and present. The thematic burden of this analysis was that the criminal in capitalist society is simply a revolutionary who through an oversight has neglected to join a Marxist party and coordinate his rebelliousness with other people’s. It beats me how I happened to wander into the field of crime and its causes. It could be that more of the Puritan work ethic had seeped into my head than I realized and prolonged unemployment was making me feel like a criminal. Certainly writing articles on the unconscious politics of footpads and second-story men wasn’t giving me any sense of gainful employment, whereas the criminal welcomes any opportunity to present himself as a politician—it’s a promotion, though a slight one.
(This is in no way to make light of the current politicalization of our prison populations. That is progress all around. But if we want to keep our bearings, particularly those of us on the left, we’d better see the difference between prisoners who take to politics in a mighty striving for mind expansion and those—their numbers may not be negligible—who reach for politics as a handy, because fashionable, mask.)
I feel now that this analysis done in 1938 was defective in key respects. It seems to give less than the full story about a number of disorderly and impatient types, from the Boston Strangler to Charles Manson. I’m relieved, in retrospect, that my article did not bring a rush of recruits to the Socialist Workers Party from the chronic lawbreaking strata—if the Stranglers and Mansons ever decide to flock to a leftwing movement their comrades will have to put on bulletproof vests and hire bodyguards to see them home from meetings.
My real point is that the words I was turning out in this period, if totally wrong, were uniformly effective. My comrades thanked me many times for setting them straight on both the Spanish Civil War (which they never knew I had located in France) and the blind alleys all criminologists but me had gotten themselves into.
Item. In the course of time I was invited to join Trotsky’s small secretarial and household staff in Mexico, where he’d received asylum after being expelled from Norway by Trygve Lie’s whimsically and skittishly socialist government. This was another nice, if not in any way remunerative, recognition of my dexterity with words—they needed somebody who knew English, could translate documents from French and German, prepare news releases and in general handle the press. It was clear to me that Albie Booth (star quarterback and captain of the Yale football team when I was in school) would not have qualified for this job, so it looked like my exemptions from gym had not been in vain. I won’t dwell on my literary activities during this year in Mexico because, although my output was high, its form was minor: mostly postcards.
Item. When I got back from Mexico I was taken on by the Connecticut WPA Writers Project to head a research and writing team that was said to be preparing an ethnic study of the peoples of Connecticut for ultimate publication by the Yale University Press. More about this job later. I’ll just point out here that I would never have gotten it if I hadn’t appeared to the WPA bureaucrats as a writer, at least somebody who could write, and, further, if a good friend of mine hadn’t happened to be doing the hiring. This appointment would have seemed sure proof of my literary calling if I hadn’t observed, right after reporting for work, that Albie Booth could just as well have wangled the job and passed unnoticed no matter how much writing he didn’t do, all the people present being too drunk or too hung-over to check on anything but the Alka-Seltzer.
I elected to do my main research in Yale’s Sterling Library, where if the ethnic components of the Connecticut population were not highly visible the furniture was at least softly upholstered. I spent most of those 18 months sleeping in the splendid sofas of the Linonia & Brothers Reading Room. It was in this vaulted chamber, soothingly reminiscent of the Union League Club, that one day I picked up an avantgarde magazine from Paris and read Joyce’s haunting sentence, “I can do anything I want with words.”
My reaction to that chesty line should be recorded. I thought, here I am, ready, willing and able to do anything anybody wants with my words so long as they’ll pay modestly for them . . . dying to get some words out tailored to the needs and interests of some market, any market at all . . . my full literary equipment is there on the block, and they’re all too busy reaching for the Alka-Seltzer to take me up on it, make a bid, draw some guidelines, notice me at all.
You might say that under the circumstances, since I was drawing a paycheck every week—nothing great but enough to eat on—I might have used my great gobs of free time to do something I wanted with my unemployed words. But that was just the trouble. There was nothing I wanted to do with them, nothing I dared to do, except put them up for sale and lament the absence of buyers.
One more item, this going back to the Mexican days, and you’ll have the background picture.
It wasn’t a soft life we had in that broken-down villa in Coyoacán, then a backwash village outside Mexico City. It was, all in all, a radical departure from the sculpted panels and puffy pillows of Linonia & Brothers. We lived in a one-story house built around the thee sides of a patio, all of the single-file rooms opening on the internal garden. There was no heating system. When the panes of the French doors got broken they didn’t get fixed. It turns cold nights on the Mexico City plateau, up 7,500 feet. You look to the snow peaks of Popocatepetl and you feel that snow in your bones, in your teeth.
We were often up nights in that drafty, unheated place, feeling the Popo snows. We had to be. In addition to the day’s chores of paper work and seeing to security we, the members of the secretariat, kept a rotating guard shift through the night. There were three of us, a Frenchman, a Czech, and myself. That meant we split the night into three watches, early, middle, and late. That meant that every third night I could expect to be up through the most miserable hours from midnight to almost dawn, huddled in a soldier’s ratty fur wraparound left over from Red Army days, blowing on my fingers, trying not to let the cold blow my mind.
Lots of nights I sat in the dining room at the 20-foot-long lemon-yellow wooden table that we used at one end for eating, at the other for our typewriters and papers, taking apart the Luger I’d been issued, then putting it together. I had no strong interest in the insides of a gun, though I’d never examined them closely before. The idea was to have some project, focus the head, keep busy. The cold wouldn’t go away but it could, with strategy, he banished for periods to the outskirts of mind. I had to use my fingers somehow. I couldn’t think of anything to do with them at the typewriter, having written all my postcards hours before and having no nobler literary projects in mind. I broke that Luger down till it couldn’t be reduced any further except with an acetylene torch. Night after night I did this, getting it all apart, then getting it all together.
Once, very late, the Old Man came through the dining room on his way to the bathroom, and saw me with parts of the gun in my hands and more parts spread on the table. He was always alert to how the young people around him behaved with weapons, afraid that their tendencies to kid around and show off might make them careless.
His hands-off style wouldn’t allow him any tone of chiding or lecture. He just said quietly and seriously, “You know, in the Revolution we lost more people than the enemy could claim credit for. Many young comrades killed themselves with their own guns and suicide was very far from their minds.”
I said, “You don’t have to worry about me, L.D., I always take the clip out and make sure the chamber’s empty, there’s no danger here.”
I couldn’t detail for him all the ways in which there was no danger. Minutes before he’d appeared, just as I was beginning to fit the barrel back into its housing, there’d been a whiffing noise and I’d watched some spring from the firing mechanism fly out the French doors. I was vague as to the spring’s location in the innards of the gun and in the dark as to its function. But wherever it operated and whatever it did, I knew it was important. Just before the Old Man came in I’d proved to my satisfaction that the gun would not fire without this obscure coil. The perfect gun, you might say, for Russian roulette.
