Returning, p.31
Returning, page 31
Not long after the miraculously candid article was posted on the bulletin board at Country Day, I found out where the Vieux Carre Courier’s office was, worked up my courage, and went there. The office was on the second floor of an ancient mustard-yellow building at the back of the French Quarter, beyond the usual ambit of tourists. I walked up a long, steep, barren flight of stairs and found myself in a large, shabby open room, full of boxes and stacks of paper, where seven or eight people in their twenties were working at desks. I asked to see the editor, and then asked for a reporting assignment. We wound up making a deal: in turn for being allowed to try being a reporter for the Courier, I would agree also to go to the printer every week, load up the Courier’s Datsun station wagon with stacks of the new issue, drive around the French Quarter unloading the previous week’s paper and containers full of quarters from coin boxes and refilling them with this week’s edition, and bring the returned papers and a cloth sack full of quarters back to the office.
That was the beginning of my real life. I hadn’t encountered Quentin Compson yet either, but I definitely did not hate the South, and I especially didn’t hate New Orleans. I wanted to find a different way of being there than the way that Quercus represented. The Courier was different. The 1960s arrived late in New Orleans; this was probably the height of it, in 1972. The French Quarter was home to underground newspapers, head shops, teenagers who had run away from home, vegetarian restaurants. The Courier’s staff was a kind of squabbling family, more or less located within the local bohemia, such as it was: self-consciously Southern writers, gay activists (as opposed to the handful of undoubtedly gay “confirmed bachelors” who were part of my parents’ social circle), antidevelopment preservationists, hippies, jazz historians, convivial drunks, nude-rendering painters and photographers.
That part of it wasn’t consistent with everything that happened to me afterward in journalism, but what was consistent was that we got to gossip and complain relentlessly, something frowned upon at Quercus, and that it was our job to be actively curious to the point of intrusion—to know, or try to know, or pretend to know, everything that everybody in the city was up to. How did real-estate interests get permission to build incongruously tall buildings in the French Quarter? Who’d set a fire, killing dozens, in a gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge? Where were there vestiges of the Jim Crow system, a few years after it had officially ended? The thick fog of politeness, of surface-dwelling conviviality, of things unspoken, that usually settled itself over everything had lifted. The second job I acquired during this period, interviewing the elderly veterans of The Double Dealer, led me to a man named William B. Wisdom—scion of one of the leading antebellum sugarcane plantation families and a collector of material about the Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. He wore a white linen suit and had a similarly white goatee. A few days after I had interviewed him, he called me and asked whether I was the same person whose byline he’d seen in the Vieux Carre Courier. Yes. “Son,” he said, in his elegant Southern accent, “I knew your grandfather. I know your father.” Pause. He had registered that what, to his mind, the Lemanns represented in New Orleans and what the Courier represented were completely inconsistent. “Son, you are a traitor to your class.” Exactly.
It wound up that most of my friendships, most of my romances, most of my decisions about where to live, and most of what I undertook to learn about have been connected to journalism. Just about every serious undertaking has been end-point punctuated by my publishing something. Over the years I moved from working for outsider publications to working for established ones. I began to spend my time with people who were like secular high priests, or maybe even court Jews, in the sense that we were not formally, securely in control of anything, but we knew what was going on, we were able to get in touch with anybody who was important, and we were confident about our ability to dispense wisdom on every conceivable matter. We had inside information about who was going to get which major job, and confident opinions about what course they should follow once they got it. We had the self-conferred right to decide what books and ideas mattered and which did not. We were unconstrained, at least consciously, by having a point of view particular to our circumstances or by having to dwell in the mundaneness, the quotidian detail, of making everyday things work properly. As journalists we were, as I was raised to be, a religion (of the public interest), not a race (of people who belonged to an inescapably delimited subcategory of humanity). This way of defining oneself was supposed to fulfill every need, every doubt, every longing, and for a long time it did.
