I pushed on with it for another year, and then, after a bitter, anguished debate with myself, I concluded that I wasn’t making sufficient progress and stopped. It’s not that I thought my work was bad. There were occasional sparks, a few poems that seemed to have something fresh and urgent about them, lines I felt genuinely proud of, but by and large the results were mediocre, and the prospect of living out my life as a mediocrity frightened me into quitting.
The London years. The somber revelations of dashed hopes, loveless sex in the beds of prostitutes, one serious liaison with an English girl named Dorothy that crashed to a sudden halt when she found out I was Jewish. But, believe it or not, in spite of how grim all this must sound to you, I think I was growing stronger, finally beginning to grow up and take charge of my life. I finished my last poem in June 1973, ceremoniously burned it in the kitchen sink, and went back to America. I had sworn not to return until the last U.S. soldier had left Vietnam, but I had a new plan now, and I didn’t have time for such high-minded claptrap anymore. I was going to throw myself into the trenches and fight it out with my bare fists. Good-bye, literature. Welcome to the thing-in-itself, the sensorium of the real.
Berkeley, California. Three years of law school. The idea was to do some good, to work with the poor, the downtrodden, to involve myself with the spat-upon and the invisible and see if I couldn’t defend them against the cruelties and indifference of American society. More high-minded claptrap? Some might think so, but it never felt that way to me. From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.
Now that my illness has forced me to stop working, I’ve had ample time to ponder my motives for choosing the life I did. In a very concrete way, I think it started that night in 1967 when I saw Born stab Cedric Williams in the belly—and then, after I had run off to call for an ambulance, carry him into the park and murder him. For no reason, no reason whatsoever, and then, even worse, for him to have gotten away with it, to have skipped the country and never to have been judged for his crime. It would be impossible to overstate how terribly this grieved me, has continued to grieve me. Justice betrayed. The anger and frustration have not diminished, and if that is how I feel, if this sense of justice is what burns most brightly in me, then I’m certain I chose the correct path for myself.
Twenty-seven years of legal aid work, community activism in the black neighborhoods of Oakland and Berkeley, rent strikes, class action suits against various corporations, police brutality cases, the list goes on. In the long run, I don’t think I’ve accomplished much. A number of satisfying victories, yes, but this country is no less cruel now than it was then, perhaps more cruel than ever, and yet to have done nothing would have been impossible for me. I would have felt that I was living in a fraudulent relation with myself.
Am I starting to sound like a self-righteous prig? I hope not.
Income was meager, of course. The kind of work I did does not a rich man make. But there were family resources that fell into my lap—my lap and my sister’s lap—following the deaths of our parents (mother in 1974, father in 1976). We sold the house and our father’s supermarket for a considerable sum, and because Gwyn is a clever and practical woman, she invested the money well, which meant that I always had enough to live on (modestly, but comfortably) without worrying too much about what my work brought in. Playing the system in order to beat the system. A fine little twist of hypocrisy, I suppose, but everyone has to put food on the table, everyone needs a roof over his head. Alas, medical bills have made a severe dent in my savings these past two years, but I think I’ll have enough to carry me through to the end—assuming I don’t last too long, which doesn’t appear likely.
As for matters of the heart, I staggered along in my clumsy, retarded way for a good many years, too many years, crawling in and out of various beds, falling in and out of love with various women, but never felt any temptation to settle down and marry until I was thirty-six, when I met the one person who ever really counted for me, a social worker by the name of Sandra Williams—yes, the same last name that belonged to the murdered boy, a slave name, a common slave name borne by hundreds of thousands if not millions of African-Americans—and although an interracial marriage can pose numerous social problems for the couple (from both camps), I never considered it to be an impediment, for the truth was that I loved Sandra, loved her from the first day to the last. A wise woman, a brave woman, a spirited and beautiful woman, just six months younger than I was, already married and divorced when we met, with a twelve-year-old girl, Rebecca, my stepdaughter, herself now married and the mother of two, and the nineteen years I spent with Sandra turned me into someone better than I had been, better than I would have been alone or with anyone else, and now that she is dead (of cervical cancer, five years ago), not a day goes by when I don’t long for her. My only regret is that we never managed to have children together, but making a family is beyond the power of a man who turns out to have been born sterile.
