Part 25 (1/2)

”It was not to my liking when Marion first came into my father's life,” Anne admits. ”I wanted him to myself in those days. I was p.i.s.sed off, but n.o.body paid much attention to that. I always liked Karen Kennerly because she was enamored of me. Marion was straight and narrow, kind of blue-b.l.o.o.d.y... Dad called her Marigold, Good as Gold.”

”When [she and Donald] first [got] together, they were like freshmen in high school,” says Harrison Starr. ”I always had a car in New York. Native Californian, right? I'd thread my way. We went to dinner [one night] at a French restaurant up in the Thirties, East Thirties, and they were in the backseat like little high school children.”

Kirk Sale saw that Don's hours were ”much warmer and fuller” whenever Marion was around.

”Don had never led a normal life, but he sort of started one with Marion,” Kennerly says. It was the ”closest he'd come to a steady life.”

Marion Knox was born in Baltimore, the middle sister of three. Her father was a general surgeon. She attended Garrison Forest School in Baltimore, then the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. In 1967, she earned a B.A. in history at the University of Wisconsin. After that, ”I went to Paris with a girlfriend intending to backpack around (it was those days),” she says. She ”ended up working at different jobs (no green card),” including a several-month stint with La Jeune Afrique La Jeune Afrique, a magazine for francophone countries of Africa. The editors paid her ”under the table.” Eventually, Time Time's Paris bureau hired her to file newspaper clips and to make telephone calls in French. She had to get stock market quotes from the bourse, ”which was horrifying because they were given so fast and I had to secretly call back many times to get them right,” she says. During Les Jours de Mai Les Jours de Mai, when gasoline was rationed because of student riots and workers' strikes, the office staff asked Marion to fill the tank of her borrowed car so they could siphon the gas off. In 1971, she moved to Manhattan and went to work in the forty-eight-story Time-Life Building on the Avenue of the Americas, at first doing research for other writers, then more and more reporting, primarily on education and women's roles in various professions.

”I am happy and know myself to be happy-a rare state,” Don wrote soon after meeting Marion. Other events did not escape his attention: the increasingly nefarious lunacy of the Nixon administration and the opening of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, which sucked much of the island's trade its way. Contemplating these developments, in his new happy mood, Don wrote a whimsical letter to George Christian in Houston, proposing that the two of them ”form a new government.” The ”inadequacies of the existing government I need not dwell upon,” he said. Don's idea was that ”when the former real government does anything especially especially horrible, dull, stupid, or evil, we will issue a press release, stating the position of the new real government....Our statements will be so eloquent, right-on and funny that the press will of course eventually become conditioned to turn naturally to us for comment on the major issues of the day.” horrible, dull, stupid, or evil, we will issue a press release, stating the position of the new real government....Our statements will be so eloquent, right-on and funny that the press will of course eventually become conditioned to turn naturally to us for comment on the major issues of the day.”

Don suggested Norman Mailer for president (sworn in on the steps of the New York Public Library, with his right hand on a copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary Webster's Unabridged Dictionary), Lynn Nesbit for chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and for himself, ”Gray Eminence.” Oh-and one of the Supreme Court seats, he said, should go to ”my dear friend Marion Knox.”

42.

PEN AND SWORD.

A secret White House tape, recorded on June 23, 1972, caught Richard Nixon haranguing his perceived enemies. He ordered the CIA to block investigations of Howard Hunt. Nixon had offered Hunt hush money so he wouldn't reveal the ”seamy things he had done” for the president during the Watergate affair. The June 23 tape became known in Was.h.i.+ngton as the ”smoking gun,” and led to the final stages of the debacle that ended in Nixon's resignation.

”Watergate sure did get [Don] revved up,” wrote Thomas Pynchon, who met Don through Kirk and Faith Sale. By 1972, Pynchon said, Nixon had ”mutated into a desperate and impersonal force, no longer your traditionally human-type President, but now some faceless subG.o.d of folly.”

Don wrote, ”One can attempt to explain this Administration in a variety of ways, but folie a deux folie a deux is perhaps too optimistic, and on the other hand I do not want to believe that we get what we deserve.” He could only fall back in ”stunned wonder at the fullness and mysteriousness of our political life.” is perhaps too optimistic, and on the other hand I do not want to believe that we get what we deserve.” He could only fall back in ”stunned wonder at the fullness and mysteriousness of our political life.”

