Herself Read online

  “Mumma,” said the girl, “will iyut be dowk in thay?”

  A very young sailor, sauntering past with his arm around the waist of a girl, giggled, hearing the remark, and swung the girl closer to him, almost colliding with a gray-haired couple who stood immobile in the path, refusing the contact of the tightly packed line. The woman, in her voile, flowered hat, and sensible white shoes the very prototype of so many sailors’ mothers in so many refrigerator ads, moved self-consciously nearer her husband.

  “Ha-rry,” she said, in that middle-western accent which is almost Scottish, “have you closed the windows of the car-r?”

  The husband nodded, swinging his watch chain against his dark suit, and the two of them gazed with satisfaction at the parking grounds just below us, where a Buick, set a little apart from the other cars gleamed like patent leather in the sun.

  The guard herded us forward, almost to the door of the monument. As we stood there, four young women, dressed alike in black pinafores over underdresses of purplish blue, with caps like Whistler’s mother’s tied on their center-parted dark hair, came around the side of the obelisk. The tallest, a strapping, heavy-browed girl with more animation than the other three, was deep in conversation with the uniformed driver of a bus tour. The waiting three all had a similar pigeon-breasted scrawniness which, with their high, domed foreheads, gave them the air of women in American “primitives,” a look marred into reality by their dull, pimpled complexions, which contrasted with the purity of the caps.

  “Deaconesses?” I murmured.

  “Mennonites,” said my husband.

  “Oh.” That explained the complexions. I knew something of the Pennsylvania Dutch diet. “Seven sweets and seven sours.”

  I watched the women as they walked on with the gesticulating driver. As our section of the line penetrated the monument, and we, the farmer and his family, the couple of the Buick, and thirty or forty others as variegated as a poster, were inserted into the elevator, I reminded myself that crowds always have a specious vigor and significance; I must be careful not to draw from it any homilies on the far-flung strength of a nation. Remember, I thought, the verdigrised crowds in the subway, and Harlem on a Sunday afternoon, with the crowd sweated out of its peeling doorways on to the splotched sward of the streets.

  At our backs a loudspeaker suddenly gave tongue in a neutral, unregional voice. We listened as we rose, the perfect captive audience, with, for a minute and a half, no place else to go but up inside a shaft, as the voice told us, whose walls were 15 feet thick at the base and 18 inches at the top.

  “In a 30-mile-per-hour wind,” said the voice, “the sway of the monument is only .125 of an inch.”

  The voice rested, in perfect timing with the elevator. We disembarked and took our turns at each of the deep-ledged windows through which Washington was exposed with exquisite arterial mimeography. From the slit at which I stood I could see the narrow bar of the Memorial Bridge, its farther end plunged in the greenery of Arlington, which we had visited the day before. Somewhere in that greenery lay the Curtis Lee mansion, in front of which L’Enfant, the planner of Washington, is buried. One end of his small triangular tomb points toward the hideously thick, squat columns which support its porch—columns, as my husband had remarked, more suited in their relative proportion, to Knossus, than to the porch of an eighteenth century house. We had wondered how well that architectural purist rested in the sight of them, and had hoped, with the easy insolence of the sightseer, that his head was pointed the other way.

  In the little Hudson River town of Piermont, not far from where we live, there is a house designed by L’Enfant, built in 1839 by John Fredon, then president of the Erie Railroad, purportedly to satisfy the nostalgia of a southern wife. It must always have been too magniloquently grand for its situation, set as it is, out of sight of the river, in a valley whose topography could never have given the high-columned porch a proper approach, the view from its widow’s walk blunted by an undistinguished hill. Now, although it is well kept up by its present owner, the blank brick wall of the silk mill further constricts its horizon, the creek which must once have been “idyllic” steams with the exhaust of the paper-box factory up the river, and every so often one of the nearby shacks topples or burns. Although it was built long before the Civil War, it must even then have had a lost confederate air—the look of the revenant. But L’Enfant, perhaps, might have liked to be buried there. It has something of the look of his incomplete Washington—of an audacious plan overwhelmed by the complexities of progress—and its columns, slender and improvidently high, are his own.

