Report From the Interior Page 14
Step two: the prison board hearing. Lawyer Ramsay and brother Clint present Allen’s side of the case. As Allen’s virtues are extolled, there is a brief cutaway to the chain gang, where Allen is shown working with his sledgehammer as the chorus of black male voices starts again. Then, some seconds later, back to the hearing, where the judge vigorously defends the institution of the chain gang, arguing (with nightmare logic) that the discipline it imposes on the prisoners can be a builder of character—as, for example, in the case of one James Allen. Step three: the pardon is refused. When Clint comes to report the decision to his brother, Allen, standing on the other side of a barred cell, explodes in a burst of uncontrollable anger, raging against the liars and hypocrites who have stolen his life from him. Clint, ever calm and reasonable, ever the man of the cloth, tells his brother that the commission voted to let him go if he conducts himself as a model prisoner for one year. One year, minus the three months he has already served, which would come to only nine more months. Allen: Nine months! This torture—I won’t do it! I won’t do it, I tell you! I’ll get out of here—even if they kill me for it! Step four: he does it. Having no other choice, he agrees to hang on for nine more months. Once again, pages fall from the calendar as the months pass, and behind those pages are the hills, the wide shot of two hundred men breaking stones with their hammers, and the chorus of black male voices continues. Step five: another prison board hearing. Ramsay (to the judge): And finally, not only has James Allen been a model prisoner for a whole year, but I have presented letters from countless organizations and prominent individuals beseeching you to recommend his pardon. Cut to the bunkhouse. The warden enters and says to Allen: Just had a final report on your new hearing. Allen sits up in bed, looking devastated, half dead, half insane, no more than two heartbeats from oblivion: Well? Warden: Suspended decision. Indefinitely.
Allen’s face. What happens to Allen’s face at that moment. A close shot of the face as it crumples up and disintegrates, as tears begin to gather in his eyes. His mouth twitches. His body shakes. He lowers himself onto the bed with clenched fists, no longer seeing anything, no longer a part of this world. Jabs his fists into the air. Feeble, spasmodic jabs—aimed at nothing, hitting nothing. The screen goes black.
This time, he and Bomber escape in tandem. Bomber will be shot and killed, but not before he helps Allen steal a dump truck, not before he drops dynamite on the road to impede the advance of pursuing cars, not before he has one last laugh, and after the old man dies, Allen frees himself by cutting through his chains with the gears that control the back of the truck. Then, with another bundle of dynamite, he blows up a bridge and ends the chase. You are so caught up in the action that you do not stop to consider that Allen, the builder of bridges, has blown up a bridge in order to save his life.
A sequence of newspaper headlines and articles, with more calendar pages falling in the background. The last headline reads: WHAT HAS BECOME OF JAMES ALLEN? IS HE, TOO, JUST ANOTHER FORGOTTEN MAN? “A little more than a year ago, James Allen made his second spectacular escape from the chain gang. Since that time, nothing has been heard of him…”
You imagine he is living in comfort somewhere on the East Coast or West Coast, perhaps in some South American country or Europe, reestablished under a new, more deceptive false name, a survivor of the injustices that have been committed against him, for however cruelly he has been knocked around, he has shown himself to be brave and inventive, an exceptional man who has done the impossible by escaping twice from the lowest circle of hell. If not an out-and-out hero, he is nevertheless heroic, and in your limited experience so far the heroic men in movies always triumph in the end. But now it is black again, the last newspaper article has faded from the screen, and when the action resumes it is night, a dark night somewhere in America, and a car is pulling into a garage. A woman gets out, and as she walks forward in the dimly lit driveway, you see that it is Helen. She hears a sound and stops. Someone is hiding in the shadows, a man has been waiting for her, and now he is softly calling out her name—Helen, Helen, Helen—and then the camera turns on him, and it is Allen, ragged and unshaven, no longer close to oblivion but obliterated, another man from the one last seen escaping from prison a year ago. Helen rushes over to him, touches him, speaks his name. Why haven’t you come before? she asks. Because he was afraid to, Allen answers. But you could have written, she says. The camera moves in on Allen’s face, which is no longer the despairing, shattered face of a prisoner but the face of a hunted man, a fugitive, all nerves and jitters now, his eyes showing nothing but fear. It isn’t safe, he says. They’re still after me. I’ve had jobs, but I can’t keep them. Something happens, someone turns up. I hide in rooms all day and travel by night. No friends, no rest, no peace. Forgive me, Helen. I had to take a chance to see you again—to say good-bye. He falls silent. She throws herself into his arms, sobbing. It was all going to be so different, she says. Yes, Allen says, different—and then, with savage bitterness in his voice: They’ve made it different.