In college I had my first encounters with Jews from the American Jewish mainstream. Harvard had changed from the time when Father was there. There was never a press release to announce it, but it was clear that the Jewish quota was gone. The on dit was that Harvard in the 1970s was one-third Jewish; the grandchildren of Jews who’d fled Eastern European pogroms and wound up in America’s urban slums and whose children had miraculously progressed to middle-class suburban neighborhoods were now possibly closer to being the typical Harvard student than were high-Protestant graduates of New England boarding schools. All these years later, it strikes me that many of my Jewish classmates were overconfident that their new acceptance was complete and permanent. Somehow being a Jew in the wider world, which had always been complicated, was going to be uncomplicated from now on. It looked as if all the old barriers had fallen, without any modulating or disguising of one’s Jewish identity being part of the bargain. Even Harvard’s most elite undergraduate social club, the Porcellian, which always occupied a large space in Father’s mind, accepted one of my classmates as its first Jewish member.
Today, I think of the way I was brought up as a kind of advantage-in-reverse, because it taught me never to be completely sanguine in my estimate of how much the rest of the world loved us, but back then, encountering pure Jewish confidence for the first time was intoxicating. I found that I felt unaccountably comfortable around Jews, even though I’d been raised to feel uncomfortable, unless they were New Orleans Reform Jews of a kind it was difficult to find anywhere else. Jews were lively, funny, smart, voluble. They were free to talk—constantly, obsessively—about being Jewish, in ways that I might have wanted to, because I thought about it, but that felt dangerous in our house in New Orleans. They seemed to lack the earnestness that so many other people had. They came at life from an oblique angle. They didn’t obediently accept situations as they were presented.
Feeling comfortable wasn’t the same as simply joining up, though. I told people I was Jewish only sometimes, and when I did, they often seemed surprised. I didn’t fit their idea of what Jews were like. When one went beyond their manner and got into specifics, my Jewish friends were a font of unfamiliar touch-points. I didn’t know any Yiddish expressions, even oy. I had never eaten at a delicatessen. I had never lit Hanukkah candles. I wasn’t aware of knowing anybody who had ever been to Israel. I had never been to a bar mitzvah, and I was mystified by some of my Jewish friends’ custom of calling each other by the Hebrew names used at their bar mitzvahs—Shmuel ben Yitzak, and so on. One of these people, someone whose parents had fled Europe in the 1930s, used to greet me with a taunt: “Here comes Finzi-Contini.” This was a reference to the Italian novel (published in 1962) and film (released in 1970) about an assimilated, well-connected Jewish family that thinks it’s safe, but winds up being deported along with all the other Jews. I was beginning to get the picture that Jews like us, German Jews, had a lot to answer for, in the minds of the American Jewish majority—we had not welcomed the arrival of the Eastern European Jews, and most of us had been actively anti-Zionist, even during the period when the establishment of the state of Israel was an urgent necessity. At that moment, the last thing I wanted to do was watch The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. I didn’t want to see my family attacked, via comparison to a similar family. When I finally did watch it, not so long ago, I was surprised to see a scene where the Finzi-Continis are conducting a solemn and joyful Passover seder, wearing kippot. We’d never have done that.
Once, I remember, Harvard’s Polish-born, kippah-wearing Hillel rabbi, Ben-Zion Gold, a grave-looking man who was the only member of his family not to have been murdered by the Nazis, appeared in the newsroom of The Harvard Crimson, where I was usually to be found, and asked for me. Somebody must have tipped him off. He asked me if I wanted to come to services. I said I was too busy being a student journalist, but that was just an excuse. The picture his invitation conjured up was of students with whom I had nothing in common, doing things (like praying in Hebrew) that I didn’t know how to do, and probably also talking about Israel. It felt as if I would be out of my depth, and I also had a deeply bred-in instinct that if I were the kind of person who was a regular at Hillel, it would somehow disqualify me from whatever it was that I wanted to do that was not explicitly Jewish—not just at Harvard’s social clubs, but even at the Crimson.
