Herself (6 page)

… Views I will be bound to propagate because, as a writer’s, are they not public property?—and to promulgate because people will listen to them. All this to be done of course, in the assumption that these views are “right,” and with the attitude that if a writer does this, he or she won’t have to do anything else. I am to find this attitude—in which, to be verbally engage is enough—intolerable as a private person. I will also find that on the barricades, even on such foot-high stiles as I venture, the habit of meditation creates a gap of its own. I would always leap back to the meditation … or forward, as I sometimes judged it … As a writer always will. …

It costs ten cents (I said) to ride the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument; you can walk up the 898 steps and 50 landings for free. The Saturday in early September on which my husband and I, our fourteen-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son, ended there a tour which had included various monuments and divers graves, was a perfect picture-postcard day. As the four of us stood on the hill overlooking the city, with the main points of the compass accurately pinned to earth for us—to the north the White House, to the east the Capitol, to the south the Jefferson Memorial, and nearest us, to the west, separated only by the long dark bar of its reflecting pool, the Lincoln Memorial—the minute, aerial photograph perfection of the scene only added to my depression. I recoil from the prearranged educational experience, on the grounds that anything of real value is usually acquired accidentally, at least by me. At such times, my view of history is dark, my separation from the crowd neurotically deep; as I stroll past the incised marble, the preserved trundle-bed. I keep up a constant, sub rosa colloquy with the dead, in which only they and I know much less honorable they were, how much less honored they are, than the ladies’ associations and the restorers would make them out to be. Only they and I know how rude, philistine, and essentially inconclusive it is to be alive at all.

Some one should have informed the talented retoucher behind the scenes that too much harmony between column and cloud makes the dangerous analogue between the two all the clearer. I looked guiltily at my children, standing next to me in the long line of people encircling the base of the monument, waiting their turn at the elevator. Had it been right for me to indorse for them this cardboard conception of “our nation’s capitol?” Ought I not remind my daughter that the real officialdom, out of sight or out of town, petty as its army of civil servants, immutable as its McCarthy, nervous as the hop-head journalese of its dateline, had little in common with the symbolism of the obelisk that rose in our center? Wasn’t it my duty to take her and my son (who had once asked, in our own northern town ‘Why do Negroes have to live in such untidy houses?’) to places not too far from the Lincoln Memorial and say “Here they are—the famous slums of Washington”?

I turned away from the eternally prodding, parental dilemma. To the right of us, a farmer out of Virginia or Maryland, a neat-featured, evenly browned man with pomatum slicked along the one cowlick that shot forward from his cropped head was chivvying his wife on the ability to walk up, instead of waiting for the ride. The wife, more than buxom, but still with a look of the Saturday-night belle about her, smiled, droopy-lidded, into the sun and made no move. A boy and girl of about the ages of our children squirmed restlessly around her.

“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.

I
N
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.”