I elected to do my main research in Yale’s Sterling Library, where if the ethnic components of the Connecticut population were not highly visible the furniture was at least softly upholstered. I spent most of those 18 months sleeping in the splendid sofas of the Linonia & Brothers Reading Room. It was in this vaulted chamber, soothingly reminiscent of the Union League Club, that one day I picked up an avantgarde magazine from Paris and read Joyce’s haunting sentence, “I can do anything I want with words.”
My reaction to that chesty line should be recorded. I thought, here I am, ready, willing and able to do anything anybody wants with my words so long as they’ll pay modestly for them . . . dying to get some words out tailored to the needs and interests of some market, any market at all . . . my full literary equipment is there on the block, and they’re all too busy reaching for the Alka-Seltzer to take me up on it, make a bid, draw some guidelines, notice me at all.
You might say that under the circumstances, since I was drawing a paycheck every week—nothing great but enough to eat on—I might have used my great gobs of free time to do something I wanted with my unemployed words. But that was just the trouble. There was nothing I wanted to do with them, nothing I dared to do, except put them up for sale and lament the absence of buyers.
One more item, this going back to the Mexican days, and you’ll have the background picture.
It wasn’t a soft life we had in that broken-down villa in Coyoacán, then a backwash village outside Mexico City. It was, all in all, a radical departure from the sculpted panels and puffy pillows of Linonia & Brothers. We lived in a one-story house built around the thee sides of a patio, all of the single-file rooms opening on the internal garden. There was no heating system. When the panes of the French doors got broken they didn’t get fixed. It turns cold nights on the Mexico City plateau, up 7,500 feet. You look to the snow peaks of Popocatepetl and you feel that snow in your bones, in your teeth.
We were often up nights in that drafty, unheated place, feeling the Popo snows. We had to be. In addition to the day’s chores of paper work and seeing to security we, the members of the secretariat, kept a rotating guard shift through the night. There were three of us, a Frenchman, a Czech, and myself. That meant we split the night into three watches, early, middle, and late. That meant that every third night I could expect to be up through the most miserable hours from midnight to almost dawn, huddled in a soldier’s ratty fur wraparound left over from Red Army days, blowing on my fingers, trying not to let the cold blow my mind.
Lots of nights I sat in the dining room at the 20-foot-long lemon-yellow wooden table that we used at one end for eating, at the other for our typewriters and papers, taking apart the Luger I’d been issued, then putting it together. I had no strong interest in the insides of a gun, though I’d never examined them closely before. The idea was to have some project, focus the head, keep busy. The cold wouldn’t go away but it could, with strategy, he banished for periods to the outskirts of mind. I had to use my fingers somehow. I couldn’t think of anything to do with them at the typewriter, having written all my postcards hours before and having no nobler literary projects in mind. I broke that Luger down till it couldn’t be reduced any further except with an acetylene torch. Night after night I did this, getting it all apart, then getting it all together.
Once, very late, the Old Man came through the dining room on his way to the bathroom, and saw me with parts of the gun in my hands and more parts spread on the table. He was always alert to how the young people around him behaved with weapons, afraid that their tendencies to kid around and show off might make them careless.
His hands-off style wouldn’t allow him any tone of chiding or lecture. He just said quietly and seriously, “You know, in the Revolution we lost more people than the enemy could claim credit for. Many young comrades killed themselves with their own guns and suicide was very far from their minds.”
I said, “You don’t have to worry about me, L.D., I always take the clip out and make sure the chamber’s empty, there’s no danger here.”
I couldn’t detail for him all the ways in which there was no danger. Minutes before he’d appeared, just as I was beginning to fit the barrel back into its housing, there’d been a whiffing noise and I’d watched some spring from the firing mechanism fly out the French doors. I was vague as to the spring’s location in the innards of the gun and in the dark as to its function. But wherever it operated and whatever it did, I knew it was important. Just before the Old Man came in I’d proved to my satisfaction that the gun would not fire without this obscure coil. The perfect gun, you might say, for Russian roulette.
The Luger was never to fire again. That night, and many cold nights after that, I spent hours on my hands and knees around the cactus and pieces of Aztec statuary in the patio, looking for the spring. It was nowhere to be found.
I really don’t want to talk about the state of our weaponry in Coyoacán. I’m simply drawing your attention to the fact that in that cold room on those cold nights I had to get my hands working at something. Since guns wouldn’t do it for me indefinitely, sooner or later I had to face the fact that there was another piece of apparatus present whose springs wouldn’t take flight so readily—a typewriter. And so began some writing on my nights of vigil because there was nothing else available to keep me from climbing the walls, which were black with tarantulas.
It was hard to get started. If in those days there was any relationship between me and words it was one in which we warily circled each other, unable to come together, unable to break it off and go our separate ways. As a result I was a little stiff with the writers who came visiting at our house. There were many—Jim Farrell, who was later my good and helpful friend, Michael Blankfort (later to be president of the Hollywood Writers’ Guild, currently my neighbor in the Beverly Hills rat trap where I have my office, and am writing these notes), Herb Solow and Johnny Macdonald (both of whom wound up as editors on Fortune), Suzanne LaFollette, Benjamin Stolberg, Charles Rumford Walker, on and on. I felt a bit guilty to be presented to them as someone with a political identity, guiltier yet because my deepest urges were toward writing and I couldn’t say a word about them. What was there to say? That I read like a demon? That I knew a shitpile of novels? What does such information communicate about a man except that he’s an insomniac, and pretty anti-social to boot?
There was my problem. The fancy name for it these days is identity crisis—in those simpler times all we had to say about this shaky condition was, Shit or get off the pot. I had to appear as, and go through the motions of, a politico, at which I really wasn’t very good, mainly I just repeated other people’s phrases. I had to keep under cover those appetites and curiosities about which I could really hold forth because that’s all I’d ever done about them, hold forth, not work with or build on. As a result I was invisible. When later my good friend Ralph Ellison brought out his novel Invisible Man I knew exactly what he was talking about, though my own long bout with invisibility had taken place in a nonracial context.
But, you know, writers were in a certain sense the niggers of the left movements. These days all groups that feel set upon like to apply to themselves the labels of the oppressed black—students talk about being treated like niggers, as being the Harlem of the young, and so on. Writers had plenty of reason to see themselves that way in revolutionary circles. They were looked down upon as cafeteria intellectuals, parlor activists, undisciplined and irresponsible bohemians. They were defined as incorrigibly petty-bourgeois, constantly slapped in the face with their non-prolism. In all respects that counted they were held to be inferior people who if they had any loyalty to the cause of social overhauling at all would allow their names and public weights to be used without ever presuming to question the hallowed fulltime politicos who used them. This anti-egghead arrogance was most vicious in Stalinist circles but it was by no means unknown among certain Trotskyites.
For example. Jim Cannon was the titular head of the tiny Trotskyite movement in those days. He had plenty of reason to feel grateful to Suzanne LaFollette. Suzanne was not in any sense