To the person who thinks with his head life is a comedy.

—Henry Miller

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“So you’ve sold out,” she said severely, biting down on a liverwurst sandwich while I poured a glass of domestic Chablis under the Virginia sky.

“You have to eat to live.” But this small sarcasm was ignored.

“If you could only realize the immorality of what you’re doing. No, I don’t mean you’re intentionally wicked—but like most Americans you’re a sleepwalker, just not seeing.”

“Not seeing what?”

“Well, for example, this terrible place you’re living in. I agree that people shouldn’t be moved around like chesspieces, and that urban renewal often creates more problems than it solves, but you’re intelligent, you’ve been to college, and you must know better.”

“It’s a complicated story,” I apologized.

_____________

In April of 1968 I descended into the bowels of the American economy. More precisely, one of many bowels, pipes, tubes, canals, ducts, etc. Once an economist, now I couldn’t count them all, let alone match up fittings.

I bought a small trailer and lived by myself in a trailer park sandwiched between a freeway overpass and the city of Alexandria garbage dump. There were eight other trailers in the park, and twenty-six people, the only inhabitants of a reclaimed swamp known locally, and in the bastard-Colonial style of the Old Dominion, as Difficult Run.

Unlike the average residential neighborhood, it had a life of its own. There was movement, as trailer trucks roared southward steadily through the night, and waste, an acrid smell of wet smoldering cardboard and rubber drifting gloomily over the landscape.

I had begun a new job as a machinist, rebuilding diesel engines, and spent the evening assembling data for my embryonic invention: a type of turbine (powered by an inert gas) for automobiles. Like a diligent packrat, I searched the Library of Congress and the Patent Office for design concepts, heat exchange rates, coefficients of expansion, properties of lubricants, etc.—winnowing out and streamlining down toward a final synthesis.

Once the design was finished, I would construct the first crude model myself, for only this could make it physically and mentally my own. I had been compartmentalized and specialized for so long in my old job that I felt I had to do everything myself.

A few years before, I had read in the literature of management an article on “Modern Warehousing Techniques” which matched the uneasy eclecticism of my own mental processes perfectly. It stressed: “Most importantly, pattern recognition, the ability to see systems of organization and revise them to your purposes.”

Though uncertain as to the results of this backyard inventing, I knew I was putting on intellectual muscle fast. Like an amateur bodybuilder before the mirror, I could glimpse, from time to time, what I was looking for:

It is a primary aim of industrial cybernetics to harness this ability of a system to teach itself optimum behavior. To do it, however, we must know how to design the system in the first place as a machine-for-teaching-itself. There must be exactly the right flow of information in the right places; rich interconnectivity; facilities for the growth of feedbacks . . . and so on.

—Cybernetics and Management, Stafford Beer

I even started a garden that summer—after years of living in furnished rooms—planting carrots, tomatoes, sweet corn, and sunflowers in a neat little 20-by-20-foot plot.

My neighbors, all blue-collar workers from small Southern towns with obscure names, were shy and suspicious, saying little except to comment that I “looked educated.” I kept a solemn face and nodded unhappily. A few were interested in my garden, which they claimed would never grow “in the hard soil up here.”

But I diligently searched for horse and cow manure among the disappearing farms at the edge of the suburbs and prepared a mulch from grass clippings. The sunflowers bloomed where feces had fallen, the tomatoes and carrots flourished, though my corn was eaten up by worms.

My problems were social ones.

In the beginning, I put on a clean shirt in the evenings and sat in workmen’s bars trying to pick up girls. When this failed, I resumed my old habits and, with coat, tie, and shave, drove across the Potomac to Georgetown and the Friday-night parties of the Young Republicans and the Saturday-night parties of the Young Democrats.

Here, finding either sex or companionship became an uphill struggle. The girls were somewhat shopworn, fitfully alternating between guilt and aggressiveness; they were either divorced or career girls for whom independence was turning sour. My 1949 Cadillac with the back seat missing did not promise security in an unstable world. Once I even rented a car and somehow began talking unhappily about a “serious relationship” to a girl who took me seriously. She only made me feel uncomfortable.

During my first few weeks at the machine shop, I had indulged my taste for symbolism—wearing a white sports shirt with a blue collar, then a chambray work shirt with a white collar sewn on. But no one ever noticed, and finally I threw both shirts away.

A day or so after I had let the serious girl off for the last time (“What’s so funny?” she kept asking tediously) and returned the car to the rental agency, I became extremely depressed.

“The brain is like a glass of milk,” I wrote in my journal, “it curdles when left too long outside.”

Exactly what this meant I didn’t know, but it seemed to describe my feelings. In moods like these, time stretches and unravels. Separate events blur into their backgrounds. The simplest, most mechanical acts become terribly laborious, and I can scarcely read or think at all.