Another time, a younger friend of Pop, a federal judge named Charles Wyzanski, an elegant, magpie-bright man who walked around Cambridge in a bespoke suit and a fedora, carrying a polished wooden walking stick that, according to Father, had once belonged to Lord Byron, turned up in the Crimson newsroom and invited me to lunch at his house. That was more like it. There, I heard the kind of confidential talk about the doings of prominent people that used to fill Pop’s correspondence, and that represented, roughly speaking, the world that my Harvard friends and I aspired to enter. I found out later that Judge Wyzanski’s wife, Gisela Warburg, of the famous banking family, was a German-born refugee from the Nazis and a prominent Zionist, but I don’t remember any of that coming up at the lunch—instead, what I left with was a sense of the allure of prominence, of insiderness, that would have stood in contrast to what I imagined that being in the overtly Jewish environment of Hillel represented.
I remember once getting a call from Mother in the Crimson newsroom. I was sitting at a desk surrounded by other people at other desks, so they could hear only my end of the conversation, which covered (let’s say) whatever was the latest controversy in the literary and intellectual world, how my classical archaeology course was going, my reaction to her armchair-psychological analysis of the travails of this or that New Orleans family, and what I thought of some mid-1970s movie of the moment that everybody was talking about—Nashville? Last Tango in Paris? After I’d hung up, a Jewish friend asked me who I’d been talking to. My mother. Your mother? The person asking me couldn’t believe it. No badgering, no guilt, no irrational fears, just a witty, emotionally contained adult conversation? Was such a thing possible?
It was, but at the same time Mother had become an ardent advocate of my taking up my destined place at Monroe & Lemann. I think this represented some combination of trying to please Father by being more aggressive than he’d want to be in stating their shared view that I should come home, and the ingrained conviction of middle-class Jewish parents of her generation (a category that included her but not Father) that their children should become lawyers or doctors, because anything else was either too risky or not open to them. After they both had died, I came across a letter Mother had written me after I’d told her I had gotten a postgraduation job at a new, low-paying liberal political magazine in Washington that was becoming known for launching promising careers in journalism. Mother must have thought better than to send me the letter, or else why would it have been among her things? “I feel like the victim of an anti-personnel bomb,” she wrote. “Congratulations on the high-paying job. But move out, whoosh. I feel a great sense of loss. Perhaps it is strange that a mother should enjoy the presence in the menage of her 20-year-old son but indeed I do and indeed I will feel deprived if you live elsewhere. Of course I will let you and accept it but it is a wound.” Even now, I feel a stab as I read this, a feeling that I had betrayed her and Father by choosing to leave New Orleans. But I can see that there may also have been some impulse on Mother’s part, the impulse that left the letter unmailed, not to try to stop me from living the life she’d chosen, and may have regretted choosing.
The founder, owner, and editor of the magazine, the Washington Monthly, was Charlie Peters, who had been a young politician in West Virginia, joined John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, come to Washington to work in the Kennedy administration, and then started the magazine. Officially, and up to a point actually, we were devoted to evaluating the effectiveness of government programs, but the charge of working there came from believing that from our small, shabby, hard-up offices we were going to be able to change the course of history. Isn’t that the eternal dream of people who do this kind of work? People who wrote for us would get influential government jobs. Our staff members would go on to run major institutions in journalism. We belonged, I suppose, to the later and more establishment-oriented cohort of the sixties generation. Journalists had recently toppled the President of the United States; now we would help to devise a new liberal order, harnessing the wild energies of the civil rights and antiwar movements to replace the aging political system represented by the New Deal.
I suppose Charlie was my Willie Stark, powerful to the point of being dominating by force of personality, which is especially impressive in somebody who isn’t actually powerful. He was a small, round, hard-drinking man who spoke in an intimate Southern accent and had an uncanny ability to charm people, especially young people, by making them believe they had joined a sacred cause. He earned the adoration of his staff partly through his limitless interest in custom-tailoring the big futures we hoped were in store for us. In my case an essential part of this entailed Charlie’s openly confirming a message I’d imbibed implicitly for my whole life. “What’s great about you is that you’re a Jew, but you’re not a Jewy Jew,” he would say jubilantly, meaning, my ascent would not be blocked as it would have been if I’d been in the latter category. Embedded in this formulation was the idea that it wasn’t completely okay to be Jewish, that the rough edge of it had to be sanded off. Explaining further, he told me that everybody important needs “a little Jew in the back room,” someone who might not be clubbable but who could master the details of highly complicated subjects for them. Senator Ted Kennedy, the hero of liberal Washington, for example, had someone like that advising him on tax policy. But the little Jew could never escape the back room, the way I could.
