Mind of an Outlaw (25 page)

Afterward one could ask what it was one wanted of her, and the answer was that she show herself to us as she is. Because what we suffer from in America, in that rootless moral wilderness of our expanding life, is the unadmitted terror in each of us that bit by bit, year by year, we are going mad. Very few of us know really where we have come from and to where we are going, why we do it, and if it is ever worthwhile. For better or for worse we have lost our past, we live in that airless no-man’s-land of the perpetual present, and so suffer doubly as we strike into the future because we have no roots by which to project ourselves forward, or judge our trip.

And this tour of the White House gave us precisely no sense of the past. To the contrary, it inflicted the past upon us, pummeled us with it, depressed us with facts. I counted the names, the proper names, and the dates in the transcript. More than two hundred items were dumped upon us during that hour. If one counts repetitions, the number is closer to four hundred. One was not being offered education, but anxiety.

We are in the Green Room—I quote from the transcript:

A neurotic may suffer agonies returning to his past, so may a nation which is not well. The neurotic recites endless lists of his activities and offers no reaction to any of it. So do we teach with empty content and by rigid manner where there is anxiety in the lore. American history disgorges this anxiety. Where, in the pleasant versions of it we are furnished, can we find an explanation for the disease which encourages us to scourge our countryside, stifle our cities, kill the physical sense of our past, and throw up excruciatingly totalitarian new office buildings everywhere to burden the vista of our end? This disease, is it hidden in the evasions, the injustices, and the prevarications of the past, or does it come to us from a terror of what is yet to come? Whatever, however, we do not create a better nation by teaching schoolchildren the catalogs of the White House. Nor do we use the First Lady decently if she is flattered in this, for catalogs are imprisonment to the delicate, muted sensitivity one feels passing across Jackie Kennedy from time to time like a small summer wind on a good garden.

Yes, before the tour was over, one had to feel compassion. Because silly, ill-advised, pointless, empty, dull, and obsequious to the most slavish tastes in American life as was this show, still she was trying so hard, she wanted to please, she had given herself to this work, and it was hopeless there was no one about to tell her how very hopeless it was, how utterly without offering to the tormented adventurous spirit of American life. At times, in her eyes, there was a blank, full look which one could recognize. One had seen this look on a nineteen-year-old who was sweet and on the town and pushed too far. She slashed her wrists one night and tried to scar her cheeks and her breast. I had visited the girl in the hospital. She had blank eyes, a wide warm smile, a deadness in her voice. It did not matter about what she spoke—only her mouth followed the words, never her eyes. So I did not care to see that look in Jackie Kennedy’s face, and I hoped by half—for more would be untrue—that the sense one got of her in newspaper photographs, of a ladygirl healthy and on the bounce, might come into her presence before our deadening sets. America needed a lady’s humor to leaven the solemnities of our toneless power: finally we will send a man to Mars and the Martians will say, “God, he is dull.”

Yes, it is to be hoped that Jackie Kennedy will come alive. Because I think finally she is one of us. By which I mean that she has not one face but many, not a true voice but accents, not a past so much as memories which cannot speak to one another. She attracts compassion. Somewhere in her mute vitality is a wash of our fatigue, of existential fatigue, of the great fatigue which comes from being adventurous in a world where most of the bets are covered cold and statisticians prosper. I liked her, I liked her still, but she was a phony—it was the cruelest thing one could say, she was a royal phony. There was something very difficult and very dangerous she was trying from deep within herself to do, dangerous not to her safety but to her soul. She was trying, I suppose, to be a proper First Lady and it was her mistake. Because there was no need to copy the Ladies who had come before her. Suppose America had not yet had a First Lady who was even remotely warm enough for our needs? Or sufficiently imaginative? But who could there be to advise her in all that company of organized men, weaned on the handbook of past precedent? If she would be any use to the nation she must first regain the freedom to look us in the eye. And offer the hard drink. For then three times three hurrah, and hats, our hats, in the air. If she were really interested in her White House, we would grant it to her, we would not begrudge her the tour, not if we could believe she was beginning to learn the difference between the arts and the safe old crafts. And indeed there was a way she could show us she was beginning to learn, it was the way of the hostess; one would offer her one’s sword when Henry Miller was asked to the White House as often as Robert Frost and Beat poetry’s own Andy Hardy—good Gregory Corso—could do an Indian dance in the East Room with Archibald MacLeish. America would be as great as the royal rajah of her arts when the Academy ceased to be happy as a cherrystone clam, and the weakest of the Beat returned to form. Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a spaceship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communication faint.

YOUR COLUMNIST
would warn you. These pieces will be written two months before publication. The art is to anticipate what may be interesting in sixty days. I was talking about this with a columnist. “Write your column so it can still be read with pleasure ten years from now,” he said. Good advice. I will try to entertain some of you. I will try to drive others a little closer to their deaths.

This week the news is of Marilyn Monroe and the drug thalidomide. In sixty days most of you will have forgotten thalidomide so I remind you now that it was the drug which gave tranquillity to pregnant women suffering from morning sickness. As a side effect it seemed to affect embryos. They grew little flippers for arms. In West Germany, five thousand of them grew that way. It encouraged a joke:

“Darling,” said the German bride, new and pregnant, “these pills seem to have an odd effect on me.”

