I don’t know if that copy of the commemorative volume is still around. Maybe it’s buried in a carton in my brother’s cellar outside New Haven, I haven’t seen it in decades. I rather wish I had it now, I’d like to read about Dean Riggs, or Briggs. I understand he was very nice to John Dos Passos. For some years I’ve been trying to be nice to incipient writers at UCLA and I’d be interested to see how our techniques compare.
Item. So we can say that at 15 I was by any definition an incipient, as well as malnourished, writer. Further proof came in my first year at Yale when I won some sort of freshman essay contest. My subject this time was the development of the esthetic of realism, which my survey traced, hastily and in big jumps, from the early cave drawings to Norman Rockwell and Raymond Chandler.
This time, too, I got not a penny, just a voucher entitling me to $25 worth of books at Whitlock’s Book Store. I pleaded with the people at Whitlock’s to convert that useless piece of paper to negotiable currency but those incorruptible Yankees—whose enthusiasm for steady habits (Connecticut had way back nicknamed itself “The Land of Steady Habits”) did not seem to extend to eating—wouldn’t hear of it. I finally took my payment in Modern Library novels, sat up several nights devouring them two or three at a time, there being little else around to devour, then sold them for whatever I could get. With the proceeds I bought a meal ticket at the Greek’s on Chapel Street, where they offered a marvelous thick and crusty breaded veal cutlet drowned in tomato sauce with a heap of spaghetti and two fat buttered rolls for 35 cents.
For once, however devious the operation, I’d managed to convert award-winning words into food, and you will not mistake my meaning when I say it whetted my appetite.
Item. Words finally did bring in some moneys at college. With my good friend Johnny Dorsey I started a ghosting agency for people like football players who had no time to write essays and term papers and who in any case had probably so sapped their heads by overnourishing their bodies that they couldn’t write anything. (If the Manicheans have at times kept me from employment, at other times they’ve made profitable work for me.) We charged four dollars a page if the client was satisfied to squeak by, but hiked the price to six if he wanted a guaranteed “B” or better.
I must say that when we gave a grade guarantee we stood behind our product and we never missed. This can be interpreted in a couple of ways. It might mean that we were incredibly talented writers. It may, on the other hand, suggest that Johnny Dorsey and I knew a lot of the young reading assistants who graded papers for the professors, were alert to their crochets, and got good at assessing their tastes. For a couple of years there Johnny and I ate well at the Greek’s, and any number of varsity members did their double-shift wingbacks at the Yale Bowl with an easy mind.
Item. After some pointless months in the Yale Graduate School I quit to take a teaching job in a school for women trade unionists which operated on the Bryn Mawr campus during the summers. Here I reached new heights of eloquence, though of the oral rather than written order, particularly when I addressed the noontime assembly on current happenings around the world.
One noon I lectured forcefully as to why the political tensions now mounting in Paris would have to explode with a military bid for power by the labor-hating fascists in the Croix de Feu. Two days after I made my categorical prediction there was a fascist uprising, Francisco Franco’s in Spain. I quickly appeared before the assembly again to announce that my analysis of the class struggle in Europe had been absolutely right but that I’d gotten the country wrong, that was all. I overwhelmed these girls the first time and I overwhelmed them equally the second without shifting any essential gears.
Right after that I came down with a bad case of gastric poisoning and had to spend several days in the campus infirmary. Nobody visited me on my bed of pain to crow over what happens when a man has to eat his words (I thought I’d avoided that rather neatly) but oh, how my stomach hurt.
Item. After Bryn Mawr I hung around New York for a time producing for the Trotskyite publications (The Militant and The New International) words covering the Spanish Civil War, the one I’d misplaced geographically, plus book reviews and an article or two. I discovered that the best way to report any overseas war is to sit in a Greenwich Village room and redo the dispatches of the New York Times correspondents who are required by their task-master bosses to make personal appearances at the fronts. (The approach I picked up in this period was to stand me in good stead during World War II, in which I avoided personal appearances on a wide variety of fronts.) The technique is simple, you keep the facts cabled home by the front-line reporters, since you don’t have any of your own to substitute for them, and just correct their blurred vision with Bolshevik-Leninist bifocals.
One piece I did for The New International was an exhaustive study of the theoretical errors vitiating all schools of criminology past and present. The thematic burden of this analysis was that the criminal in capitalist society is simply a revolutionary who through an oversight has neglected to join a Marxist party and coordinate his rebelliousness with other people’s. It beats me how I happened to wander into the field of crime and its causes. It could be that more of the Puritan work ethic had seeped into my head than I realized and prolonged unemployment was making me feel like a criminal. Certainly writing articles on the unconscious politics of footpads and second-story men wasn’t giving me any sense of gainful employment, whereas the criminal welcomes any opportunity to present himself as a politician—it’s a promotion, though a slight one.
(This is in no way to make light of the current politicalization of our prison populations. That is progress all around. But if we want to keep our bearings, particularly those of us on the left, we’d better see the difference between prisoners who take to politics in a mighty striving for mind expansion and those—their numbers may not be negligible—who reach for politics as a handy, because fashionable, mask.)
I feel now that this analysis done in 1938 was defective in key respects. It seems to give less than the full story about a number of disorderly and impatient types, from the Boston Strangler to Charles Manson. I’m relieved, in retrospect, that my article did not bring a rush of recruits to the Socialist Workers Party from the chronic lawbreaking strata—if the Stranglers and Mansons ever decide to flock to a leftwing movement their comrades will have to put on bulletproof vests and hire bodyguards to see them home from meetings.
My real point is that the words I was turning out in this period, if totally wrong, were uniformly effective. My comrades thanked me many times for setting them straight on both the Spanish Civil War (which they never knew I had located in France) and the blind alleys all criminologists but me had gotten themselves into.
Item. In the course of time I was invited to join Trotsky’s small secretarial and household staff in Mexico, where he’d received asylum after being expelled from Norway by Trygve Lie’s whimsically and skittishly socialist government. This was another nice, if not in any way remunerative, recognition of my dexterity with words—they needed somebody who knew English, could translate documents from French and German, prepare news releases and in general handle the press. It was clear to me that Albie Booth (star quarterback and captain of the Yale football team when I was in school) would not have qualified for this job, so it looked like my exemptions from gym had not been in vain. I won’t dwell on my literary activities during this year in Mexico because, although my output was high, its form was minor: mostly postcards.
Item. When I got back from Mexico I was taken on by the Connecticut WPA Writers Project to head a research and writing team that was said to be preparing an ethnic study of the peoples of Connecticut for ultimate publication by the Yale University Press. More about this job later. I’ll just point out here that I would never have gotten it if I hadn’t appeared to the WPA bureaucrats as a writer, at least somebody who could write, and, further, if a good friend of mine hadn’t