commitment was to education and intellectual dialogue, set
the tone and taught both my brother and me that our proper
engagement was with the world. He had a whole set of ideas
and principles that he taught us, in words, by example. He
believed, for instance, in racial equality and integration when
those beliefs were seen as absolutely aberrational by all of his
neighbors, family, and peers. When I, at the age of fifteen,
declared to a family gathering that if I wanted to marry I
would marry whomever I wanted, regardless of color, my
father’s answer before that enraged assembly was that he expected no less. He was a civil libertarian. He believed in unions, and fought hard to unionize teachers— an unpopular
notion in those days since teachers wanted to see themselves as
professionals. He taught us those principles in the Bill of
Rights which are now not thought of very highly by most
Amerikans— an absolute commitment to free speech in all its
forms, equality before just law, and racial equality.
I adored my father, but I had no sympathy for my mother. I
knew that she was physically brave— my father told me so
over and over—but I didn’t see her as any Herculean hero. No
woman ever had been, as far as I knew. Her mind was uninteresting. She seemed small and provincial. I remember that once, in the middle of a terrible argument, she said to me in a
stony tone of voice: You think I’m stupid. I denied it then, but
I know today that she was right. And indeed, what else could
one think of a person whose only concern was that I clean up
*
My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that
she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me
from reading them. Sometime during my adolescence, books came to connote
for me, in part, my intellectual superiority over my mother, who did not
read, and my peership with my father, who did read.
my room, or wear certain clothes, or comb my hair another
way. I had, certainly, great reason to think that she was stupid,
and horrible, and petty, and contemptible even: Edward
Albee, Philip Wylie, and that great male artist Sigmund Freud
told me so. Mothers, it seemed to me, were the most expendable of people— no one had a good opinion of them, certainly not the great writers of the past, certainly not the exciting
writers of the present. And so, though this woman, my mother,
whether present or absent, was the center of my life in so
many inexplicable, powerful, unchartable ways, I experienced
her only as an ignorant irritant, someone without grace or
passion or wisdom. When I married in 1969 I felt free— free
of my mother, her prejudices, her ignorant demands.
I tell you all of this because this story has, possibly for the
first time in history, a rather happier resolution than one might
expect.
Do you remember that in Hemingway’s
did the earth move? For me, too, in my life, the earth has