When Thursday night rolled around, I knew that I could not finish out the week. I called in sick the next morning and slept most of the day.

By evening I felt better and began reading from an anthology of English and American poetry and drinking red wine from a gallon jug. My own private, sad little party.

What I like about poetry is that I can manipulate it, almost like a private, closed-circuit television system. I read a line at random and watched the shape form in my mind. Then it blurred and dissolved. Again, more wine, another line, another image.

“There will be time to murder and create,” Mr. Eliot snapped briskly.

“I can’t create,” I complained.

But a suitable victim squatted about a quarter-mile away.

It was the Sign of the Burgermaster, Inc. (“Your Highway Host From Coast to Coast”), the corporate trademark of a chain of drive-in restaurants, a pudgy, 12-foot hermaphrodite of plastic and neon—sausage-curl wig, knee breeches, frock coat and ruffles, gobbling an overloaded hamburger—it flashed on and off twenty-four hours a day, squatting obscenely with legs spread far apart as if inviting rape by either sex.

I cleaned and oiled my gun the next day, a scope-sighted 30-caliber bolt-action given to me as a present for graduating from high school, and very early Monday morning, before the sun rose, walked through the tall grass around the edge of the dump and sighted it from a junked car which served as a shooting platform.

I estimated the distance at more than 300 yards, adjusted the cross-hairs to maximum range and adjusted myself to the three-seconds-on, three-off blinking rhythm of the sign and fired.

Too low—though this was only guesswork. I slid the bolt back, lifted the muzzle a notch and fired again, and a third time. The sign stayed dark. Then I hid the gun under the broken back seat of the car and took a bus to work.

That evening workmen were bolting a matching piece of plastic on the sign’s crotch, and the police were asking questions.

“You know anything about this?” an elderly gray-haired cop was asking “Young Sam,” as the trailer people called him, the only teen-ager in the park. Sam was a pale, short skinny boy with a blond ducktail combed back in the style of the 50’s, one of the anachronisms of that place I could never understand.

“No sir!” he piped up shrilly. “Nobody around here did it! Ask them niggers ‘cross the river!”

“Son, we’re askin’ everybody,” the cop reproved tiredly.

But finally they left empty-handed, not even finding the gun. My relief was unexpectedly huge, and I lay awake most of the night giggling and chortling like a disturbed adolescent. I was a free man again—or so it seemed.

_____________

About a month and a half later, Sam and his grandfather, a leathery, shambling old man who worked as a night watchman somewhere in Alexandria, came to visit me early one evening. It was the middle of August, and I was sitting inside my trailer sweating over the design of turbine rotors.

“We’d like a talk with you,” the grandfather announced, as Sam stood by solemnly. “It’s important,” he added, seeing my reluctance.

So I unfolded my Sears Roebuck lawn chairs and set them up outside. The old man moved his chair almost as close to mine as possible and sat down.

“We were goin’ home anyway,” he began, “but I hate bein’ pushed.” He hawked and spat, then rambled on about his life in Alabama, how he had come North as a carpenter in the 50’s, how arthritis had crippled his hands, forcing him to become a night watchman, and how he had adopted Sam after the boy’s mother had run away.

Finally he came to the point, producing with a flourish a copy of the Alexandria newspaper. “Now you read,” he said, waving it under my nose.

“VANDALISM, GARBAGE GLUT TO FORCE OUT TRAILER RESIDENTS,” the headline proclaimed. I laughed out of reflex, and then—while Sam and his grandfather scowled in unison—read the rest of the story.

“An unfortunate act of vandalism to an Alexandria drive-in restaurant,” the article ran, “has led the City Council part of the way to evicting nine trailers apparently occupying city property illegally. The additional land will be used for much needed expansion of the dump, which has been severely overloaded in recent years.

“Since World War II, trailers have used city-owned land free of charge while acquiring water, electricity, and postal service,” it continued. “Embarrassed officials declined comment when asked whether permits had been granted and whether residents paid city taxes.”

“What can be done?”

“You might know.” This was stated as fact.

“Why me?” I pushed my chair back a little in an effort to disengage.

“You used to work for the government,” he said, clawing futilely at a cellophane-wrapped plug of tobacco. Then Sam, who sat silently hanging on every word, opened it for him.

“I don’t like to be forced,” I said finally, deeply sorry I had ever told him about myself.

His eyes narrowed with contempt as the plug settled in his cheek. “You stupid intellectual,” he was really saying, “what else do you want besides self-interest? Just do your job.”

I couldn’t answer that question. I owed money on both the Cadillac (which had needed a new engine, transmission, and paint job) and the trailer. I was in no shape to move—but maybe in five or six months.

