When I was growing up, my parents were contemptuous of Jews who tried to pass–they were WASPy Jews– and maybe inevitably when I went out on my own I began to explore that territory. I married into that tribe and I made a lot of WASP friends. My manner changed; my sister accused me of becoming taciturn.
I was best friends for a while with a guy who was especially true to type, tall austere and goodlooking. We used to go camping a lot and drink and smoke weed. One of the first times we went out, on a lake upstate, I was freaked by the outdoors and couldn’t sleep from drinking and the loons were going on the lake. The next day I wrote a dithyramb in the notebook we found in a shelter, telling about vomiting and my freakout and saying the loons sounded like witches. My friend was angry about this. On our walk out he lectured me about the correct code for campbook statements.They were to be upbeat and convey information to others and not be self-indulgent. At that time my wife had a Buddha quote on the fridge saying, We are the sum of all our thoughts, and I said that to my friend and he said, That’s true, but it doesn’t mean you have to express them all.
A couple years later he and I went up Katahdin, reading Thoreau’s ecstatic essay about his half-ascent– “Contact! contact! who are we? where are we?”– and slept in a cabin with a crowd of Thoreau enthusiasts. One of them snored like a fartpillow, and my friend couldn’t sleep and he dragged his bag outside. In the morning he was in a wretched mood and took me aside. You have only two modes of interacting, he said. One is to grill people with a million questions, it makes them uncomfortable and it’s weird. The other is just as weird, you try and be a hale fellow, well met, Like you say, “Have a good one,” all the time. That’s not you, you’re not an ordinary person, you shouldn’t try and pretend to be one. That’s not sincere. You don’t say, Have a good one.
I took my dressing-down like a soldier and when I told my wife about it I think she somewhat agreed with the critique. I was an uncomfortable person socially. Looking back on it, I’d say some of the discomfort stemmed from the social faultline I was walking. As my wife would be the first to admit, Jews had their place in the anti-semitic world she grew up in– they were often the doctors and lawyers, but they didn’t aspire to social equality. So she and I were trying to make our own world, to suit ourselves.
Years ago at the 92d Street Y, V.S. Naipaul spoke and they read out questions on filecards. One said, “Why did you turn your back on Trinidad?” “This is not a question, it’s a form of abuse,” he said angrily, then I believe he said something about needing a wider field for his imagination and ambition. And I was thrilled by that. I thought– more power to him, against anyone who would hold him back, in Trinidad or in England or in India.
I think about his line often. My error in the campbook became a running joke with the other guys we went camping with. I went along with the joke for a while, until the joke struck me as a form of abuse, and I shut up about it.