Charlie may have stated this a little crudely, but what he said comported with what I could see of the state of the world I was entering. Using all his powers, he was able to secure a job for me at The Washington Post, the big time for a young journalist. The owner, Katharine Graham, had inherited the paper from her father, a man with a background quite like my own—he was the descendant of Alsatian Jewish peddlers who had a business connection in Donaldsonville. But she was an Episcopalian (when she died, her quasi-state funeral was held in the National Cathedral), and the heads of the news and editorial departments of the paper were also Episcopalians, from socially impeccable backgrounds. In those days—and who knows, maybe also now—the ranks of the prominent in Washington were full of secret Jews, because, as Charlie said, the more obviously Jewish you were, the less high you could rise in the world. I had a friend who had come to Washington in the early sixties as a correspondent for a string of Texas newspapers. She secured an interview with C. Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the treasury and head of a white-shoe Wall Street firm. “Mr. Dillon, my readers would like to hear you talk about how your grandfather was a Polish immigrant peddler named Sam Lapowski who opened a store in Abilene,” she said. That ended the interview.
The Post’s top editors each had a hardworking middle-class Jewish deputy. Howard Simons, the managing editor, had an uncanny ability—or maybe everyone does, so it isn’t uncanny—to figure out who in the vast Post newsroom was Jewish. He’d establish a special line of communication with each of us, which was wonderful for me. What I could do for Howard was tell him what, behind the veil, life was like for German Jews. For an Eastern European Jew like him, this was catnip, because we were an object of mixed fascination and resentment that was necessarily speculative, because we were so far out of reach. Some years later, Howard produced a book of oral histories called Jewish Times, in which I was one of the interview subjects. I suppose I was guilty of dining out on stories that I knew by then would strike mainstream Jews as exotic: the impenetrable rejection of us by the Mardi Gras krewes and the Boston Club, and our own insistent need to distance ourselves from the Ostjuden. Father had told me once that back in the 1930s his aunt in Chicago, Nettie’s sister, had felt she had to sell her house because Abe Pritzker, the founder of a great fortune but to her simply “Russian,” had moved onto her block. That was in my oral history. When Howard’s book was published, Father was not happy: not only did it call public attention to our Jewishness, and put us in the company of other Jews from whom we would want to be distinguished, I had also talked about private matters in New Orleans that we were not to acknowledge except in conversations that other people couldn’t overhear. He went to all the bookstores in New Orleans—there weren’t many—and offered to buy up their stock of the book if they would agree not to reorder it.
Maximum Days
By the late 1970s, when I was out of college and working in Washington, Father had pretty well abandoned his project of bringing down the last restrictions against Jews, or at least against us, in the most rarefied restricted precincts of New Orleans social life. Father and Mother were accepted—indeed, loved and admired—by the people from those precincts who accepted them, and they didn’t socialize with the people who didn’t. They’d give large holiday parties at Quercus, the house fully decorated with a Christmas tree and wreaths, for an overwhelmingly non-Jewish guest list. I think of this period as representing the maximum glory days of Quercus. Mother’s most favorite novels were Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and War and Peace; she used to tell me that she wished she could somehow unread them, erase them from her memory, so she could experience the pleasure of the encounter for the first time again. I was so committed to resisting her career advice in those days that I resisted all her advice. (In those days, I still identified myself most strongly as a Southerner, something Mother never did, so my reading was in search of a submerged Southern liberal tradition I could identify with.) It was years before I read those books and saw what she meant. The Magic Mountain’s obvious connection to Mother was through her ongoing and never resolved illnesses, but Buddenbrooks and War and Peace remind me of the part of New Orleans we inhabited, and I’m sure Mother noticed that too. The ceaseless kaleidoscope-like rearrangings of a coterie of large extended families, who were collectively presiding over a social order in decline—that, not the modern American mainstream, was our world.