  As we began to descend, the canned voice of the monument spoke again. This time it spoke of the symbolism of the walls which enclosed us, of the world’s admiration for the principles of democracy and liberty, and it ended, in graceful synchronisation as we grounded, with greetings from that Department of the Interior under whose perpetual care those principles might be presumed to be. On the faces pressed close around me, I charted the sway of emotion—not more than .125 of an inch.

  As we walked out into the sun again, I fumbled in my purse for the leaflet I had retained from Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, as restored by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, its clapboards tidily anachronized with stucco, its servants quarters labeled with the names of the original occupants—Aunt Judy’s room—as if-they too, along with the immobile rockers, the empty bread troughs, hadn’t been able to escape the collector. I had liked the tomb however, as simple a one as any of our national heroes is likely to have, designed by its inhabitant. We are lucky in this hero, I had reflected; the plot of his biography is spare and rectilinear, if not easily humanized, not easily debunked either, for the most fallible thing we know of him is that he married a widow and had to wear false teeth.

  I opened the brochure. “The estate had long been unproductive; the buildings had unavoidably depreciated; gardens and grounds had suffered. A comprehensive plan of repairs and restoration was immediately inaugurated. … Since 1858 the tract has been enlarged to an area of sufficient size to insure the property against undesirable encroachments.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine which sort of encroachments the Mount Vernon ladies had deemed undesirable. I knew suddenly that it was not the depredations of the present on the past which made me a squirming onlooker in the shadows of obelisks, or at the beautifully cut hair of graves. It was the undesirable encroachment—on an inadequate present—of the historic property itself.

  Below us, whitening in the noon light, Washington posed its uncomfortable questions, clarified in marble or obscured in the crypts of the brave. From the Lincoln Memorial, on whose steps Marian Anderson sang, one might draw a straight, though not unimpeded line to Constitution Hall, within whose doors she could not. Such a line would pass, probably, through the Munitions Building and the Atomic Energy Commission—accumulating, therefore, certain other platitudes along the way.

  “Where is Lincoln buried?” I murmured to my husband.

  “Springfield,” he said, with a look of surprise.

  “Oh, of course,” I muttered. “When lilacs last.”

  Four young men in black suits suddenly tramped toward us around the bend of the path, their long, Dutch-cut hair swinging rhythmically against their round cheeks, under stiff-brimmed hats identically wide as platters. These were the Mennonite husbands. They plodded past us in a kind of instinctive unison, looking straight ahead of them with a blank, cenobitic stare. In a sense they, and we, were encroachments on one another. Yet if there was a central fact which could equilibrate the presence here of both of us, of all the people in the mural, it was that, tangential as we were to one another, we held certain graves in common, and occasionally paid them mind.

  I watched as they walked down to the curb where the women and the bus driver waited.

  “Where do you suppose he’s taking them?”

  “Arlington,” my husband said.

  “Daddy,” my son said, looking at some passing uniforms, �
�which way is Korea?”

  There was a pause. It was of a kind which occurs often these days, more often in the conversations of men, although it happens among women too, when something seen or said tears the palpable modern serenities aside, and we remember, for a minute, that the feudal bleeding still goes on. I call it “the civilian pause.”

  For its second, my husband hesitated.

  “That way,” he said, waving a curt hand toward the sun, and linking arms with one another, we all walked together down the path to the car.

  I called the piece “How Sleep the Brave.”

  ODE

  WRITTEN IN THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1746

  How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,

  By all their country’s wishes bless’d!

  When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,

  Returns to deck their hallow’d mould,

  She there shall dress a sweeter sod

  Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.