“Don’t worry, dear,” says husband, “doctor knows what he’s doing.”

The joke is sexually displaced. It is men who distrust doctors. Women adore them. If a hero cares enough about a lady he must be ready to enter the lists against Richard Burton, Fidel Castro,
Jack Kennedy, Cary Grant, Paul Getty, Yuri Gagarin, Sinatra, Glenn, early Brando or middle Pinza, it does not matter. If one wants a woman enough, there is some kind of chance. Do not give up, advises your columnist. Do not, unless your lady is an actress or a beauty and your opponent is a doctor or a psychoanalyst. Then it is hopeless.

“Darling,” says the German bride, “these pills seem to have an odd effect on me.”

“Throw them out,” says her groom.

“Are you being stupid again?” cries she. “Doctor knows what he’s doing.”

I know a doctor who’s intelligent, cynical, and an expert on cancer research. He heads a program in a New York hospital. He was fascinated by thalidomide. Thought it might represent a breakthrough. “It means we are able to affect the direction of evolution.”

“To what end?” I asked.

He shrugged. Not interested in that. It is not the end but the immediate power which calls to scientists. In modern man there is a profound rage against nature. One hears it everywhere: in the sound of an air conditioner, the electronic hiss of a public address system, in automobiles passing on a superhighway. One feels this invasion upon nature when one touches a plastic toy. I hate the thought of children using plastic toys. I would as soon give them blown-up prophylactics for dolls.

And then there’s the cry of nature answering back.

I am torn in two, says the air. Take away your jet planes.

Stop screaming, pal. We need the jets to get there.

Get where?

Move on, says fuzz.

The worst story I ever heard about Jack Kennedy was that he sat on his boat one day eating chicken and threw the half-chewed bones into the sea.

So few people understand what I mean, it forces me to explain that you don’t give the carcass of an animal to the water. It was meant to seep back into the earth.

Of course we pump our sewage out to sea, a sewage which was meant to return to the land, but then in a thousand years we may discover that the worst plagues of man, the cancer and the concentration camps, the housing projects and the fallout, the mass media and the mass nausea come from a few social vices, from the manufacture of the mirror, from the introduction of tobacco to Europe, from the advance of sanitation. Science may have been born the day a man came to hate nature so profoundly that he swore he would devote himself to comprehending her, and secretly to stifling her.

There is nothing wrong with hating nature. It is less bad than being the sort of columnist who admonishes his readers to love nature. What is bad is to fear death so completely that one loses the nerve to contemplate it. Throwing a chicken bone into the sea is bad because it shows no feeling for the root of death, which is burial. Of course Kennedy might have muttered “Sorry, old man” as he tossed the bone. That is the difficulty with anecdotes. One cannot determine the nuance. I have the conceit that if I had been there I might have sensed whether Kennedy was genuinely rueful, oblivious to the fact, or acting like a dick, a house dick.

Some will now mutter: Can’t the man be left alone? Is he entitled to no private life? The answer is: none. He is a young man who has chosen to be president. He is now paying part of the price. I suspect he is ready to pay it.

Rare was the czar or king who did not have a witness in his chamber to sniff the passing of the state. Arthur Schlesinger?

The root of death is burial. I was never particularly fond of Joe DiMaggio. His legend left me cold. But I have respect for the way he chose to give Marilyn Monroe a small funeral. If she had never been a movie star, if she had been one of those small, attractive blondes who floats like spray over the Hollywood rocks, a little drink here, bit of a call girl there, bing, bam, bad marriage, nice pot, easy head, girlfriend, headshrinker, fuzz, dope, miscarriage and lowering night, if she had been no more than that, just a misty little blonde who hurt no one too much and went down inch by inch, inevitably, like a cocker spaniel in a quickbog, well then she would have ended in some small Hollywood parlor with fifteen friends invited.

Probably she was like that by the end. Sleeping pills are the great leveler. If everyone in America took four capsules of Nembutal a night for two thousand nights we would all be the same when we were done. We would all be idiots.

Any writer who takes the pills year after year ought to be able to write the tale of a club fighter whose brain turns slowly drunk with punishment. But that is the book which is never written. We learn the truth by giving away pieces of our tongue. When we know it all, there is no tongue left. Is it then one rises at dawn for the black flirtation, slips downstairs, slips the muzzle into the mouth, cool gunmetal to balm the void of a lost tongue, and goes blasting off like a rocket. Here come I, eternity, cries Ernest, I trust you no longer. You must try to find me now, eternity. I am in little pieces.

Hemingway and Monroe. Pass lightly over their names. They were two of the people in America most beautiful to us.

I think Ernest hated us by the end. He deprived us of his head. It does not matter so much whether it was suicide or an accident—one does not put a gun barrel in one’s mouth, tickle the edge of an accident, and fail to see that people will say it’s suicide. Ernest, so proud of his reputation. So fierce about it. His death was awful. Say it. It was the most difficult death in America since Roosevelt. One has still not recovered from Hemingway’s death. One may never.

But Monroe was different. She slipped away from us. She had been slipping away from us for years. Now it is easy to say that her actions became more vague every year. I thought she was bad in
The Misfits
, she was finally too vague, and when emotion showed, it was unattractive and small. But she was gone from us a long time ago.