“That’s defeatist!”
“What are you talking about—” Richard talked to the ceiling. He was only glanced at and shushed like a barking dog.
“If you are going to broaden that word, which I really don’t think you understand”—Betty closed her eyes and sharpened her tone when Leo groaned at this—”to include any act that involves death, then Che is defeatist.”
“No, no.” Leo bounced his right leg up and down nervously.
“I’m
saying it’s defeatist because it’s put in romantic terms. You go off passively, martyred, refusing to co-operate. That’s not struggle. That’s not what Che—”
“You’re just being a fool.” Richard was amazed he had said it. For the first time his voice was confident and unhurried. But the effect frightened him. Leo had jumped up.
“Look, I’m not going in for this. You two can just go on making up your little theories.” Richard watched him leave and for a moment was sorry. His mother looked at Mark with embarrassment, but when she turned to him, he saw that she was upset.
“Now please do me a favor, Mom,” Richard said. It was pouring out of him. “Don’t make me feel bad. He said I was absurd. I said he was a fool.”
“I’m not angry at you,” she said quickly. She convinced him. “I was sorry he was so upset by it. That’s all.”
“Okay,” he said, ready to go on, but he felt tears along with the words and that scared him into silence.
Richard was apprehensive of Leo from then on, sure that a resolution of their spat would come at dinner. But there was the usual exchange of literary gossip, followed by Leo’s enthusiastic questions about gardening and the local people. Everyone had forgotten the argument—Aaron and Louise weren’t aware there had been one—except for Richard.
His father, once they had settled in the living room, tried to extract information about what the Movement was doing, but Mark and Leo evaded all his questions and confirmed Richard’s fear that Leo planned to join many of his friends in the underground. The prospect made him timid and uneasy. It would mean Leo’s death. Eventually.
He started thinking of how he would react and found himself on the lawn surrounded by reporters, making a proud speech. He was jolted out of it by shame at such egotism. He looked around as if he had just peed. How absurd, he thought, if I’m heartless, it’s no use being embarrassed.
The next day, after lunch, Mark and Leo said they were going for a walk in the woods. Richard went along. They stopped in a clearing and Leo cut off a branch to whittle. Mark produced the throwing knives and stood fifteen feet away from a young skinny pine. “If you hit it,” Richard said, meaning to be friendly, “you might chop it down.”
Mark smiled without taking his eyes off the tree. He held himself carefully and balanced the knife on his fingertips, gestured twice toward the tree, and finally snapped his wrist, releasing it. He missed everything.
Richard tried to suppress a laugh. But Mark took the failure well. He laughed and said, “Not very impressive.”
“Try a bigger tree,” Richard said, no longer awed by this revolutionary training. He looked at the knives lying on the ground and he couldn’t resist a romantic act. He picked one up and, spotting a larch, he turned to face it. He had planned to prepare the throw carefully, but was too embarrassed by Mark’s observation to wait. He released it without calculation.
“All right! Check it out!” Richard skipped happily toward the tree. His knife had notched a small square of bark off and remained embedded in the wood. He was surprised by the milky sap that oozed out over the tip of the blade. He couldn’t pull the knife out of the tree and he called Mark over to help.
Mark pulled it out without complimenting Richard on his accuracy. Richard considered that a grave sin and it rankled all day. Mark continued throwing with little success. Richard felt an airy contempt for his lack of skill and he waited until he judged that Mark’s disappointment had peaked before he threw again. The thud of the blade hitting and the vibration of the handle while it settled into the wood were perfect re-creations of the Hollywood ideal. Leo said, “Good, Richie. How are you doing it?”
“I don’t know. I just keep thinking of the Buddhist thing. You know, aim without aiming.” That sounded foolish, Richard thought, and his embarrassment was mixed with his pleasure at Leo’s notice of his skill.
“I know,” Mark said. “That’s my problem. I’m too self-conscious.”
“What do you mean?” Leo asked. He picked up a knife.
“You know,” Richard said, glad that Mark had understood him. “It has to be a part of you. I mean that sounds silly, but. You can’t worry that it’s going to work. Just let it go.”
“Yeah, well,” Leo said, not concealing his amusement. “I mean like which end do you hold?”
