Parenthesis by Jay Neugeboren

Author:Jay Neugeboren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Parentheses
ISBN: 9781941088456
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1970-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

My fourth book was done (I was twenty-three), and I brought it to the SANE office, where the National Director read it, praised it, and sent me to Norman Cousins. Cousins was then Honorary Chairman of SANE, and editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review. I had relied, for some of my information, on his book, In Place of Folly, and to have a direct introduction to him made me feel that I was getting somewhere.

I did not, in fact, ever see him or hear from him. A month later, the editorial assistant who had taken the manuscript from me, returned it, telling me that it was “the most incredible piece of political writing” by a young man that she had ever read. She was probably right.

I returned home and the next day I was back at work on my novel; I had dealt—in a tangible way—with the guilt that bound my fiction to my politics. The political book was there; in fact, by having turned my political emotions into a book, I had made them into something that was doubtless more real to me than anything else could have been. While I waited to hear from Saturday Review or any of the other magazines and publishers I would submit it to, I could justify what I felt a need to justify (would always feel a need to justify)—the fact that I was no longer working full time to save mankind.

I had, I even began to see, been somewhat excessive in my politics—perhaps, I admitted, even slightly paranoid. Certainly I had been unrealistic. Now, however, things were different—I was writing again, I was away from Indiana, from The Meadows, from General Motors. The letter to Kennedy had been a silly, misconceived scheme, and I was, I would tell friends, embarrassed by the fact that I could have gotten so insanely involved in it, in the idea of the campaign which would surround it.

My new manuscript, on the other hand, I would point out, once it was published as a book, would be able to do what I as an individual, and what the letter alone, could never have done.

This new, more “realistic” view of things had other effects. Although I felt more certain than ever that I would have chosen jail before military service, I now saw no reason for precipitating the need for such a choice. The practical thing to do was to use the freedom I had in order to work for the policies in which I believed—and so I became involved in my first actual political activities.

There were, in New York, people who were fighting the same enemies I had been fighting, and this now seemed to me a reassuring fact. If those who had already risked their jobs and lives, as many in the civil rights movement had done, could continue to do so—and could continue to commit their time and energies to mundane tasks which didn’t seem to promise any imminent apocalypse, who was I, who had

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