“I’ll see what can be done.” It was the time-honored closer, and they went quickly with two solemn handshakes.

“In six months,” I promised myself, “I’ll tell them all to go to hell.”

_____________

I began looking for a part-time job to help pay off my bills—while my mind kept circling carefully around the problem, like a boxer, I imagined, feinting and shifting.

I first visited the Department of Property Inspection and Tax Assessment. Tired clerks with faces worn like old furniture. I could sense the situation before I’d said a word. The newspaper story had frightened them, and they were afraid to talk about the trailers.

The Mayor and most of the City Council were supposed to be on vacation. So I stormed upstairs to Central Records and, with the pretext of checking title deeds, began searching through ordinances and minutes of meetings.

But it wasn’t until driving home that evening that I grasped a workable idea. The area had never been zoned for private homes, yet there were a few scattered references in the minutes to residential use of the trailer park. If anyone could be put on the spot, it was the Zoning Commissioner, a powerful bureaucrat of long tenure and an ex officio member of the council.

The next morning, however, he too refused to see me after a secretary had relayed my identity and mission.

But now there was an opening. I wrote a long, carefully-worded letter pointing out in oblique bureaucratic language the “problem” that might be left on his doorstep as the result of “oversights,” hinted at “adjustments,” and left my work telephone number.

I read it over with smug self-congratulation, and, coasting on ego now, wrote another letter, this time complaining of the impending indignity of forced eviction, “the callous disregard for human beings,” and “bureaucratic indifference or harassment.” A copy went to each of the three local newspapers.

Sure enough. A week later came a call from the bureaucrat’s secretary, all arrogance and efficiency, saying he would visit the park at 10 A.M., September 10, to “inspect the premises.”

“No, no other time is satisfactory,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Bitch!” I shouted at the cylinder block I was drilling and strapped my goggles back on. But after ten minutes the telephone rang again. It was Washington’s liberal newspaper.

My letter had been bucked down through the hierarchy to some girl who talked as though she had just graduated from carrying coffee. “I don’t know much about urban renewal, Mr. Bentham, but I am quite concerned about the human interest side of the story.”

“You’ll do just fine.” I was beginning to feel good-humored again. “Could you come at ten in the morning, September 10? The Zoning Commissioner of Alexandria will be there.”

“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” she said, “just let me check my calendar. . . . Yes, I can make it,”

“Then your story will come straight from the horse’s mouth.” She didn’t laugh, and there was an awkward pause.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you, did I?” She seemed suddenly on the edge of flirtation. “Well, it’s Webster—Marjorie Webster.”

“Are you related to the dictionary-maker or the politician?” I had to find out whether she was intelligent.

“My grandmother says we’re related—very distantly—to Daniel Webster.”

“No kidding. I’m a big fan of his—especially of the writings on the need for political unity. Have you read them?”

“Are you a teacher?” she countered suspiciously. Then, “No, I read something in high school once, but I’ve forgotten the name.”

“I’m not a teacher.”

“I see. How interesting. Well, it will be nice to see you on the 10th.”

“Likewise, I’m sure. Goodbye.”

_____________

I should give Sam some credit—he did help me clean up the park that morning while the others faded away rapidly on some excuse or other. We cut down weeds and picked up litter until everything looked fairly clean, and then I sent him on his way. I was left alone with nine tin houses on wheels, some struggling crabgrass, and the “Wallace for President—’68” stickers that Sam had pasted on every trailer but mine.

I had considered peeling them off, but finally concluded that they could possibly help influence the Zoning Commissioner. Although the day was becoming hot, I wore a brown sports jacket over a white short-sleeved shirt—a deliberately ambiguous choice—and no tie.

He arrived almost precisely on time, driving down the dusty dirt road from the freeway to the dump in a dark green 1950 Plymouth sport coupe with a heavily repainted look. An old-school Southern politician? I remembered that Time magazine had once quoted the late Harry Byrd, Sr. as saying that he used to drive his Chevys until they “plumb wore out.”

He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with rimless glasses, of willowy build but with a slight pot, and he was wearing slacks and a shirt like mine.

“I’m the Zoning Commissioner,” he said brusquely, ignoring my proffered handshake and punctuating his sentence with a slam of the car door.

“I’m Jerry Bentham. Would you—”

“Look, I’m a busy man.” He walked past me and began inspecting the first trailer, mumbling something about “transients.”

“I asked for—”

“If the city says move, you have to move.” And then, with the abrupt change of pace that politicians accomplish so easily, “How much time do you need?”

“Six months.”

“Six months!” He was genuinely surprised. “It takes this Council six months to put paper in the Jiffy Johns. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I guess not.”

