106
PARTISAN REVIEW
By 1948, flush times came to the Bronx. The young people had long since
been bored by their parents' memories of the Depression, bored with all of
the past. For
us,
there was no scarcity of prospects. The country was waiting for
our maturity, fat, ripe, and promising. Walk down the street and
eye
the girls'
legs and the drabness disappears in a Hollywood splendor. Love like a
butterfly's wings, speckled gold and black. Our world was not the world ofour
fathers. A glimpse of grandeur existed for all men. For
us,
too.
The working class was something
you
came out of. But
you
didn't talk
about it, because this was America and even with an uncle who read the
Worker
there was a certain shame about your own father's failure to keep his
eye
on the main chance. By the time I was fifteen, I had already adopted my
heroes-Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Big Bill Haywood . The world was a simple
affair, its lines clear and observable: the screwed and those who screwed them.
Simplistic enough. Still, if you didn't make it, you were a failure. The
contempt I felt for' 'bosses" in general could be transformed into anger at my
father for never having become a boss. Not that his life would have
significantly changed. Nor mine. Few millionaires emerge from counter
displays of Novia Scotia salmon . But I wanted him to walk through the
glowing entrepreneurial light of this America even as I cursed it. A boss was
like a landlord. He made decisions for others. People were in his debt, not he
in theirs. Supplicants to his will.
I wanted not money but liquidity, the power
to
convert my own inner
urgings. " Be your own man," advised my father. "A professional. Don't
depend on them . On any of them." A country's ryranny could be in what it
claimed from you. To identify wholly with the working class was to drive
oneselfinto a corner. The dread suspicion of not being able to measure up, of
lacking the talent to deal with the aspirations this America had created. I
needed a wider world, a more substantial vision. The dreariness, the lack of
vision, the sense of limitation that one was expected to accept as his own, the
thousand and one ways in which these provincial streets testified to our fear of
failing, of being left behind. What
you
were was what
you
struggled to get out
of, like a caterpillar fighting to emerge from its pupa, struggling
to
claim its
rightful wings .
And it was not furriers or appetizing clerks who were destined to devour
the goodies of this world .
We
didn't know enough. Our minds had been
tuned to the pitch ofa shallow consumption. We groped in the dark. What we
needed was a vulgarity so vast that Park Avenue matrons would vie to capture
neighborhood studs for their own. An awesome prospect. But we didn't know
how to sell what we were .