A discussion of Richard’s and Mark’s methods removed any chance of success. For an hour they failed to land a blade in the tree and then began to miss everything, eventually losing a knife in the forest’s undergrowth.
Richard was convinced by this childish and delightful adventure that Mark and Leo weren’t going underground. It was just cowboy fantasies. He got to like Mark but was disturbed that Mark treated him casually. He found himself waiting eagerly to be alone with him to talk. But his stomach fluttered nervously when they were, and he was afraid that he would be unable to break the paralyzing fear of humiliation. They were in the kitchen, the rest of the house asleep, Mark reading the
Times.
Richard had a sense of déjà vu, confusing Mark with John. Was this the beginning of a neurotic cycle? He was afraid of not earning older men’s respect and chased after them like a puppy. It disgusted him. I’m a latent homosexual. I have a shattered ego.
He cleared his throat and said, “Leo didn’t pay much attention to it—” Mark looked up, startled. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No, go ahead.”
“You know, in the woods. Leo didn’t relate to what I was saying. About the Buddhist stuff. But you did.”
“Oh yeah. That’s heavy stuff. I’ve really been into that. Have you read Castaneda?” Richard shook his head no.
“Don Juan?”
Mark described the book, telling Richard of the giant dog that plays with Castaneda while he is on Peyote. The idea that there were gods of drugs that came to either kill or help the taker frightened Richard, because if they existed, they surely meant to kill him.
Richard learned something from Mark’s description of Castaneda’s books: Mark wanted to handle life with perfect control. He said that it was amazing to think of life noncompetitively. You allow things to master you rather than trying to master them. We make things difficult, he said, by putting our egos between our consciousness and our acts.
“That’s really amazing that you say that,” Richard responded. He was sincere in his remarks but conscious of their formality. “Because I’ve been worried by my egotism”—he laughed to deprecate the contradiction—“but I decided it was a strength and not a weakness.”
“Egotism?” Mark’s worried shifting of his eyes reminded Richard of Mark’s reactions to his jokes at breakfast.
“Yeah,” Richard said. “I mean I realize that sounds adolescent but I’m not doing what I used to—trying to get over my embarrassment of feeling unappreciated by emphasizing my great opinion of myself. I just don’t believe in modesty. I think it’s strengthening to admit that you think you’re great.”
Mark seemed lost. “Well, I think you should feel good about yourself.”
“I don’t mean just that,” Richard said. “I think ambition is a vital part of great acts.”
“Oh no. I think that’s wrong. Geniuses aren’t aware of their genius.”
“Oh, come on. Balzac, when he was fixing up his first study, had a bust of Napoleon, and he stuck a piece of paper under it. He had written on it, ‘What he did not achieve by the sword I shall achieve by the pen.’ ” Richard’s enjoyment of this quote returned to him. He laughed, he realized, the way Mark ought to have. Mark’s lack of appreciation made him uncomfortable. “I mean Tolstoy,” Richard continued, “considered himself grand enough to start a new religion, to maintain Shakespeare was a lousy playwright. They were all like that. And I can’t believe it’s a coincidence.”
Mark smiled with gentle contempt. “Yeah, but everybody thinks he’s a genius. You’re not including the thousands of people who thought so and were totally forgotten.”
“I agree with that. But then you’ll admit that, for a genius, their ego doesn’t get in the way of their acts.” Richard looked at him triumphantly.
Mark shifted in his chair and when he spoke his voice lost its tone of distance. “I think there’s an organic process that a genius goes through that isn’t complicated by worrying over fame.”
“Look, I love geniuses as much as the next guy, but I can show you a copy of the first page of the
Père Goriot
manuscript. Balzac has a flamboyant and large title, a crossed out paragraph, and the rest is scribblings of his optimistic estimates of how much money he expected to make on it. And that’s one of his most respected novels. It’s a classic. Do you think Edmund Wilson is a genius?” Mark nodded reluctantly. “Well, he describes getting up late at night to read the reviews of his books. Thomas Mann called writers charlatans because of all this. But I don’t think so. It’s just a middle-class attitude that there’s something refined and great about the personality of genius.”
“All your examples are writers.”
Richard was puzzled by this, but he saw that Mark considered it a clever point. “So?”