“Well, you seem like a nice kid so let me give you some advice.” He turned back toward his car, got in and started the engine. “You keep this place nice and neat and call the Health Inspector and ask him to come by and look around. He can’t turn you down—that’s the law. ‘Course, if you’re getting out in six months—it doesn’t matter. Six months . . . horseshit!” He gunned the accelerator, the old car bucked and lumped, and with what little speed it could muster, went charging up the road.

The whole transaction had taken around five minutes.

Disgusted at my political ineptitude, I dragged out a lawn chair, took off my jacket, and sat in the sun, brooding disconsolately.

You can’t learn everything from print, I told myself reasonably. The really important things people never write down, and you can only learn them through word of mouth or personal experience.

But, reasonable as this was, I knew I could never accept it. Somewhere there was a formula, a key that opened everything.

And then up drove Marjorie Webster.

“Am I late?” she shouted. A little blonde with a tense white face behind big sunglasses, riding in a red Austin-Healy Sprite.

“He left just a minute ago.”

“Oh dear! That green car?”

“Yes.”

She considered a minute and then got out. Good slim legs, but with just a trace of varicosity on the ankles. And a steno pad—Jesus Christ! Even television reporters don’t use steno pads. I was insulted that my case was considered so inconsequential as to deserve such an amateur.

“What did you two decide?” she asked.

“Everything’s been put off for the next six months. By then you might have a story.”

“Well, I could write a feature story now, possibly for the Sunday edition,” she said.

I shrugged.

“You know what I’d like to do,” she resumed brightly. “I could interview you now, leaving the date and type of story open. A great deal would depend on your judgment, of course.”

“Whatever you like.”

“Well, why don’t we get started? Do you have another chair?”

And we sat down under the slowly intensifying morning sun.

“As I told you before, I’m interested in the human-interest angle.” She removed her sunglasses to—I suppose—look more human. “Not courts, not laws, nor even Zoning Commissioners, but people—how they really think and feel. I. . . .”

Her eyes had found, for the first time, one of the Wallace stickers. And from where she sat, four others were visible. Formerly indifferent, I suddenly found myself enjoying her middle-class discomfort.

And, feeling mean, I forced her to meet my eyes.

“Are those on every trailer?” she asked sharply.

“Except mine.”

“Oh, then you’re not—”

“I just don’t care,” I said, studying her curiously.

“Well, I do care very much!” she exclaimed shrilly. “I care about what’s happening to this country. Look at Chicago the riots—”

“Would you like something to drink?” I interrupted. Jeremiads like these bother me. “I have Cokes, ginger ale, iced tea, beer, wine—a very good white wine. I might have quinine water for gin and tonics. No, it’s not hot enough for gin and tonics. I’ll get some wine.” Without waiting for an answer, I went into the trailer and poured two glasses of Chablis.

When I came out, she had composed herself. She accepted the wine, and we sat silently for a while.

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” she said finally.

I said nothing.

“Well, all right, if it’s some kind of a game, you’ve won, if it makes you feel any better,” she persisted. “Anyway, I want to ask you a question.”

“Yes?”

“Do you hate me because I’m a woman or because I’m a liberal?”

That didn’t make sense. And anyway, I’m apolitical.

“I don’t hate you at all,” I said quickly. “But listen, it’s past eleven o’clock, and I didn’t eat breakfast, so that means it’s time for lunch. Would you like a sandwich?”

“It is late,” she said noncommittally.

“Liverwurst with lettuce and tomato? Or head cheese? I’ve got some bologna too, but I wouldn’t vouch for it. You see, I have this craving for glandular meats—I rarely eat any other type, except perhaps a hamburger from time to time.”

“Liverwurst will be fine,” she said, frowning uncertainly.

“Mustard or mayonnaise?”

“Mustard.”

And so we sat, ate, and argued. Marjorie was a graduate of the New England College for Women, she was quick to tell me, where she had majored in political science and had been “exposed to a broad diversity of ideas and opinions—that’s the essence of a liberal education, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“Of course it is! But you’ve been to college,” she said.

“True.”

“Graduate?”

“Yes.”

“You never told me what it is you do.”

“I rebuild diesel engines.”

“Then you’re an engineer.”

“No.”

“Well, in any case, your problem is crystal clear to me. Your education has overstressed the scientific and technical aspects, leaving no room for the humanistic values.”

“What values?”

“Humanistic—having to do with human beings.”

“Which are?”

“Do you need to have everything explained?”

“Probably so,” I replied, not expecting an answer. The day was wearing on, and there was no money in sitting around. But, surprisingly, she tried to answer my question.

“First of all,” she began, “there are many who might disagree, but I think religious values are very important. Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, what do you believe in?”

She seemed more friend than foe at the moment. But I hesitated to tell her about myself, though I knew it wouldn’t make any real difference. I had the safety of knowing I was unique, unbelievable, and consequently unpublishable.

