Going from dormitory to classroom to library to football field to happy Vassar weekends, you’re moving much too fast to notice the faceless mass out of whose systematic exploitation your fun and frolic get cushily financed. Occasionally, sure, you’ll leave a tip or a bauble for the black man who serves you your meals in the dining hall or the Polish lady who makes your bed up or the Irish guard at the dormitory entrance. But they don’t grow to human dimensions in your mind, which is too filled as it is with poetry and lacrosse schedules, they’re there mainly as props and devices, good ones, worth five bucks at the Yuletide season, certainly.
My mother was never one of those campus maids but that was just her bad luck. She’d applied many times for the job. There was always a long waiting list. She never had the luxury to wait. Of course I couldn’t reconcile town and gown in my life or in my mind. Every time I stepped on campus I had the creepy feeling that I was in enemy territory.
There are two ways you can handle a split life. You can just fall apart. Or you can keep your eye on your two halves and keep running back and forth between them, giving one enough spin to keep it going for a while, then the other. The second technique takes a certain agility, and you have to develop a good wind, but it can be done.
You don’t have to like the game. You can hold a low opinion of its rules, which they set up without consulting you. But if it’s the only game in town you’ve only got one choice, to play or not to play. In times of more flourish they put it, to be or not to be.
My father chose not to be, not to play.
For 19 years he’d had a good and secure job in a very large factory where they made all sorts of printing presses, some for branches of government like the Treasury Department—the Harris, Seibold & Potter Company in Shelton, 10 miles from New Haven. Starting out in the paint department, he’d risen to be foreman, but he never went over to the management side; he belonged to the workers’ union and when it went out on strike he went out. Management never got around to firing him for his union loyalty because when there was no stiike he ran the paint department well, besides, if they’d tried to fire him the workers would have gone out on strike over that.
Then came the Stock Market Crash of 1929. All businesses took a nosedive (along with a fair number of the businessmen), including Harris, Seibold & Potter. Maybe there was less demand for printing presses because in times of economic downturn there just aren’t many things to print except forms for overdue bills and eviction notices. In any case, the factory shut down, and my father was suddenly without a job.
He’d been living a split life all along. For one thing, there was a certain gap between his occupation and his desire to play the violin, which he did well. But with that degree of twoness he could cope, since for ideological as well as human reasons he enjoyed his comradeship with the other factory hands; also, he could play his violin evenings and weekends. Now came a much more serious fission—on one hand was his urge to feed his family, keep up payments on the house, and do something out in the world that he got some pats on the back for; on the other, his sudden termination of all function, his drop into a total vacuum, his loss, as they like to say these days, of identity, as much as he had.
Overnight he’d been broken to pieces and he had no desire to juggle the fragments. Any world that would do that to a man, he was profoundly convinced, was just not worth bothering with. He resigned from the human race and all its doings. He went into the bedroom, pulled down the shades, and there in the darkness sat on a chair facing the wall.
I can’t say I altogether blamed him. The way things were going, there really wasn’t much worth looking at Out There.
Still, you have to make the effort. Those are the rules of the game, the only one in town. If you don’t obey the rules they won’t call you a sensitive soul, a man with esthetic of such high order that you can’t take the vulgarities and obscenities out there on the street—no, they’ll pin the label of psychotic on you and lock you up.
They pinned the label on my old man not without reason, though I must say if they wanted to get a full picture of his sickness they would have had to look into the sickness of American capitalism too. They took him away and locked him up in Yale’s Institute of Human Relations where they had a psychiatric division devoted to the study of interesting cases. They judged my old man to be an interesting case. You don’t get many factory workers who are devoted to the violin.
He entered Yale’s Institute not long after I entered Yale. That gave my academic career a certain focus.
I’d been at a loss as to what field to do my honors work in. I definitely didn’t want to major in literature in an English Department that did not recognize the existence of James Joyce when he was knocking the whole literary world on its ear. Now, however, I saw a course of study that would make sense. I would concentrate on psychology, more specifically, abnormal psychology. At the same time I would fulfill all the pre-med requirements, and after graduation go on to medical school and become a psychiatrist, maybe a psychoanalyst.
If I couldn’t find out in Yale’s curricula what was wrong with the world or at least with literature, I could bone up on what was wrong with my old man. I could in fact make an occupation out of it.
The Psychology Department headquartered in the Institute of Human Relations, was, if I remember rightly, part of it. I visited there often to talk with this or that professor. On my side the conversation was often a little forced because I was aware of my father’s presence in another wing of the building and discussions of the mind’s gnarlings were therefore a lot less academic for me than the professor could guess. The professor, I mean, could speculate freely as to how the mind gets twisted one way or another—if he was wrong that was O.K.; he had no stakes in this. My stakes were high; if he didn’t know what he was talking about my old man was going to be cooped up in that locked room with his violin for a long, long time.
One of my instructors was a first-rate fellow named Florian Heiser. I took to him because my Marxism didn’t bother him, as a matter of fact he was something of a Marxist too, enough of one that after a while Yale told him to move on. I visited with him often. One day he packed up his briefcase and walked outside with me after our business was done with.
We went along Davenport Avenue toward the spot where he had his car parked. I happened to look up at the row of barred windows that marked the psychiatric wards. Behind one set of bars was my old man, just standing there testing, I suppose, if there was anything besides walls worth looking at. I don’t know if my memory is writing additional dialogue for the facts here but as I recall the scene he had his violin tucked under his arm.
Florian Heiser didn’t notice anything. He went on talking about some exciting experiments somebody was just then doing in conditioning aggression out of rats with electric shocks—socialization through traumatization, I think it was called. That was Florian’s field, experimental psychology. It’s the same snap-to treatment they’ve been using more recently on autistic children, who I suppose can be seen as rats for being so unsocial.
Florian was an instructor in why some people get things done and some get undone, and in general a right and sympathetic sort of guy, pretty much on my side, certainly not on the enemy’s, but there was no way to break into his impassioned talk about the new Pavlovian traumatizings of rats to say, “I don’t mean to change the subject, I’m really interested in all these things they’re doing to rats, but that skinny old geezer up there, he’s my father, he’s had some shocks recently too—they didn’t socialize him much—would have had more, in fact, they’d decided to give him electric-shock therapy and were wheeling him into the jolt room but at the last minute somebody thought to check his blood pressure, it was way up and they found he had an advanced case of arteriosclerosis, the voltage they’d been about to run through him might have killed him.” Nope, there was no way to work this information in, which, it seemed to me, said just about everything there was to be said, between clenched teeth and with gorge that wouldn’t stay down, about the discipline of psychology, the University, the country, the system, and the human how of it all down the line, some (only some) of which, to be sure the