What more to say? I am well cared for by my housekeeper (who will cook dinner for us on the night of your visit), I see Rebecca and her family often, I talk to my sister on the telephone nearly every day, I have many friends. When health permits, I continue to devour books (poems, history, novels, among them yours—the instant they are published), still take an active interest in baseball (an incurable disease), and fitfully indulge in the escapism of watching films (thanks to a DVD player, loyal friend to the solitaries and shut-ins of this world). But mostly I think about the past, the old days, that long-ago year (1967) when so much happened to me, happened in me and around me, the unexpected turns and discoveries of that year, the madness of that year, which pushed me toward the life I wound up living, for both good and bad. Nothing like a fatal illness to sharpen one’s thoughts, to make one want to tote up the accounts, to produce a final reckoning. The plan is to write the book in three parts, three chapters. Not a long book, not a complicated book, but it has to be done right, and to be stuck in the second part has become a source of terrible discombobulation. Rest assured, I am not expecting you to solve the problem for me. But I have a suspicion, perhaps a groundless suspicion, that a talk with you would give me the kick in the pants I need. Beyond that—and before that—that is, above and beyond my minuscule travails, there will be the tremendous pleasure of seeing you again . . .
I had been hoping for a word from him, but it never occurred to me that he would write more than a couple of paragraphs, that he would be willing to put in the time and effort to share such a full account of himself with me—I, who was hardly more than a stranger to him at that point. Many friends or not, he must have been lonely, I thought, he must have been more than a little desperate, and while I still couldn’t grasp why I was the person he had chosen to be his confessor, he had latched on to me in such a way as to make it all but unthinkable not to do everything I could for him. How swiftly the weather changes. A dying friend had reentered my life after an absence of close to forty years, and suddenly I felt an obligation not to let him down. But what kind of help could I give him? He was having trouble with his book, and for some inexplicable reason he had deluded himself into thinking I had the power to say the magic words that would get him started again. Did he expect me to hand him a prescription for a pill that cured struggling authors of their writer’s block? Was that all he wanted from me? It seemed so paltry, so painfully beside the point. Walker was an intelligent man, and if his book needed to be written, he would find a way to do it.
That was more or less what I told him in my next letter. Not straight off, since there were other subjects to be addressed first (my sadness over his wife’s death, my surprise over his choice of profession, my admiration for the work he had done and the battles he had fought), but once those matters had been dispensed with, I said quite bluntly and simply that I believed he would figure it out on his own. Fear is a good thing, I continued, repeating the word he had used in his first l
etter, fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits, and any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value. As for the wall he had mentioned, I said that everyone hits those walls, and more often than not the condition of being stuck arises from a flaw in the writer’s thinking—i.e., he doesn’t fully understand what he is trying to say or, more subtly, he has taken a wrong approach to his subject. By way of example, I told him about the problems I had encountered while working on an early book of mine—also a memoir (of sorts), which had been divided into two parts. Part One was written in the first person, and when I began Part Two (which was more directly about myself than the previous part), I continued writing in the first person, grew more and more dissatisfied with the results, and eventually stopped. The pause lasted several months (difficult months, anguished months), and then one night the solution came to me. My approach had been wrong, I realized. By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself), and therefore I returned to the beginning of Part Two and began writing it in the third person. I became He, and the distance created by that small shift allowed me to finish the book. Perhaps he (Walker) was suffering from the same problem, I suggested. Perhaps he was too close to his subject. Perhaps the material was too wrenching and personal for him to write about it with the proper objectivity in the first person. What did he think? Was there a chance that a new approach might get him up and running again?
When I sent the letter, my trip to California was still six weeks off. Walker and I had already set the date and time of our dinner, he had furnished me with directions to his house, and I wasn’t anticipating another letter from him before my departure. A month went by, perhaps a little longer than that, and then, when I was least expecting it, he contacted me again. Not by mail this time, but by telephone. Years had passed since our last conversation, but I recognized his voice at once—and yet (how to express this?) it wasn’t quite the same voice I remembered, or else it was the same but with something added to it or subtracted from it, the same voice in a slightly different register: Walker at one remove from himself and the world, incapacitated, ill, speaking softly, slowly, with a barely perceptible flutter embedded in each word that escaped from his mouth, as if he were summoning all his strength to push the air up through his windpipe and into the phone.
Hi there, Jim, he said. I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner.
Not at all, I replied. We won’t be eating for another twenty or thirty minutes.
Good. It must be cocktail hour, then. Assuming you still drink.
I still drink. Which is exactly what we’re doing now. My wife and I just opened a bottle of wine, and we’re gradually swilling ourselves into a stupor as a chicken roasts in the oven.
The pleasures of domestic life.
And what about you? How are things on your end?
Couldn’t be better. A minor setback last month, but all is well again, and I’ve been working my head off. I wanted you to know that.
Working on the book?
Working on the book.
Which means you’re unstuck.
That’s why I called. To thank you for your last letter.
A new approach, then?
Yes, and it helped enormously.
This is good news.
I hope so. Rather brutal stuff, I’m afraid. Ugly things I haven’t had the heart or the will to look at in years, but I’m past it now and furiously mapping out the third chapter.
You mean the second chapter is finished?
A draft. I came to the end about ten days ago.
Why didn’t you send it to me?