Suddenly, a noise is heard in the dark. A car door slamming? One of the neighbors walking toward them? Allen disentangles himself from Helen’s arms, looks up, looks around, his eyes ablaze with panic. He whispers to her: I’ve got to go. Helen: Can’t you tell me where you’re going? Allen shakes his head. He is backing away from her now, disappearing into the shadows. Helen: Will you write? Again, Allen shakes his head, continuing to back away. Helen: How do you live? By now, he has been swallowed up by the darkness—still there, but no longer visible. His voice says: I steal.
Nothing now except darkness, and the sound of his steps as he runs into the night.
Hard to forget those last two words—
Hard to forget, and because you were so young when you first saw the film, it has been many years now since you haven’t forgotten.
TIME CAPSULE
You thought you had left no traces. All the stories and poems you wrote in your boyhood and adolescence have vanished, no more than a few photographs exist of you from your early childhood to your mid-thirties, nearly everything you did and said and thought when you were young has been forgotten, and even if there are many things that you remember, there are more, a thousand times more, that you do not. The letter written to you by Otto Graham when you were turning eight has disappeared. The postcard sent to you by Stan Musial has disappeared. The baseball trophy given to you when you were ten has disappeared. No drawings, no examples of your early handwriting, no class pictures from grade school, no report cards, no summer-camp pictures, no home movies, no team pictures, no letters from friends, parents, or relatives. For a person born in the mid-twentieth century, the era of the inexpensive camera, the postwar boom days when every middle-class American family was gripped by shutterbug fever, your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known. How could so much have been lost? From the age of five to seventeen, you lived in just two houses with your family, and most of this childhood material was still intact, but after your parents divorced, there were no more fixed addresses. From the age of eighteen until you were in your early thirties, you moved often and traveled light, parking yourself in twelve different places for six months or longer, not to mention innumerable other places for shorter periods of two weeks to four months, and because you were unsettled and often cramped in those places, you left all relics from your past with your mother, your chronically restless mother, who lived with her second husband in half a dozen New Jersey apartments and houses from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, and then, after relocating to southern California, moved every eighteen months in a perpetual buy-sell frenzy for the next decade and a half, purchasing condominiums in order to fix them up and sell at a robust profit (her interior decorating skills were impressive), and with all those comings and goings, all those cartons packed and unpacked over the years, things were inevitably ignored or forgotten, and bit by bit nearly every trace of your early existence was wiped out. You wish now that you had kept a diary, a continuous r
ecord of your thoughts, your movements through the world, your conversations with others, your response to books, films, and paintings, your comments on people met and places seen, but you never developed the habit of writing about yourself. You tried to start a journal when you were eighteen, but you stopped after just two days, feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious, confused about the purpose of the undertaking. Until then, you had always considered the act of writing to be a gesture that moved from the inside to the outside, a reaching out toward an other. The words you wrote were destined to be read by someone who was not yourself, a letter to be read by a friend, for example, or a school paper to be read by the teacher who had given you the assignment, or, in the case of your poems and stories, to be read by some unknown person, an imaginary anyone. The problem with the journal was that you didn’t know what person you were supposed to be addressing, whether you were talking to yourself or to someone else, and if it was yourself, how strange and perplexing that seemed, for why bother to tell yourself things you already knew, why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal? You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.