“The Digestive Process,” I replied.

She only stared blankly in response. We were in for a long afternoon.

_____________

The Centrists

America needs to hear the vital voices of the broad and vital center. The center is under savage attack. It must be held at all costs.

—Richard M. Nixon, 1968

I can barely remember beginning life as an orphan.

My first memory is of a large fan, slowly and ineffectively churning through the summer heat, in the emergency room of the Plattsburgh General Hospital in upstate New York.

My parents had died that day, July 21, 1944, a Sunday, after their car had skidded on wet pavement during a sudden rainstorm, then somehow leaped a retaining wall on a twisting, downhill road going into Plattsburgh. I still carry in my wallet the newspaper clipping describing the accident, embalmed in a special plastic guaranteed to protect against ultraviolet light.

I had been riding in the back seat at the time, and my only injury was an ear lacerated by an open ashtray on the armrest, leaving me in adult life with one lobe lower than the other.

I was almost five then, but cannot remember anything more until almost a year later. About a week after the accident, my father’s cousin, Matthew Bentham, together with his wife Hortense, arrived in Plattsburgh, took charge of my father’s estate, and became my legal guardian.

After the funeral, the three of us left for their home in Centropolis, a town of about 15,000 in eastern Kansas located on the Republican River at the junction of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad and the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (M-K-T) Line.

_____________

The next time you look at a map of the United States, consider Kansas.

It has what the noted graphic designer and theorist Laslaw Molybdenum called “classic proportions, a rectangle twice as wide as it is high, conforming to the Golden Rule of Sectionality.” The Missouri River nibbles away the northeast corner, a light touch of asymmetry in this flat land, but elsewhere the Euclidean grid of highways and county lines is hardly ever bent or broken.

The Benthams have lived in Kansas for five generations, moving west in 1857 when the Reverend Jeremiah Bentham, a Methodist minister in a small Massachusetts town, suddenly and unaccountably began gathering a traveling party after more than forty years of uneventful preaching and sermonizing. Jeremiah, despite his name, was a congenital optimist, booster, and backslapper, and easily organized a small clan of relatives and followers around him.

They began in the spring, traveling in easy, deliberate stages, and by November of that year, the little band of about thirty had arrived in Kansas City, where they spent the winter.

Spring came, and the tired old man (he was seventy-four), reinvigorated by rumors that the Santa Fe Railroad was planning to build a line across the Republican River, gathered his followers around him once more. Nearly 100 miles out of Kansas City, they reached the river, and here the lightning struck. I quote from the official program of the Centropolis Centennial, which I had to attend in 1958:

When first sighted by the Reverend Bentham on that spring of 1858, our fair city was then a beautiful, grassy, nearly level expanse covering about three square miles. It was bounded on the north by the Republican River and on the south by a line of surveyors’ stakes marking the yet unfinished Santa Fe line to Dodge City.

In places, the beauty of primitive Kansas may be seen still in an almost unimpaired state. The flinty residual soil left by the Great Glacial Period is clothed by a wealth of bluestem grass which in the spring is decorated by numerous species of wild flowers. The waving herbiage and the infinite diversity of contour of the gently rolling hills terraced by escarpments of limestone strata, best displayed by the lengthened shadows of early morning or toward nightfall, constitute a scene of beauty of which the eye never tires.

In the Reverend Bentham’s time the river bottom presented beauty of another type. The watercourses were bordered by timber, as the forest trees of the East struggled for dominance with the prairie grass of the West. On the adjacent flat land grass grew far more luxuriantly than on the uplands. Flowers of many species also occurred abundantly in their season.

When he came upon this inspiring vista, the Reverend Bentham sank to his knees and offered his thanks to the Lord for their safe journey.

Then he rose to his feet, and lifting above his head the pruning hook he carried in place of a staff, symbolizing soil fertility, proclaimed in sonorous Latin—for he knew no Greek—“Hicest centrum” (Here is the center) and thrust it into the ground. The new settlers then prayed that their land would prove fertile, and that abundance would greet their first harvest.

The crops planted that year succeeded, but in another respect the Reverend’s hopes were bitterly disappointed.

He had named his city Centropolis, believing that the United States Territorial Commission would make Kansas a square state, fixing the western boundary at the 6th meridian of longitude and giving all the rest of present Kansas and eastern Colorado “back to the Indians.”

The site he had chosen was only 15 miles from the geographic center of the United States, and the proposed boundary would place it in the exact center of the new state as well.

But in 1860 the boundaries were finally set by the Territorial Commission, then meeting in Washington, D.C., and, much to the Reverend’s disgust, the western border was pushed well into Colorado Territory. The old man, ailing and near death, gathered the Bentham family around him for the last time and made all members swear an oath never to return to the politically corrupt and decadent East. He died soon afterward, leaving a family tradition.