  By fairy hands their knell is wrung

  By forms unseen their durge is sung;

  There honor comes, a pilgrim gray,

  To bless the turf that wraps their clay;

  And Freedom, shall awhile repair,

  To dwell a weeping hermit there!

  William Collins

  This was to be the one time I would use a title not original with me. Novels armored with quotes from Donne or Yeats or Kierkegaard are using another man’s effects. But this poem, which in college I had committed to memory, had a special bitterness for me. Even after a war, its martial elegy could move me. But I no longer believed a word of it.

  What I wrote under its aegis, was—a prelude. (I am to do this many times again, this audible thinking before I leap into a short story or a novel, yet it will take me years to see this connection between my non-fictional and fictional life.)

  Shortly after, in the story In the Absence of Angels, my work itself enters politics. This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action—I will write it out. In the way that is natural to me. There I will dare anything.

  IN 1950 The New Yorker prints a story of mine called “Old Stock,” about a young girl at a Jewish summer resort in the Catskills, one in the old-farmhouse style, centered among natives of the region—and her first encounter with anti-Semitism “outside,” inside her own family, and possibly in her Jewish self. Before publication, an editor there warns me that both the magazine and I will get a lot of protest mail on it. “From Anti-Semitic Jews who don’t know they are.” Innocently, I ask, isn’t it brave of the magazine to do this then—publish what they already know will bring them protest mail? He answers that all the magazine asks of any work on a controversial subject is that it be impeccable as art—that is, as nearly as possible invulnerable to criticism on artistic grounds. (I will come to believe that little of art is, or that only little art is.) But what he says next will return to me often. “You will learn to expect that when people disagree with what you say, or are offended by how you say it, they often won’t admit that; they’ll say that the work is bad, that you’re a bad writer.”

  Mail does come, from all sides. When addressed to the magazine, it is answered by them, copies of both being forwarded to me. In accordance with their habit of checking any possible usage with existent authorities, they have countered one correspondent who has protested my use of “race” (as applied to Jews of course), with a citation on that word from B’nai Brith, which has O.K.’d my use of it. Letters addressed to me care of the magazine are sent on for my reply. I answer them all, as I will all correspondence from then on. (Even though you believe, as I do, that the best works of imaginative literature are not primarily or a priori controversial, if you also believe that the pen is a power, you cannot refuse to deal at least once with any response it evokes. Up to a point, and addressed to whatever grain of sense.) Still I am grateful for that editor’s warning, otherwise the bundles of hate that keep arriving would really throw me.

  A Rabbi Silver of Cleveland—The Rabbi Silver, as I am told by friends closer to actively Jewish circles—writes a diatribe in his newspaper. I begin to see that the anger, whether it is illiterate, orthodox, written under a university letterhead or scrawled on an obscene postcard, is all covertly the same. Whether it is felt that I have criticized Jews’ life-habits, or have even collaborated with the Gentiles by suggesting that special Jewish habit exists—I have in each case touched on the same self-hatred and secret fears; I have dared to imply that Jews are not impeccable. (Like art.) And it is all the worse, all the harder to get at, because I have done it under the guise of art.

  I understood their anger well enough, also that it goes deeper than anti-Faganism (Jewish villains in literature, movies, et al.). Goes below even the holy feeding of many Jews (more anti-Christian than moderates ever admit) that “now of all times”—after a war in part fought for the six million dead—Jews must stand together, and Jewish artists also, by not letting one “anti” iota enter the already half-poisoned air. By never ever even “contributing to it”—as the phrase often went—with any of the unfortunate humor and self-analysis to which centuries of stress had bred us.

  I understood what I had done better than they—or earlier. My sin was double. I had expressed some of these tormenting self-doubts which even the most outwardly impregnable Jew—rich, assimilated, cosmopolitan, living an easy life scarcely subject to slurs, much less oppression—may still be born with: Are “we” anything like “they” say we are? Are we defensively proud of being whatever we are, because we have to be? What are we really, underneath the pride? And: Would we really rather not be what we are? Worst, I had explored what must never be admitted to enemy forces—that there are divisions in our ranks. Not only divisions, but hierarchies. I had turned up the underside of our own snobberies.