About two months after you started writing this book, you received a telephone call from your first wife, your ex-wife of the past thirty-four years, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis. As often happens to literary folk when they approach a certain age, she was preparing to have her papers transferred to a research library, one of those well-ordered archives where scholars can pore over manuscripts and take notes for the books they write about other people’s books. You too have unburdened yourself of vast mountains of paper by doing the same thing—happy to be rid of them, but at the same time happy to know that they are conscientiously cared for by the good people who run the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Lydia then told you that among the papers she was planning to include were all the letters you had written to her, and because the words in those letters belonged to you, even if the physical letters belonged to her, she was going to make copies and send them to you for a look, wanting to know if you felt anything in them was too private or embarrassing for public scrutiny. She would hold back any letter you asked her to, and if the prospect of exposing the ensemble gave you qualms, she could have them all sealed up for a specified number of years—ten, twenty, fifty years after you were both dead. Fair enough. You knew that you had written to her frequently when you were young, especially during a long, fourteen-month separation in 1967–68, when she was in London and you were in Paris and then in New York, but you had no idea how frequently, and when she told you there were about a hundred letters and that they ran to more than five hundred pages, you were astonished by the numbers, flabbergasted that you had devoted so much time and effort to those ancient, all-but-forgotten messages that had flown across seas and continents and were now sitting in a box in upstate New York. Manila envelopes started showing up in the mail, twenty or thirty pages at a time, letters that went all the way back to the summer of 1966, when you were just nineteen, and pushed onward for many years after that, even past the end of your marriage in the late seventies, and as you continued to work on this book, exploring the mental landscape of your boyhood, you were also visiting yourself as a young man, reading words you had written so long ago that you felt as if you were reading the words of a stranger, so distant was that person to you now, so alien, so unformed, with a sloppy, hasty handwriting that does not resemble how you write today, and as you slowly digested the material and put it in chronological order, you understood that this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn’t been able to write when you were eighteen, that the letters were nothing less than a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood, a sharp, highly focused picture of a period that had largely blurred in your memory—and therefore precious to you, the only door you have ever found that opens directly onto your past.
The early letters are the ones that interest you the most, the ones written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two (1966–69), for in the letters you wrote after your twenty-third birthday you sound older than you did the year before, still young, still unsure of yourself, but recognizable as a fledgling incarnation of the person you are now, and by the winter of the following year, that is, just after you had turned twenty-four, you are manifestly yourself, and both your handwriting and the locutions of your prose are nearly identical to what they are today. Forget twenty-three and twenty-four, then, and all the years that follow. It is the stranger who intrigues you, the floundering boy-man who writes letters from his mother’s apartment in Newark, from a six-dollar-a-day inn in rural Maine (meals included), from a two-dollar-a-day hotel in Paris (meals not included), from a small apartment on West 115th Street in Manhattan, and from his mother’s new house in the woods of Morris County—for you have lost contact with that person, and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognize him anymore.
Thousands of words addressed to the same person, the young woman who would eventually become your first wife. You met in the spring of 1966, when she was a freshman at Barnard and you were a freshman at Columbia—products of two radically different worlds. A dark-haired Jewish boy from New Jersey with a public school education and a fair-haired WASP from Northampton, Massachusetts, who had moved to New York at ten or eleven and had been given scholarships to the best private schools—several years at all-girl Brearley in Manhattan, then off to Putney in Vermont for high school. Your father was a scrambling, self-employed businessman with no college education, and her father was a college professor, an esteemed critic who had taught English at Harvard and Smith and was now a member of the Columbia faculty. In no time at all, you were bowled over. She, though not bowled over, was nevertheless curious. What you shared: a passion for books and classical music, a determination to become writers, enthusiasm for the Marx Brothers and other forms of comic mayhem, a love of games (from chess to Ping-Pong to tennis), and alienation from American life—in particular, the Vietnam War. What drove you apart: an imbalance in the chemistry of your affections, fluctuations of desire, unstable resolve. For the most part you were the pursuer, and she alternated between resisting your advances and wanting to be caught, a state of affairs that led to much turmoil in the years between 1966 and 1969, numerous breakups and reconciliations, a constant push and pull that generated both happiness and misery for the two of you. Needless to say, each time you wrote to her you were apart, physically separated for one reason or another, and in letter after letter you devote much space to analyzing the difficulties between the two of you, or suggesting ways to improve them, or trying to work out arrangements for seeing her again, or telling her how much you love her and miss her. By and large, the letters can be considered love letters, but the ups and downs of that love are not what concern you now, and you have no intention of turning these pages into a rehash of the romantic dramas you lived through forty-five years ago, for many other things are discussed in the letters as well, and it is those other things that belong to the project you have been engaged in for the past several months. They are what you will be extracting from the time capsule that has fallen into your hands—what will allow you to go on with the next chapter of this report from the interior.