My father was the only one who disobeyed. In the 30’s a few relatives, hard pressed by the Depression, sold their property and moved to California. This was resented, but they could claim—belatedly—that they were pioneers.

Gerald, as my father was always called, presented a more difficult problem. After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1937, he told the family he wanted to attend Columbia University Law School.

Utter dismay resulted at first. Gerald had always been the family favorite. Tall, slender, and fair-haired, with the closely-set eyes and aquiline nose that had become, since Jeremiah, almost Bentham trademarks, he was an excellent student and had won letters in basketball and track. Law school at Kansas or Missouri, then a junior partnership in my great-uncle’s law firm, had been assumed from the start.

But the longer the family tried to dissuade him, the more obstinate he became, offering to pay the additional expenses out of his savings, or the entire tuition plus room and board if it came to that.

Money was not really a problem, however. My father’s family had always been skillful, in a conservative way, with money, maximizing gains and minimizing losses. They had always invested only in commercial property and better quality home mortgages and were lucky enough to be only slightly scratched by the Depression. The funds were there, and, seeing his determination, they gave in grumblingly, telling each other that in three years’ time he would be “back home where he belonged.”

_____________

His first year passed uneventfully. That summer, as he had since age ten, he clerked diligently at my grandfather’s grocery store. During the evenings he listened to my great-uncle curse “Roosevelt and all his tribe” and blame the Depression on the shiftless and the faint of heart.

That fall a letter came. He was “head over heels in love with the most intellectually brilliant woman I’ve ever met.” Another letter—they were engaged and he had bought her a “diamond as big as the Ritz” with all his savings. Then they came home together for the Christmas vacation.

Her name was Laura Hegel, and she was an instructor in philosophy at Barnard College. Brilliant she indeed was, the family readily agreed. But not the right sort of girl for Gerald—oh no!

When she first met my father, Laura was thirty-four, a widow. Her first husband had died a decade before in her native Swabia, and she had used part of the proceeds from his estate to book passage to America, “the land of the future,” as she called it.

Arriving in Boston, she proceeded directly to Cambridge where she supported herself by tutoring German, Latin, and Greek, and took classes at the Harvard Graduate School. She was, she told the family, the first woman ever to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard.

And, of course, they hated her from the start. Bentham women had always been soft-spoken and pious, the upholders of domesticity and religion. Laura completely disregarded the former and paid lip service to the latter, they felt.

“A real snake, that woman!” Matthew once recalled vehemently. “She’d argue all sides of any question. If you were a Republican, she’d pretend to be a Democrat, and vicey versey. Why, one time she said she was an atheist—but then everybody was gettin’ hot under the collar—so she turned around and used the same argument to prove she believed in God. Poor Gerald just didn’t stand a chance.”

Poor Gerald. The photographs my parents left behind seem to echo the family’s dismay. My father (at Laura’s insistence I was given the middle name of Detritus, “to avoid calling the boy a Junior”), six feet two inches, slender and handsome, seems embarrassed and ineffectual. Then my mother, nearly a foot shorter, sallow and stocky, with jet black hair in a severe academic bun. Sometimes she is smiling and sometimes scowling, but she dominates every picture.

The Christmas vacation ended inconclusively. After Gerald and Laura took the train back to New York, my great-uncle, who had become the leader of the opposition, hired a private detective to investigate her background. The claims she had made about herself checked out, except that Harvard class records showed several other women had received doctorates in philosophy before her. “But we didn’t say anything to Gerald, ’cause we knew she had the brains to wiggle out of that,” Matthew told me much later.

Stubbornly, the family hired another detective, and this one reported back a rumor that Laura, during her student days in Cambridge, had had a child. Authentic or not, it was enough for my great-uncle. He put through a call to Gerald immediately.

They were all too late. My parents had been married a few weeks before and were spending their honeymoon of a week’s semester break in a friend’s cottage on Staten Island—a place, I was told, synonymous with immorality.

The record shows clearly, I want to add, that I was not born until the “decent interval” of ten months later. But by that time my father was disinherited, several times over, by various members of the family.

_____________

The Philosophic Background

Man’s a mosaic, but life is linear.

—Galaxy S. Gutenberg

“And then what happened?” Marjorie asked.

“It was the Depression, and they had practically no money. My father had to leave law school, but then somehow found a job teaching high-school English and biology in Plattsburgh. I don’t know whether he had a certificate or not; there aren’t many records left. Anyway, they were struggling, like everyone else at the time.”

“It’s truly sad,” she empathized. “When I read books of that period—novels like Grapes of Wrath—I can’t help but feel compassion. It should be enough to make a liberal out of even the most hard-hearted person.”