He penned half a dozen satires of Nixon, including this parody of the White House tapes: P-What did I do then?E-You understood that inaudible had unintelligible. P-When did I understand that? P-When did I understand that? E-You understood that on the morning of the unintelligible. E-You understood that on the morning of the unintelligible. P-Oh, I see. I understood that because inaudible had informed me that unintelligible...But won't that look like expletive deleted? P-Oh, I see. I understood that because inaudible had informed me that unintelligible...But won't that look like expletive deleted? H-It will look like you at least knew that unintelligible before inaudible and had the guts to be unintelligible. H-It will look like you at least knew that unintelligible before inaudible and had the guts to be unintelligible. P-I've never been afraid to be unintelligible. P-I've never been afraid to be unintelligible.

Don published his satires in The Village Voice The Village Voice, in The New Yorker The New Yorker 's ”Notes and Comment” section, and on the op-ed page of 's ”Notes and Comment” section, and on the op-ed page of The New York Times. The New York Times. They were his attempts to ”hurl great flaming buckets of Greek fire (rhetoric) at the Government,” he said, ”not thinking that the Government is paying the slightest attention, but merely for the splendid exercise given the Citizens.h.i.+p muscle.” They were his attempts to ”hurl great flaming buckets of Greek fire (rhetoric) at the Government,” he said, ”not thinking that the Government is paying the slightest attention, but merely for the splendid exercise given the Citizens.h.i.+p muscle.”

His ruefulness reveals why his satires were generally more gentle than biting. He was ”prevented from becoming a world-cla.s.s curmudgeon on the order of, say, Ambrose Bierce, by the stubborn counter-rhythms of what kept on being a hopeful and unbitter heart,” Pynchon says. A ”tenderness and geniality” always ”s.h.i.+ne through” whenever Don ”drops the irony, even for a minute.”

During the early seventies, Pynchon lived off and on in the Sales's bas.e.m.e.nt apartment, below Don, when the Sales were away. He wrote parts of Gravity's Rainbow Gravity's Rainbow there. As he came to know Don, he was impressed by Don's neighborliness. ”He disliked being alone, preferring company, however problematical, to no company,” Pynchon recalled. The two men hit it off; they shared a quick wit. Karen Kennerly says that one morning, Pynchon called Don and said, ”I've just put the cat in the refrigerator. Do you think that's a problem?” On another day, he sent Don a note saying he'd thought he'd spotted Don walking around the Village, but he didn't approach him ”on the off-chance it was Solzhenitsyn.” there. As he came to know Don, he was impressed by Don's neighborliness. ”He disliked being alone, preferring company, however problematical, to no company,” Pynchon recalled. The two men hit it off; they shared a quick wit. Karen Kennerly says that one morning, Pynchon called Don and said, ”I've just put the cat in the refrigerator. Do you think that's a problem?” On another day, he sent Don a note saying he'd thought he'd spotted Don walking around the Village, but he didn't approach him ”on the off-chance it was Solzhenitsyn.”

Most Village dwellers cheered Nixon's departure, though local politics consumed them more intensely than national battles. For many in the neighborhood, the demolition of the Women's House of Detention, a twelve-story prison at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Tenth Street, was a greater source of joy than the fall of the paranoid in chief. The building had been an eyesore; it housed mostly addicts, black and Puerto Rican prost.i.tutes, and antiwar activists. In an era of growing feminist consciousness, it had come to be seen as a shameful reminder of social inequalities.

Grace Paley had been held there for six days in the late 1960s, for sitting in a street and impeding a military parade. In her cell, a tall black woman put her arm on Grace's shoulder. ”What's your time, sugar?” she asked.

”Six days,” Grace said.

”Six days? What the f.u.c.k for?”

When Grace told her, the woman screamed at the guards, ”Hear me now, you motherf.u.c.kers, you grotty pigs, get this housewife out of here! Six days in this low-down hole for sitting front of a horse!”

When the prison came down under pressure from neighborhood activists, and after large trucks had hauled away all the bricks, Grace was one of the few people sorry to see the place go. ”[I]f there are prisons, they ought to be in the neighborhood, near a subway-not way out in distant suburbs...and the population that considers itself innocent forgets, denies, chooses to never know that there is a huge country of the bad and the unlucky and the self-hurters,” she said.