I don’t know. Too nervous, I guess. Too unsure of myself.
Don’t be ridiculous.
I was thinking it might be better to wait until the whole thing was done before showing it to you.
No, no, send me the second part now. We can talk about it when I see you in Oakland next week.
After you read it, you might not want to come.
What are you talking about?
It’s disgusting, Jim. Every time I think about it, it makes me want to puke.
Send it anyway. No matter what my reaction is, I promise I won’t back out of the dinner. I want to see you again.
And I want to see you.
Good. Then it’s settled. The twenty-fifth at seven o’clock.
You’ve been very kind to me.
I haven’t done anything.
More than you know, good sir, more than you know.
Try to take care of yourself, all right?
I’ll do my best.
See you on the twenty-fifth, then.
Yes, the twenty-fifth. At the stroke of seven.
It was only after we hung up that I realized how unsettling this conversation had been for me. For one thing, I felt certain that Walker was lying about the state of his health—which was not good, not good at all, and no doubt growing worse by the minute—and while it was perfectly understandable that he should want to hide the truth from me, to deflect any impulse on my part to pity him by toughing it out with a stoic’s false cheerfulness (Couldn’t be better!), I nevertheless felt (and this is something of a paradox) a tone of self-pity running through his words, as if from the beginning to the end of our talk he had been fighting back tears, willing himself not to lose his grip and start weeping into the phone. His physical condition was already a cause for grave concern, but now I was just as worried about the condition of his mind. At certain points during our conversation, he had sounded like a man on the brink of a mental breakdown, a man holding himself together with nothing more than a few frayed pieces of string and wire. Was it possible that writing the new chapter of his book had depleted him to such an extent? Or was that only one element among several, among many? Walker was dying, after all, and perhaps the mere fact of his impending death, the corrosive horror of that impending death, had become too much for him to face anymore. And yet, the trembling, tearful catch in his voice could just as easily have been caused by an adverse reaction to a medicine he was taking, a side effect of some drug that was helping to keep him alive. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, but after the lucid, forthright depiction of himself in the first part of his book, along with the two articulate and courageous letters he had sent me, I found myself a bit thrown by how different he sounded in person. I wondered what it would be like to spend an evening in his company, enclosed in the private world of his dwindling, devastated self, and for the first time since accepting his invitation I was beginning to dread our encounter.
Two days after the phone call, the second part of his book arrived at my house in a FedEx envelope. A brief cover letter informed me that he had at last come up with a title, 1967, and that each chapter would be headed by the name of a season. The first part was Spring, the part I had just been sent was Summer, and the part he was working on now was Fall. I had already heard him describe the new pages to me over the phone, and with the words brutal, ugly, and disgusting still fresh in my mind, I braced myself for something unbearable, a story that would be even more harsh and troubling than Spring.
SUMMER
Spring turns into summer. For you it is the summer after the spring of Rudolf Born, but for the rest of the world it is the summer of the Six-Day War, the summer of race riots in more than one hundred American cities, the Summer of Love. You are twenty years old and have just finished your second year of college. When war breaks out in the Middle East, you think about joining the Israeli army and becoming a soldier, even though you are an avowed pacifist and have never shown any interest in Zionism, but before you can come to a decision and make any plans, the war suddenly ends, and you remain in New York.
Nevertheless, you feel a strong urge to quit the country, to be anywhe
re but where you are now, and therefore you have already gone to the dean of students and told him that you want to sign up for the Junior Year Abroad Program (after a lengthy consultation with your father, who has grudgingly given his approval). You have chosen Paris. You are not going there simply because you are fond of Paris, which you visited for the first time two summers ago, but because you are keen to perfect your French, which is adequate now but could be better. You are aware that Born is in Paris, or at least you assume he is, but you weigh the odds in your mind and figure your chances of running into him are slight. And if such an event should occur, you feel prepared to handle it in a manner appropriate to the circumstances. How difficult would it be to turn your head and walk on past him? That is what you tell yourself, in any case, but in your innermost heart of hearts you play out scenes in which you do not turn your head, in which you confront him in the middle of the street and strangle him to death with your bare hands.
You live in a two-bedroom apartment in a building on West 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Your roommate has just graduated and is leaving the city, and because you need someone else to share the place with you, you have already invited your sister to occupy the other bedroom—for, as luck would have it, her years at Vassar have come to an end, and she is about to begin graduate work in the English Department at Columbia. You and your sister have always been close—best friends, co-conspirators, obsessed guardians of your dead brother’s memory, fellow students of literature, confidants—and you are pleased with the arrangement. It is only for the summer, of course, since you will be winging off to Paris in September, but for part of June and all of July and August you will be together, dwelling under the same roof for the first time in years. After you are gone, your sister will take over the lease and find another person to live in the room you have vacated.