“Well—” Mark held the edge of the table with the tips of his fingers, as if balancing himself. “It really may be true of novelists, but I was thinking more of the way, say, that Che relates to life.”
“Che!” Richard gestured to the ceiling scornfully. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no more egotistical an act—”
“Oh, that’s fucked up. You can’t call dying to free oppressed people an act of egotism.”
“I’m not saying that!” Richard yelled. Mark looked at him with mild shock at his vehemence. “How else would one sustain oneself through guerrilla warfare not
once,
but many times, except by believing that you embody the will of mankind? It’s a lovely egotism. Selfless and great.”
“That’s just an intellectual concept. When you’re a revolutionary you understand that that’s like the kind of thinking in liberal history books. Being a revolutionary isn’t romantic. That’s why Don Juan is so heavy. Through action you lose all sense of guilt and self-consciousness. Writing is very alienating, and I’m sure that’s why egotism is an important part of it. But the opposite is true of political action.” Mark’s moon face was kindly though patronizing. Richard wanted to jeer at him for his pretense of being revolutionary—he couldn’t hit a tree from ten paces. But Richard felt that was an unfair point. Yet he was hurt by Mark’s implication that he was alienated and that Mark had somehow transcended this common fate of middle- class kids.
“Listen. Writers may be alienated, but good writing is not. I mean, despite the fact that it is a Freudian cliché, one writes to break through alienation, not to reinforce it. You have far too little respect for writing.”
Mark made a sound of surprise. “That’s not true.”
“Oh, you think they’re important, but you hate them for it.” Richard was returning Mark’s open, matter-of-fact manner. As he had guessed, it was effective. Mark was nonplused. “The other day you discussed them politically and my impression was that you thought they were all counterrevolutionary, and now you think they’re alienated and don’t have the mystical calm of revolutionaries. What writer do you think avoids these things?”
Neither of them concealed their hostility at this moment. Richard’s adoption of Mark’s condescending malice was provoking. Mark said, “Well, like I do think the only correct way of living is to be a revolutionary. Anything else supports the bourgeois world.”
“Okay, so let’s say the bourgeois world doesn’t exist any more. Would you be satisfied with me just being a novelist?” Richard was amused by this turn of their discussion. His family had taught him that such utopian hypotheses were considered foolishness by political activists.
Mark was solemn about this grave matter. “You would have to do socially useful labor.”
Richard was unable to dismiss Mark as a crude and silly young man because Richard was so much younger. “That’s just Stalinism!” he yelled, convinced that Mark couldn’t ignore the truth of that label and its implied moral judgment.
“Richard, you shouldn’t react defensively to what I’m saying. Part of me really understands what you’re into about writing. You know? Really. I felt the same way in college. I wanted to be another Camus—”
“How do you know what I’m into about writing? How do you know anything—”
“Well, I know you’ve written a novel and your family’s very literary.” Mark paused and Richard couldn’t deny it. “If everybody felt the way your family does about society we wouldn’t have to have a revolution. For me I’ve gone through a lot of changes about the values that like I had in college. In terms of the Vietnam War and what’s happening to black people I couldn’t really feel good about myself as an intellectual or an artist.”
Richard listened uncritically. He was cowed. Mark was a revolutionary and along with Leo was prepared to make sacrifices to change the world. I’m just a schmucky selfish kid who masturbates. He really didn’t feel good about himself.
In late August, well after Mark had left, Richard was sitting up with Leo and Louise after their parents had gone to sleep. He tried to explain his guilt about being politically inactive. “What I’m trying to say is that the only thing that seems real, I mean I have respect for demonstrations, I just mean deep down”—he smiled—“deep down I feel unless you’re willing to die, to become a guerrilla like Che, that you’re just bullshitting.” He waved his hands at them frantically to stop any response. “I don’t mean I think people are bullshitting. I mean I would think I would be bullshitting.” He said quickly to Leo: “Did you see how I misused would-should?” He hoped that would alleviate his confession of naïve political feelings, but it simply made him feel precious.
Louise leaned forward and put a hand on Richard’s knee. She spoke in a rush. “Don’t worry about that. It’s because you think life isn’t going to change. I never thought, years ago, that I would be political. You don’t have to feel that you’re making those choices for life.”