A group calling itself the Village Committee for the Jefferson Market Area designed and planted a garden on the old site, to ”create a verdant blooming oasis in the heart of Greenwich Village,” filled with daffodils, tulips, and roses. On his daily walks in the neighborhood, Don watched the garden in progress. ”It's going to be pretty,” he wrote. ”I don't know who the genius responsible for getting this done is, but I take off my hat to her.”

Grace's objection to the prison's removal was ideological; Don's approval of its absence was aesthetic. Grace did not want people to forget how the world is. how the world is. Don insisted on considering Don insisted on considering how the world should be. how the world should be.

His privacy and decorum were always at odds with his love of community and his powerful sense of shouldness. shouldness. The more he walked and talked to his neighbors, the more he acknowledged how much he ”dearly” loved the Village. ”I care for the marvelous dangerous Oz-like city as a whole.” Increasingly, his writing reflected this, in the less angry, more personal style of The more he walked and talked to his neighbors, the more he acknowledged how much he ”dearly” loved the Village. ”I care for the marvelous dangerous Oz-like city as a whole.” Increasingly, his writing reflected this, in the less angry, more personal style of Sadness. Sadness.

For instance, in an unsigned piece in The New Yorker The New Yorker's ”Notes and Comment,” he wrote of a local street festival, where a high school stage band played jazz standards. The kids in the band copied the att.i.tudes and gestures of professional musicians. When ”they played 'Yesterdays,' tears came to my eyes, which I don't much like in public, so I asked this girl if she wanted to dance,” Don said. ”She wasn't a girl, really, she was a woman, and all the time we were dancing she had this three-year-old child (wearing gla.s.ses) clinging to her right leg. I didn't get her name, but I sure did enjoy that dance.”

What is remarkable about this pa.s.sage-and, again, it was new in Don's writing at this time-is the ease with which he conveyed complex emotions and simultaneously painted a social portrait. Central but unspoken in the scene is time's relentlessness: The high school kids strained toward the future, imitating mature gestures, while their performance evoked an embarra.s.sing nostalgia in Don. He tried to recover decorum with a romantic gesture, but the girl he asked to dance was not really a girl (youth was lost to him) and the romance was tarnished by the clinging three-year-old, whose body was already starting to fail (the gla.s.ses), and yet, the moment was exquisitely touching, because Don accepted the frailties of everyone present, including himself. For all his utopianism, he never lost his ”tenderness and geniality” toward things as they are. As it turns out, nothing is more radical, as a source of political consciousness, than tenderness.

To his fellow writers, Don was by now a potent political force, respected for his modesty and his refusal to promote himself, and admired for his ability to get things done for those whose causes he chose to champion. Since he had moved to New York in 1962, he had been busy bringing people together from various reaches of the literary world. Because he usually worked behind the scenes, rarely pushed overt agendas, and couched his arguments precisely and with common-sense righteousness, he almost never met resistance.

”Don was a very active, astute, literary politician,” wrote Renata Adler, who gave an example of this in her book Gone: Gone: Once he enlisted me to block the appointment of a particular candidate for The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times Book Review. ”Why me?” I asked,...”You've worked for the ”Why me?” I asked,...”You've worked for the Times Times,” he said. ”It's your duty.” His voice had its note of irony, as his voice always did,...but he meant it. In the event, I called Diana Trilling, who spoke to Lionel, who did intervene. The rejected candidate never knew what happened; neither did the man, Harvey Shapiro, who actually got the job.

He took numerous stands on small but crucial issues, including a censors.h.i.+p flap at the Caldwell Parish Library in Louisiana. A librarian there had hand-painted diapers on the ill.u.s.trations of Mickey, the naked little hero of Maurice Sendak's popular children's book In the Night Kitchen. In the Night Kitchen. Don signed a letter to the American Library a.s.sociation objecting to the librarian's handiwork. Don signed a letter to the American Library a.s.sociation objecting to the librarian's handiwork.

Most of his literary politicking came through the international organization for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists. P.E.N. was founded in London in 1921 by John Galsworthy and C. A. Dawson Scott. P.E.N. initially had the feel of a private club, but it harbored the ambitions of the League of Nations. Its logo was a quill pen slicing a sword in half. Walt Whitman once wrote, ”My dearest dream is for an internationality of poems and poets, binding the lands of the earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy.” P.E.N. embraced this sentiment.

