What was shaping up for me was a major heavyweight battle between a gifted and courageous existentialist theologian and an important Western philosopher, John Dewey, represented now by White. It was Niebuhr who had launched his critique of Dewey’s alleged naive optimism about the application of intelligence to human affairs. Niebuhr had flung his net far and wide over human experience to come up with gems about how and why it was inevitable that Dewey’s admittedly humane project would stall. Sin is the serpent spoiler in the garden of reason, warned Niebuhr, in the tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Kierkegaard, and he expounded at length about the depth of greed, vested interests, hubris, lust, the will to power, and all manner of corporate egoism sabotaging the liberal hopes of thinkers like Dewey. Neibuhr insisted that the plans we form, the policies we put in place, must take these surd, untidy, unsettling facts into account.
White, however, defended Dewey and launched his own polemic against Niebuhr. Among other things, Niebuhr appeals to authority. It is the Pauline doctrine of original sin that lies behind his talk about the inevitability of sin. His talk at once about the inevitability of sin and human responsibility for sin is inconsistent. He offers no alternative to the use of our intelligence to make our way forward in the world. White’s diatribe went on and on.
Even at my young age I could see the two different languages and their two distinct universes at work. White was squirmy about the whole idea of sin, let alone the inevitability of sin, as if it was a harking back to some voodoo age of platitudinous gibberish. Even though he said that he agreed with Niebuhr politically, he inveighed against admitting Niebuhr into the halls of philosophical respectability. Brute, primal, and often obscure complexity was a reality belonging to a murky alien universe whose language he could not countenance in modern civilized discourse. Resolved to reduce public dialogue to its lowest, most logical and linear denominator, he was a good example of what the great nineteenth century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called a cultured despiser of religion.
For my part, I was instinctively on the side of Niebuhr, just as I had been on the side of Kierkegaard in his clash with Bishop Mynster. Not only could I understand the existential language of religion but it seemed to fit me like an old shoe. Sin and Death were still at my heels, and I knew them well. They darkened the counsel of my mind and foiled my best and brightest intentions. I knew that Niebuhr was hardly appealing to authority in his talk about sin, but rather to the tragic in human history. Yet I was unable to sift through the logical wheat and chaff to defend Niebuhr adequately. I let the unrest in my mind and soul lie for the time being. I was clearly not yet ready to resolve it, and I knew that I would return to it when the time was right.
Furthermore I had to attend to my own existence on the ground. Willful as it was, this was such an expansive time to be alive. The orange groves cast their old world glow and fragrance upon the new inventions. The horizon was receding on a daily basis. Los Angeles and Hollywood were just to the north, and they were calling. The beaches were just to the west, and they too were calling. Friday was a good movie impatient to be reached. Saturday was a beach, a surfboard, and the waves of the sea.
8 | Los Angeles
In the wee small hours of the morning
I kept a safe distance from Ruth. There were other men, whose eyes I avoided. Did she know how I felt? Did she feel the same way about me? Her feminine voice and the stately way she held her head aloft filled my dreams, and every day in the quad, the cafeteria, and the classroom hallways I was demure and concealed my shyness.
Except for my ineptitude in love and the perpetual stinging sensation inside, I was happy in southern California. Hollywood, the beaches, the hit songs on the radio, and the palm tree avenues of Los Angeles promised light ocean breezes, dreamy musical rendezvous, soft summer nights, and dancing under the stars. Disneyland had the big Benny Goodman band playing under a large tent canopy, and I danced with a dark-haired brown-eyed young woman, who gave me her phone number.
I had learned how to drive in a flashy red convertible 1957 Thunderbird with automatic transmission. It belonged to a member of our young adult group at First Presbyterian, Paul, who was the son of a local businessman. He was mild-mannered, tall and freckle-faced, with a generous smile; the color of his car was just a shade darker than his hair. Driving his car to Newport Beach and Corona Del Mar with the top down and parallel parking it on a crowded street on a Saturday intoxicated me with breezy joy.
My own first car was a shapely old blue convertible stick-shift Ford which lacked power going uphill, but the radio blared out the new hits: Soldier Boy, Do You Wanna Dance, A Summer Place. Joanie Sommers’ One Boy was my favorite. Her lilting voice was buoyant and wafting like the waves of the sea. She was the one who later did the jingle Now It’s Pepsi for Those Who Think Young. Some of us foreign students went to see Hitchcock’s Psycho in Fullerton. The movie and its screaming music during the shower scene were to be talked about forever after.
The Santa Ana Freeway was only three or four years old then, and the last miles to Laguna Beach were still a lovely rural drive through the hills of native shrubs and grass. I remember a country store and fruit stands along the way, and the advening waves were in the air.
The sleek blue convertible with the top down was even sleeker on the Pacific Coast Highway and on immaculate Sunset Boulevard among the gated gardens and homes of the movie stars. I had flashbacks of the dead body in the pool in Sunset Boulevard. I was the intrepid Gary Cooper in High Noon, and the song in my heart was Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling. I was Marlon Brando, the illiterate peasant who stood up and drawled “Zapata” when the official asked who had spoken and what his name was. I was the brooding, tragic Montgomery Clift pining for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun.
But more than Burt Lancaster’s famous scene with Deborah Kerr on the beach, more than the Montgomery Clift or the Frank Sinatra character, it was Sinatra singing the prelude From Here to Eternity in the movie of that name that set me adrift on the dark waters of the imagination. Love is fugitive, like the ebb and flow of the sea. It springs up and gives, and then it takes away.
Downtown Los Angeles had its share of B-movie theaters, sleaze bars, old navy and army clothes outlets, cafeterias, and ten cent stores. The grander cinemas and expensive restaurants were on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards in Hollywood. “Girls Girls Girls” was the flashing neon sign at venues where you could pay money to dance or sit with the hostess of your choice. At one place you climbed up the stairs, bought tickets for your minutes, and found your spot with the decent and indecent, rich and poor, American and foreign, young and wrinkled, all lonely men standing or sitting opposite the women waiting to be asked.
In those days there was a live band playing standards like Blue Moon and It’s Only a Paper Moon, but this was all soon to change to the broadcasting of recordings in the same jazz tradition: Peggy Lee’s Fever, Sinatra’s All the Way, and other songs he did in collaboration with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Teamed up with Riddle, Sinatra was becoming bigger than ever.
To the hostess’s chagrin, I asked her to abide strictly by the ten minutes I had. The richer men got the lion’s share of the time with the prettiest women, but this did not matter much to me. The couples shimmying and swinging and swaying to the music and the glow of the paper moon filled my aching, aching heart. The big anonymous city with its skyscrapers and night lights and amusements and movies and music helped keep me sane and tided me over the worst hours.
I was hermaphroditic, half seminary and half college, half Indian and half American, half religious and half worldly, half running away from and half craving for closeness with Ruth. I seemed to be on the fringe of everything there was.
One woman at the dance club actually reminded me of Ruth. She too was tall,