  I was well equipped to, having been born into some of them. My mother (whose portrait I had given in a story called “The Middle Drawer,” as well as in “Old Stock”), had been born in a small, rural town probably not so nearly “on the outskirts of Frankfurt” as she claimed, and of a family at the most respectably petitbourgeois; it pained her to admit that a beloved maternal Grandfather Rosenberg, a refined man had been a cattle dealer. Her pretenses were enlarged by her ever present consciousness that, in spite of heroically perfect English, she was still in her own mind—must it not always be in other people’s?—an emigré. Women like her made the Bovarys, the sighers in all the provinces of Europe; later, as a young woman in New York, just in sight of the city feast, but much too respectable to make anything flamboyant of her beauty, she had waited again to move out of her environment. The maternal aunt and uncle-in-law to whom she had come at sixteen, owners of a thriving bakery company in Yorkville, lived in the brownstone ranks of German Gentiles who seemed to me very like themselves. Most of the women in that family (it was the women who emigrated) did indeed look so “German” that it was hard to believe in their pure Jewish blood, or else not credit the very inheritance of acquired characteristic. In turn, they hated the newer ranks of Galitzianers, Poles, and Russians for their foreignness, and, as I grew to know in my adolescence, for their colorfulness. German Jews of that era hated those others for their presumed peasant vulgarities, which “dragged down” Jews like themselves into the ranks of the “unrefined.” Really, it was that those others had been inexcusably late. Even any who had been university-educated in the old country or were already professionals here—(now and then I brought home their sons and daughters)—were regarded by the German Jews with the suspicious contempt of people who had never had the idea of the university in their blood.

  What my German family admired was rich merchants, industrialists, which a few became; they had no taste for learning as far as I knew, and may well have thought this a Galitzianer or Russian talent too. Once, as we sit in my aunt’s bay-window in Seventy-Ninth Street, there draws up at the door the longest limousine I have ever seen, come to take my aunt and uncle for a drive, and I hear my mother’s respect
ful breath at my elbow “Mr. Littauer.” Foundation-wealth, as years later I discover. But at the moment I wonder only why they should think it so exceedingly nice of him to trot up the front steps himself, instead of sending the chauffeur.

  In a pre-World-War-Two Germany, my mother’s half-brother has risen to a townhouse in Berlin with brocaded-walled dining room, and to a white Mercedes of a length identical with Von Hindenburg’s—on occasion standing up in it to bow to a populace which mistakes him for the minister. I learn this from his son, my cousin, who in 1937, fleeing from the Fatherland as the first of a train of refugees to be sponsored by my father, gets off the boat with eighteen pieces of pigskin luggage and a German actress on one arm, and sad memories of a ski-hut in the Dolomites, whose table has soup-bowls hollowed into the wood. I have no reason to disbelieve his legends; none on that side are imaginative, neither the women, with their short straight noses and censorious mouths, nor the men who now keep arriving, thickened and formal with white-flab hands gruesome to receive in the limp, European handshake. None are in the professions; my father has had to find the once-rich young cousin, who has made a bad investment in sugar en route through Holland, a factory job. And none are artists. … It was a good background from which to rebel.

  My father, on the other hand, has a towering pride in his Jewishness and in his Southernness; how Southern Jews of his era had managed this was a nineteenth-century triumph which has come down to me, diluted. He could read Hebrew, no doubt with a drawl. His sisters, trained in music and needlework at the Academy of St. Joseph, in the Richmond of their day the “only” place to go, see nothing untoward in this nor does he; while Jewish men carried on the heritage of near-learning, they had had to get the education ladies got. They are all comfortable with Gentiles, having had them as close friends and neighbors, but this generation, except for one maverick, would not have married them. Their sons and daughters, including me, will do so entirely.