PEN American Center sprang to life in New York with the help of the writers and publishers Joseph Anthony, Willa Cather, Carl Van Doren, and John Farrar. A formal dinner in Manhattan's Coffee House Club on April 19, 1922, marked its official beginning. From England, Galsworthy sent words of support: ”We writers are...trustees for human nature...[a]nd the better we know each other...the greater the chance for human happiness in a world not, as yet, too happy.”

According to Marchette Chute, keeper of PEN's official history, in the 1930s the organization found itself ”with less and less s.p.a.ce in a world” making room ”for the absolute power of the totalitarian state.” Hitler became chancellor of Germany the month that Galsworthy died. At International P.E.N.'s 1933 Congress, held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, the delegation of German writers, led by the author of a Hitler hagiography, tried to prevent Ernst Toller, a German Jew living in exile, from speaking. H. G. Wells, the president of the Congress, forced the matter to a vote and Toller got his moment. But the German delegation (which walked out on the speech) had intimidated many other partic.i.p.ants. Henry Seidel Canby, the only American delegate at the Congress, felt a ”visible fear rising like a cold fire.”

This is the moment when PEN really really became a political organization. At the Congress, Canby read a statement drafted by the Executive Committee of the American Center: ”... it is the duty of the artist to guard the spirit in its freedom, so that mankind shall not be prey to ignorance, to malice, and to fear...” became a political organization. At the Congress, Canby read a statement drafted by the Executive Committee of the American Center: ”... it is the duty of the artist to guard the spirit in its freedom, so that mankind shall not be prey to ignorance, to malice, and to fear...”

Under John Farrar's leaders.h.i.+p in the fifties, the American Center returned to its private-club atmosphere, holding regular c.o.c.ktail parties at the Pierre, a Fifth Avenue hotel. In the 1960s, when Don became an active member, the group found office s.p.a.ce in a building at Fifth Avenue and Twentieth Street. The c.o.c.ktail parties continued at the Pierre, though they were stuffy affairs. Don didn't enjoy them much. He preferred to drink at home. ”In time, Don developed considerable influence in PEN,” says Kirk Sale. ”It was he and I who started up chapters in places outside New York-Texas being the first.” At the ”PEN Board meetings...he would habitually come in his cowboy boots, and habitually sit in the back, the eminence gris eminence gris as owl. And he would not talk often, and never long, but what he said was always pithy and appropriate, and usually right. I recall the time he was to present a report to the Board of a PEN all-star reading that we had just put on at the University of Houston. He stood up and, as I remember it, said just, 'Richard Howard took the word as owl. And he would not talk often, and never long, but what he said was always pithy and appropriate, and usually right. I recall the time he was to present a report to the Board of a PEN all-star reading that we had just put on at the University of Houston. He stood up and, as I remember it, said just, 'Richard Howard took the word rebarbative rebarbative to Texas...where it was badly needed,' and sat down.” to Texas...where it was badly needed,' and sat down.”

Don took an energetic role in PEN's letter-writing campaigns to free prisoners of conscience. When Soviet police agents forcibly detained Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Don signed a cablegram to Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev. It said, in part, ”We, his colleagues in the West, call for the immediate cessation of threats and persecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.” He sent a telegram urging then secretary of state Henry Kissinger to condemn the Soviet Union.

On behalf of PEN, Don and others worked to get restrictions lifted on the travel visas of a number of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

He signed a letter to Poland's prime minister, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, calling for an end to martial law in that country, the release of ”imprisoned writers, educators, labor leaders, students and others” and a ”speedy restoration of basic human rights in Poland.”

For Don, now in his early forties, political conscience was inextricable from a traditional, almost religious, notion of morality that valued generosity and tolerance-values linked to his Catholic schooling and his father's modernist crusade. Late in his life-and despite people like Richard Nixon-Don said, ”Democracy is the best idea we have come up with that I know of politically-a Greek-Christian kind of social organization.” Any ”individual guy or voter (poorly educated or well-educated, it doesn't matter)...is going to vote for X who answers his own needs, or he's going to vote for Y because this man seems to be more in tune with him spiritually.”