Ten years ago, I was in Mississippi, covering blacks, whites, troopers, Klansmen, nuns, whoever there was. The F.B.I. had already infiltrated the Klan to the extent that, by whatever means, they had demoralized and almost destroyed it. A small-town klavern, run by a gas-station attendant, did discover an agent in their midst. They drove him to a dark, deserted road. He conceded that they’d caught him. His predicament was trouble. He also promised that, if they did him any harm whatever, some other agents at the Bureau would come down and blow the Klansmen’s heads off. They did nothing to him. That klavern dispersed. Later, when there still seemed to be an obdurate nest of Klansmen left in Mississippi and Louisiana, it was rumored that some F.B.I. men, having tried all sorts of warnings and persuasions, drove a few of the unrelenting to another rural road and blew their heads off. It may not be true. Agents from that time and place will just grin when they are asked.
She was a dynamite girl and he was an aces fellow. On the day he at last agreed by phone to marry her, the switchboard operators were overjoyed. For six months they had listened, in sympathy and indignation, to the tears, the threats, the partings and reconciliations. They were so unequivocally for the girl that only the purest professionalism kept them, at times, from breaking in. On the day Tim, after calls to his best friend, his first wife, and his therapist, gave in at last, the oldest operator, who had been on the switchboard for twenty years, actually wept. The other two told the receptionist, at lunch. All four ladies had a drink, and then bought a card of slightly obscene felicitations. They had wavered toward the sentimental, but rejected it as basically unswinging. They did not sign the card. Tim and his girl, who had been breaking up once again on the day they received it (she was packing; they were in his apartment), were appalled. As a result of the card, and discussions of what to do about it — what it implied, who knew and who didn’t — they married.
A physicist I first met when he was working on a government military project recently turned to drastic civil disobedience. When I went to visit him and his wife in their Village apartment, the phone rang constantly — two rings for one sort of friend, ten for another. “If it took an act that I might go to jail for to bring my friends together for an evening,” the physicist said, “then it wasn’t pointless, was it?” The apartment was filled with friends from other days, other lives, looking tired and talking. The doorbell kept on ringing. A young priest would go downstairs and check. “Who was that?” the physicist said when the priest came back alone. “A man from the Daily News,” the priest said. “I told him you weren’t here.” A reader of the News objected. “They had a petition protesting their own coverage of this kind of story. Maybe he signed it.” The physicist was out the door and halfway down the block in a minute. He came back. “I found the guy,” he said. “I asked him whether he signed. He said no, he felt he could do more by not signing, by positive action in covering just this kind of story. I thanked him. I asked him to convey my thanks to the people who did sign. The guy said, I’m sure they would appreciate it more if you wrote them a personal note. I said, Oh, no, I feel I can do more by positive action in just this kind of conversation.”
When I first came to New York, a man I somehow knew, a film producer, took me from my job at the school where I was then working to dinner at the Colony. Before dinner, I was to meet him at his St. Regis suite. I arrived ten minutes late and knew at once it was an error. I should have waited twenty minutes. I had just started smoking weeks before. Over drinks in the suite, he lighted my cigarette. The match fell on the rug. I picked it up. Another error. He was a nice man. After dinner, he walked me up all six flights of the place where I was living. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen a girl’s apartment,” he said. After a while, there was one of those awkward, off-romantic moments. “It’s not my age, is it?” he said, earnestly. He was seventy-four. “No, no,” I said, “I guess I’m just neurotic.” That seemed all right. We became friends. At one point, he thought I might be the girl for his son, another film producer. It was awkward for the son and me, at Trader Vic’s, trying to be a generation. The son said he had three files of projects: one marked A through Z; one A prime through Z prime; and one marked Miscellaneous. He said that only since his analysis had he come to realize how much he had to offer.
The line stuck with me, though — I guess I’m just neurotic. Nothing else seemed to work quite so well, to be so serviceable and friendly. You don’t care to. I don’t care to. It isn’t a New York obligation. There’s already somebody. I don’t like the way you talk to waiters. I’m not an agency. You’re not an agency. Whatever. Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation. Other ways, of course, are straighter. I don’t know. An old friend — the physicist, in fact, before he married — once told me that a sister of a friend of his had sexual problems. I said, oh. He said that, when they had both been in Bolivia at a meeting, he’d made a pass at her. She wasn’t interested. He asked her why. She said “You just don’t attract me physically.” That was it. For him, the inference was problems. Maybe there is no polite way. There don’t seem to be many instances of the pure straightforward. And yet. Will is away a lot. I have my work. There is a passage in Dante when he and Virgil, traveling through the Inferno, stop beside a man buried to his neck in boiling mud. He does not care to speak to them. He has his own problems. He does not want an interview. Dante actually grasps him by the hair and gets his story. Some sort of parable about reporting there, I think. In fact, I know.
In May, 1959, Bootsy Garn, from Houston, Texas, refused to get out of the bus near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Her hair was shiny and blond. Her nails were extremely long and red. She was wearing silk trousers and pumps. She looked at her fellow students in sneakers and jeans, with their canvas sacks and pickaxes, and at the slate cliffs they seemed prepared to go straight up. She declined. “I just don’t see the sense of it,” she said. Bootsy got off the bus all three nights, did her nails, set her hair, and slept in the dingy hotel above the movie house with the rest of us. She was by no means one of the great refusers. Not an existentialist hero, or a Rosa Parks, or even a Bartleby. She simply did not see the sense of it. It would have been an outrage, even in the highest traditions of scholarship, to force Bootsy too far into the out-of-doors. She knew it, and she kept her dignity. In 1959.
She spent the three days of that field trip aboard the bus. She nearly flunked geology, defaulted the science requirement, and lost her college degree. A quiet exception had to be made. She passed. The rest of us climbed the cliffs and hills, looked at entrenched meanders, terminal moraines, glacial detritus, relief maps of the Delaware Water Gap, and outcroppings of the Wissahickon Mica Schist. None of it has since been of much use to me. I can tell an entrenched meander to this day. It means that the riverbed is old and that the river has doubled back to cut its own deep loops. But that’s all. I can’t tell one rock from the next, or recite ten lines from Faust, or recall the whole Preamble, or do one Old Slavonic text. Not one. It is all gone, after childhood knowledge of myths, constellations, baseball scores, dinosaurs, and idioms of the tennis court and athletic field. There are outcroppings of the old vocabularies still. Pinnies from field hockey. Heels down. Bad hop. Sorry. My fault. So sorry. Provide for the common defense. Meanders slip my mind. And of college there is so little, although that little does flare, like the Jesuit poet’s embers, gash-gold vermilion, when I remember it at all.