SUMMER 1966. Your first year at Columbia was behind you now. That was the school you had wanted to go to, not only because it was an excellent college with a strong English department, but because it was in New York, the center of the world for you back then, still the center of the world for you, and the prospect of spending four years in the city was far more appealing to you than being confined to some remote campus, stuck in some rural backwater with nothing to do
but study and drink beer. Columbia is a large university, but the undergraduate college is small, just twenty-eight hundred students back then, seven hundred boys per class, and one of the advantages of the Columbia program was that all the courses were taught by professors (full, associate, or assistant) rather than by graduate students or adjuncts, which is the case with most other colleges. Your first English teacher, therefore, was Angus Fletcher, the brilliant young disciple of Northrop Frye, and your first French teacher was Donald Frame, the renowned translator and biographer of Montaigne. By chance, Fletcher taught two of your classes in the fall, Freshman Humanities (a great books course that all students were required to take) and a course devoted to the reading of a single book—which turned out to be Tristram Shandy. Freshman Humanities was without question the most invigorating intellectual challenge of your life so far, a high-dive plunge into a universe of marvels, revelations, and all-encompassing joy—joy you still feel whenever you return to the books you read that year. The first term began with Homer and ended with Virgil, in between there was Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Thucydides, and in the second term you went from Saint Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, and Cervantes all the way to Dostoyevsky. The class was small, everyone chain-smoked and flicked the ashes on the floor, the discussions led by Fletcher were both spirited and provocative, and your life was never the same again. Admittedly, there were aspects of the college experience that were less inspiring to you, dreary patches of forlorn brooding, the ugliness of the dormitory, the institutional coldness of the Columbia administration, but you were in New York, and therefore you could escape whenever you were not sitting in class. One of your boyhood friends started Columbia that year as well, and because all out-of-town freshmen were required to live in dormitories, the two of you shared a room on the eighth floor of Carman Hall. Your friend came from a wealthy family, and rather than attend the local public high school as you had, he’d been sent to a progressive boarding school in Vermont, the same Putney School that Lydia had graduated from. That was how you met her—through your roommate. Through Lydia, you met another Putney graduate, Bob P., who was a freshman at a college in upstate New York, but he came down to the city often enough that spring for the two of you to become friends. A fellow future poet, Bob was an eighteen-year-old boy of great intelligence and sharp, effusive wit, and after the academic year ended, you decided to join forces for the summer, traveling up to the Catskills to work as groundskeepers at the Commodore Hotel (a strange adventure, recounted at some length in Hand to Mouth), and after you quit that job because the pay was too low and they didn’t feed you enough, you went to Bob’s hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, where for the next month or six weeks you lived in his parents’ well-appointed Tudor house and worked in the warehouse of his father’s appliance business. Better pay and better food, and the job was not difficult, for you were exceedingly strong at nineteen and the task of moving around large, heavy boxes was old hat to you by then, since for part of the summer two years earlier you had worked at your aunt and uncle’s appliance store in Westfield, New Jersey (a smaller but similar enterprise, also discussed in Hand to Mouth), and now you were at it again, eight hours a day in a cinder-block building with a cement floor, and all through those hours a radio would be rumbling in the background, filling the dead air of that space with the popular hits of 1966, none more popular than “Strangers in the Night,” as sung by Frank Sinatra, which must have come on a thousand times during the weeks you spent there, a song you heard so often and came to dislike so much that even now, at sixty-five, you have only to hear two bars of that wretched ballad to be thrust back into the summer heat of Youngstown, Ohio. Sometime in early August, you and Bob were given a ride back east, and after a brief stop at your mother’s apartment in Newark, you took off again, this time in the white Chevy you had owned since your junior year of high school, heading north for the woods of Vermont and the beaches of Cape Cod. You can’t remember why you wanted to go to those places, but you enjoyed driving back then, you took pleasure in long car journeys, and perhaps you went simply for the sake of going. On the other hand, you have a dim recollection that Lydia had gone to Cape Cod with her parents, to a house somewhere in Wellfleet, and that you and Bob wanted to show up at her door unannounced and say hello. The moronic gallantry of teenage boys. If you were looking for her, it is certain that you never found her, and after a night spent sleeping outdoors on the beach, you moved on. The first extant letter from the time capsule was written in your mother’s Newark apartment on August fifteenth, just after your return. It begins as follows: “Yes, we have come back. No, it was not much fun. Did we see the ocean? Yes. Did we see Cape Cod? Yes—to the very tip. Did we see Boston? Yes. Twice. Did we see Putney? Yes. The Alumni House? Yes, filled with African students. And the trip, was it restful? No. Did we drive very far? Yes. Over 1000 miles. Are we tired? Yes. Very. Have we been in Newark long? No, several hours. Are we now occupied? Yes. Bob in the shower. Paul on the couch, writing a letter to Lydia. To what end the trip? A woeful tale of misbegotten adventure. Was it educational? Perhaps. Did we pass Wellfleet? Yes. And what did Paul think? Of how much he loved Lydia. In thinking about her, was he objective? Only as far as love allows one to be objective. The nature of his thoughts? Wistful. Infinite sadness. Infinite longing.”