“Now wait a minute,” I protested, “As a liberal you don’t feel much compassion for the people who live in these trailers. And they’re quite similar to the Okies and Arkies, but they have a little more money—that’s all.”

“No,” she replied firmly, “they are not the same people at all. They’ve been brutalized by technology.”

“And what’s so bad about technology?”

“It brutalizes people!”

I said nothing and checked my watch. We had come to another conversational impasse.

“You were about to explain your philosophy,” she persisted.

“I am.”

“But what you’ve really told me is just a small part of your life story.”

“I can only develop ideas sequentially and in context,” I replied irritably.

“O.K.—just tell me what you mean by the ‘Digestive Process,’ and I’ll go away.” She was laughing at me.

“Somewhere near the bottom of an orange crate inside my trailer is a piece of paper with seven ideas on it. Wait a minute, and I can work from that.”

“Are they developed sequentially and in context?” She was still teasing.

“Yes.”

_____________

“One) One of my few distinct memories of early childhood was a map which Matthew had framed and hung in the living room. Roughly 3 by 5 feet, perhaps larger, it was titled “The Principal Rail Lines and Public Highways of the United States.” The railroads were in red, if I recall correctly, and the highways in blue. I always imagined they were the arteries and veins of some huge animal, an idea encouraged by Matthew’s constant references to Kansas as the ‘heart of the nation,’ to Chicago as the ‘stomach,’ and to New York (always scornfully) as the ‘brains.’ The entire country, it seemed natural to assume, was a Superorganism with a life of its own.

“2) Matthew and Hortense did not read books—their library consisted of a Bible, some Methodist hymnals, and several years of the Reader’s Digest. I used to explore my parents’ books, which had never been unpacked, but were kept in the attic in nine large trunks. While married, they seemed to have separately pursued their own interests, as each book was neatly labeled with one or the other’s name. Laura’s philosophy and history were dry and unintelligible, but my father’s tastes in literature and biology were much more appealing. And there was one book, Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant, a description of termite colonies, which dazzled my twelve-year-old mind completely. For example, this excerpt:

The workers alone are able to eat and digest. They are, as it were, the collective stomach and belly of the population. When a termite of whatsoever class feels hungry, it taps a passing worker with its antenna. If the suppliant is very young, capable of becoming a king, a queen, or a winged termite, the worker immediately gives it whatever it may have in its stomach. If the petitioner is an adult, the worker turns tail and generously proffers the contents of its intestine.

Here we have obviously an absolute communism, a communism of the oesophagus and the bowels, a collective coprophagy. In this flourishing and sinister republic, no loss is permitted of anything that, from an economic point of view, realizes the sordid ideal that nature seems to put before us. If a termite happens to change its skin, the slough is immediately devoured. Should one die—worker, king, queen, or warrior—the corpse is forthwith eaten up by the survivors. There is no waste; the clearance is automatic, and always profitable: everything is good, nothing lies about, everything is edible, everything is cellulose, and the material is used almost indefinitely over and over again. Moreover, excrement is the raw material, so to speak, of all their activities, including, as we have just seen, nutrition.

. . . one might say that they are first and foremost transcendental chemists whose learning has triumphed over every prejudice, every aversion, who have attained the serene conviction that nothing in nature is repugnant, that all can be reduced to a few simple bodies, chemically indifferent, clean and pure.

. . . all is darkness: underground tyranny, cruelty, sordid, filthy avarice, the atmosphere of the convict cell, the penal settlement and the charnel house; but also, at the summit, a whole-hearted, heroic, deliberate, and intelligent sacrifice to an idea or an instinct—the name matters little, the results are the same—a sacrifice that is without limit and almost infinite; and this must be held to compensate for what merely seems beautiful. It brings the victims nearer to ourselves, it makes them almost our brothers; and, from certain points of view, causes these wretched insects, more than the bee or any other living creature on earth, to become the heralds, perhaps the precursors, of our own destiny.

“3) Maeterlinck’s book influenced me more profoundly than anything else I’ve ever read. ‘Why?’ was my basic question, and ‘Will this prophecy come true for human beings?’ was its corollary. Throughout my teen-age years I read every book I could find on insects.

“But it was a long time—not until my senior year of high school—before I found even a tentative answer to my first question.

“The termites had, in the distant past, one geneticist claimed, been far more individualistic. They had come to their present state through regressive evolution—i.e., evolution running backwards.

“Regressive evolution occurs when the individual organism relinquishes some of its independence and freedom to become a more closely cooperating member of a group. Long before, a decision had somehow been made that the termites would band together and devour each other’s excrement instead of chewing their separate paths through the dead wood of the world. And so the individual termites of all social classes had degenerated in size, strength, and physical complexity—this was attested by fossil records.

