In his small, airless apartment the sportswriter served local wine, cheap Scotch, and beer. His wife, and the other sportswriters’ wives, four of them pregnant, two not apparently so, sat in the bedroom, drinking the Almaden, with ice. They discussed rents. The sportswriters, hitting the Scotch and the beer, sat in the living room, talking of books they planned to write but never would. The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time. No one was rich. No one was poor. No one was ever going to do anything of any consequence. We were talking about No, No, Nanette. I said I thought there was such a thing as an Angry Bravo — that those audiences who stand, and cheer, and roar, and seem altogether beside themselves at what they would instantly agree is at best an unimportant thing, are not really cheering No, No, Nanette. They are booing Hair. Or whatever else it is on stage that they hate and that seems to triumph. So they stand and roar. Every bravo is not so much a Yes to the frail occasion they have come to make a stand at, as a No, goddam it to everything else, a bravo of rage. And with that, they become, for what it’s worth, a constituency that is political. When they find each other, and stand and roar like that, they want, they want to be reckoned with.
Joe said, Isn’t it possible they just want to say that they are having a good time? It’s possible; one ought perhaps to take into account that it is fun to be part of an audience that wants to roar. Norma asked whether Joe had seen it. He said no. Norma said, “Well, then you don’t know. It’s not a musical audience roar. It’s not an avant garde roar. It’s a march roar. A rally roar. A parade roar.” Joe said, “You mean a lynch roar.” Norma said, “Now that’s going too far.”
Just two nights ago, I went to a party with three large dinner tables. It was mixed, the rich and famous and the reporters who had helped them on their way. There were some intellectual sharks, some arrivistes, some sheep, good souls, professors, editors, some radicals, who themselves invite poets, novelists, sophomore rioters, and visiting Englishmen to dinner, which is served by maids. This party was given by two kind, intelligent Americans I knew from college. They wanted to do good and to know, like people out of E.M. Forster or Henry James. The purpose was for the senior senator of an American liberal state and an Indian dignitary, a woman, to meet a cross section of American opinion. They met it. The first course was aspic. The dignitary thought somebody was going to attack her for Indian educational policies in Kerala. No one knew anything about India at all. She relaxed and grew bored. The senator thought he was going to meet the young and learn about them. I was sitting next to him. I said I thought he and I might be among the last three people in the room who still believed in the electoral process. He said, “Thanks, sweetheart.”
Suddenly, after dessert, a lady at my table — a donor to controversial social causes, now half persuaded to devote her money to the cause of saving art — said she thought the dinner would be wasted if the conversation did not become general, if it was all private bon mots spliced together, or just gossip. She thought we ought to talk about America today. She called first on one of those social academics, a man who had vecu a bit, whose bow tie was perpetually atilt, perhaps to show himself at an eccentric angle to the dinner jackets that he wore, what they implied. He rose, red-faced and angry, to his feet. He said he felt this country now was the world’s most murderous and corrupt. He happened to know, he said, of two deaths at Kent State that had not been reported, and of other grave matters he was not at liberty to disclose. He felt the only hope for humanity now lay in the vitality and idealism of the third world.
The lady who led the discussion, unperturbed, asked a tireless, self-effacing worker in the cause of civil rights whether he had anything to say “about all this.” He leaned his head against the wall, then stood up. “Bertram,” he said, “I am so offended by what you have just said, I don’t know what to say to you.” He sat down. The lady called upon a poet, a surrealist who, with clear reluctance, got to his feet and said, turning to the Indian lady, “I think in this country we need to disburden ourselves of our, our burden of rationality.” He sat down. It did not seem exactly India’s problem.
A liberal reporter of military affairs was called on. He said he didn’t want to discuss the morality of it, but that anyone who had covered the military would know…;“I know something about the military,” another reporter, younger, fiercer, gray with anger, said, rising to his feet and interrupting. Then he said he knew that the fabric of our whole society was stretching very thin. The editors — one local popular, one national radical — talked well when they were called on, discursive, rambling. It was as though they had a repressed and abiding wish to have their say, in their own words for once. The party ended the only way it could. A McLuhanite apostle, revered as a physics genius in these circles, spoke. He was in his seventies, extremely hard of hearing. He spoke long and loudly. He continued speaking. “I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” the lady moderator said, after geologic time spans passed. He did not hear her. He went on.
“I’m very sorry to have to interrupt,” she said, more loudly. He heard nothing. He continued speaking. She kept trying. Finally, some clear-sighted soul rose to propose a toast. “All stand,” he said. Everyone stood. For a few moments the clear-sighted soul and the deaf genius were speaking in duet. Then the genius, looking around, subsided. “The reason we are gathered here is to honor our hostess,” the good soul said, and drained his glass. So did we all, and then went home with all deliberate speed. I took a cab home. The driver ranted. We passed three men, two beating up a third. They had pulled his sweatshirt up over his eyes. He could not see them. A crowd had gathered, interested. Suddenly a young man got out of the cab beside mine. “That’s enough!” he shouted. The scene froze a minute. Then it started up again. After all, he was unarmed; nobody knew him. He moved closer. He said, “That’s enough,” again. The whole thing stopped, dissolved. The beaten man pulled his sweatshirt down over his injured face, put his arms inside the sleeves, and limped away. The crowd disintegrated. I thought, What a phrase from some past time I can remember. That’s enough.
In the South, in simpler days, I remember a middle-aged gentle black worker speaking to his son who had insomnia. “When you can’t sleep,” he said, “just tell yourself the story of your life.” Now sometimes when I can’t sleep, I wonder. A twenty-four-hour curfew every day, for everybody. Suppose we blow up the whole thing. Everything. Everybody. Me. Buildings. No room. Blast. All dead. No survivors. And then I would say, and then I would say, Let’s just have it a little quiet around here.