THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
779
lions on the stoop, the alarm clock ten minutes fast. Harvard: it had
mocked and dazzled us, the legendary tweeds and flannels, the soiled
saddle-shoes, the undergraduate apparatus of graciousness, and the
promise that there might be a casualness not
lumpen,
an ease, perhaps,
not sin.
We had talked about it, in the conventional weak banter of
the almost-poor, who desire not simply to possess but to despise,
while we still sucked our ambivalence with three-cent cups of ices
on the stone stoops; and under the long evenings of summer, would
break off our discussions of the difference between a horse and a
man to beat the kid who farted aloud until he shouted three times,
"Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon!"
But we were marked already for the few months at City College
and the surrender to weariness, or, at best, the Midwestern school
where the restaurant job awaited us and the stereotype: Easterner,
Red, Jew, perhaps even the recognition of an expulsion deplored by
the
New Republic.
Later, when our longing had grown too sophisticated to ignore
its ambiguities, it was Harvard that served as the other pole to the
Young Communist League (we did not dream then those fashion–
able Popular Front days when revolt, well-groomed, was to be the
simple piquancy of convention, and those who cried "Choose!"
seemed political schizophrenics): the University or the Revolution,
success or rebellion, both dear to us and difficult; if it was not a real
option, it was not ignobly imagined.
"The Movement" we called our left allegiance in a shockingly
unanalyzed phrase; how parochial in retrospect our ethical imagin–
ing; how strait the either-or we proposed and could not escape.
The
Movement, the epithet, all kinesis and no commitment, echoes
in the enduring head like a reproach.
The Movement, though, was more than the poor metaphor
that persists: the symbolic flirtation at least with denying the whole
universe that defined our intolerable exclusion, our outsideness-set
against the counter-urge to belong, to infiltrate, become at that
world's center the definition of
its
alienation.
It was a pretty irony for boys, but in the end a mask for ac–
commodation. We might have known
it
from the first, for it was
with our real names, those comic-elegant tags the Jews have worn