“4) As a result of these and other influences, I had become completely radicalized by the time I arrived in college. But the times (it was the late 50’s) were such that I could not—and still can’t, for that matter—find a political home. Disdaining Eisenhower and Stevenson as equally contemptible conformists, I liked the beards and motorcycles of the Beat Generation as well as the sarcasm and invective of William F. Buckley, Jr. and the National Review. Individualism was absolutely good, and conformity was absolutely bad. And so I grew a beard, wore a denim jacket, and rode a motorcycle—read Jack Kerouac and complained about ‘creeping socialism’ and the ‘welfare state.’ I remember that, in my sophomore year, I was one of the founding members of the local chapter of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, a politically conservative student group. A few months later, the rest of them threw me out, claiming I was a ‘Marxist malcontent.’

“In a peculiar way, they were right, although the object of my discontent was Marx himself. Let me explain.

“It was during the first semester that I changed my major from English to economics, inspired by a remarkable definition in my textbook, Paul Samuelson’s Economics: An Introductory Analysis. He says:

Economics is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society.

“This cut into life itself, far deeper than anything I’d found in literature. Compared with Samuelson, Hemingway and Sartre seemed amateurish tumblers. My path was clear: I would major in economics and do graduate work at the University of Chicago.

“But as the academic year wore on, I became increasingly depressed. Charts, graphs, tables, numbers—nothing that really meant anything, not to me at any rate. Samuelson’s book, after that wonderful introduction, was a washout and an evasion, but the good economists, like Milton Friedman and George Stigler, were too mathematical for me to understand.

“5) Looking back through the history of economics on my own, I began reading Marx’s work and the accompanying commentary. At the very core of Marxist philosophy, one scholar implied, was Ludwig Feuerbach’s slogan: ‘Der Mensch ist, was er isst’ (You are what you eat). The whole structure of economic determinism seemed to rest on man’s preference for eating—although the slogan itself had long since been prostituted into a puff for nutrition education.

“6) But not only was Marx’s emphasis on communal activity anathema to me—his economic predictions on the overthrow of the bourgeosie had turned out wrong as well. Even then it was obvious that blue-collar workers were becoming more politically conservative than the hordes of white-collar pencil pushers who thought they ran everything.

“But if man was not what he ate, what was he?

“I did not have far to look. Coming up rapidly on the academic horizon of that time were reports of a fundamental economic/psychological sickness. Whether termed the ‘Affluent Society’ or the ‘Excremental Vision,’ the malady was uniform: a spiritually sick condition in which men lust for possessions and despise them at the same time. The sickness (‘You are what you excrete’) threatened the long-running love affair between men and things—and might even degrade humans into termites after all.

“As a conservative, my mission was clear. I would have to save materialism from destroying itself. But, as I’ll explain further along, I later lost interest in politics.

“7) Unfortunately, we must proceed ahead from this point by faith alone and as individuals. Society will probably never confront the basic issue, but will evade it through dodges such as—”

_____________

“Pardon me,” Marjorie interrupted restlessly, “explain please—just what is the basic issue?”

“Creativity versus Crap.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“. . . such as wars and swindles. All right, I mentioned faith. Che Guevara said that a man must find himself ‘mirrored’ in the work that he does. But this is only part of the truth—I finally came to feel that a man must also find himself in things—as well as in the process of possessing, consuming, and creating.

“Possession, Consumption, Creation—these three words define the universe! For that’s the way the brain works; you acquire experience—Possession; you think about it—Consumption; and you decide what you’re going to do with it—Creation.

“This is what I call the Digestive Process,” I concluded, a little breathlessly. “And that’s why there’s such a thin line between Creativity and Crap.”

She neither smiled nor frowned, and I continued.

“So here I am in this trailer surrounded by hillbillies. That doesn’t bother me—I’m getting out soon. The ability to move—that’s what’s important.

“My job isn’t much, but I can do things with the skill I’ve learned. I’m designing an engine that’s more efficient and almost pollution-free. I plan on getting a woodworking lathe so that I can turn wood as well as metal. Then I’ll design furniture. I may even take advantage of the tax system and go into business for myself—souping up engines for hot rods, that’s creative to a degree. Or making metal sculpture. Or furniture.

“But it’s got to be something I like, you understand. Otherwise, it’s just like working for wages in a dull job all over again—churning out shit to help plants grow. Most people don’t know what they want—the hell with them. But I do, and I’m going to do it.”

We were silent a long time, while I tried tiredly to remember everything I’d said—to improve on it for next time.

“It all seems a little selfish,” she observed timidly.

But when I asked if I could see her again, she agreed—as I knew she would.