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became with them. By the time I finished the paper I came to the con–
clusion that Marcuse was a muddled thinker. Moreover, I realized that
he had a foolproof method of argument: anyone who disagreed with
him suffered from "false consciousness." I wrote the paper, and William
said he liked it. At the conference my new view of Marcuse was con–
firmed, because Marcuse not only denounced the repressive tolerance of
bourgeois America, he minimized the importance of the Civil Rights Act
of
1964.
The act, he said, gave blacks the freedom to pursue the same
bourgeois values as whites. He even said that he "would prefer that they
did not have the freedom to vote if they are going to make the wrong
use of their freedom."
The highlight of the conference was Leslie Fiedler's talk on "The New
Mutants." Fiedler said that the sixties generation was essentially apolit–
ical: "the 'mutants' in our midst are nonparticipants in the past ...
dropouts from history." The "new irrationalists," as he called them, dis–
liked both bourgeois democracies and Leninist one-party dictatorships.
They "celebrate disconnection," he said, and "accept it as one of the
necessary consequences of the industrial system which has delivered
them from ... that welfare state which makes disengagement the last
possible virtue, whether it calls itself Capitalist, Socialist or Commu–
nist." After the piece came out in
PR,
I asked William what he thought
of Fiedler's ideas. He waved his hand impatiently, as if he were dismiss–
ing Fiedler completely. I wanted to discuss Fiedler's piece, but someone
called him to the phone.
I am certain that William thought Fiedler's ideas were goofy, yet PR
published not only Fiedler's piece but a number of similar pieces about
the sixties generation. In a symposium on "What's Happening to Amer–
ica?" Jack Newfield, who had recently written a book called
The New
Left: A Prophetic Minority,
gave the following advice to older leftists:
"Go talk to the kids. Listen to Dylan's lyrics, read Fanon, visit some SDS
chapters, even try a little pot. Empathize with the Movement, and then
criticize fraternally."
Until the end of the sixties I continued to see William occasionally
when I visited the PR office to pick up my wife. In our brief chats I
sensed that he was not as sympathetic to the sixties generation as other
older leftists were. He would never have used the word "empathize" or
talk about smoking pot with students . And there was too much of the
cynical New Yorker in him to say, as Irving Howe did in
1965,
that
there was "in our society, a profound estrangement from the sources of
selfhood, the possibilities of human growth and social cohesion." I
