In Pursuit of Clancy Sigal
A writer’s radical life
Todd Gitlin, at right, speaks with the muckraking journalist I. F. Stone at a 1962 demonstration against nuclear weapons in Washington D.C. Courtesy the author.
The golden notebook
i first encountered Clancy Sigal, in a manner of speaking, in 1963, during my last semester in college. That’s when I picked up, and devoured, Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, which featured a character named Saul Green who was widely known to have been based on Sigal. At the time, I was a fervent and brooding left-wing activist with two years of political organizing under my belt (mostly trying to ban the bomb). So I was, unsurprisingly, enthralled by Lessing’s book, which took left-wing politics and writing seriously, as human facts, not “background.” And I was mesmerized by the broken expat Green, a Communist maudit, former union organizer, blacklisted Hollywood agent, and blocked writer, attached to left-wing ideals despite reasons not to be. I was especially moved as he and Lessing’s protagonist Anna Wulf plunge into a transformative folie de deux, “a cocoon of madness.” Saul can no longer find fellowship with his old comrades, who have settled, “all married or successful and having drunken private conversations with themselves.” He won’t settle. He tosses up in London, sick and insomniac, a political refugee and scrambling neurotic. In Anna—herself a blocked novelist trying to dig out of a rubble of Communist faith, bad relationships, and war terror— he finds a kindred, equally disassembled spirit. She takes him in, impressed by “his jaunty soldier air,” coiled as he is, “his energies… absorbed in simply holding himself together,” “his cool grey eyes on guard.” But he’s also, she will conclude, a “monster,” prone to “cold moment[s] of pure hostility,” “jeering and sneering” at her “middle-class” origins. He lectures her, and she likes being lectured to. “Saul,” she says, “we’re very bad for each other.” History having abandoned them, they lurch into each other’s arms as lovers, accusers, and confessors. She, having compartmentalized her writing into topical segments, hungers for wholeness; he, stuck in a moment when “some kind of guts have gone out of people,” would “give anything to go back to when I was in the gang of idealist kids on the street corner, believing we could change everything…the only time in my life I’ve been happy.” They circle each other like ravenous carnivores biting chunks out of each other’s flesh, their cruelties spurring understandings that feel like misunderstandings. I recognized Lessing’s characters as weathered, burned-out forebears of my New Left crowd. “The truth for our time was war, the immanence of war,” writes Anna Wulf. “War was working in us all, towards fruition.” This spoke to us, given that the United States and the Soviet Union had just careened into, and almost not out of, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And my circle devoured The Golden Notebook not least because Lessing took women’s passions and quandaries seriously. Lessing named their disquiet, their longing to be “free women.” I lent my copy to Casey Hayden, who had recently been evicted from her marriage to Tom Hayden, then the president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Politics was not all that drew me to Saul and Anna. Lessing told me what I was missing in my own life, for I often felt as if I had been dropped onto the earth without an instruction manual, lacking even a vocabulary for what human beings felt about, and wanted from, each other. I admired Anna’s courageous struggle to unite her fragments, and saw myself in Saul Green’s lurching helplessness. He was some fifteen years older than I—the right age for an archetype. He embodied both the swagger and the fragility of the masculine mystique I aspired to, à la Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Like Saul, I fancied myself summoned by history with a capital H, wanting my bewilderments and failings to add up to something significant.
going away
six months after reading The Golden Notebook, I picked up a copy of Going Away, Sigal’s second book and his major opus. By then, I had been elected the third president of SDS. I was fired up by the updraft of the civil rights movement and John Kennedy’s moves toward détente. In my bookish way I was seeking a “usable past” while struggling with an uneasy relationship between witnessing history and participating in it. In some way, I intuited that the dilemmas we were facing as young radicals were already built into the situation of being left wing in a country that was not. And I sensed that these were dilemmas about which Clancy Sigal would have something important to say. Going Away is, in a way, the story of what happened to Saul Green before he met Anna Wulf. Lyrical and intellectually serious at once, it maps the political wasteland left by the death of the Old Left. At twenty-nine, the narrator is the son of union organizers (his mother a socialist, his absent father a Communist). It is October 1956. He drives a big, borrowed red-and-white De Soto convertible from L.A. eastward, looking up old buddies and recalling adventures whose meaning has been drained away by America’s stupor. Most of the old militancy has expired; most of his pals are in retreat; a few hold fast to Stalinism for dear life. Mostly he finds embers. In Wyoming, a onetime union leader tells him, “It’s not a radical union any more.… All they talk about is sex, baseball, cars and the lousy Company.” Another: “The guys are tired. They’ve a right to be.… They want a rest. They don’t want to strike, they don’t want any trouble. They want to take long uninterrupted fishing trips.” “All the people I talked to felt ‘out of it,’” Sigal writes, “believing that they could exercise no real influence over the important decisions in their lives, they were now busily brewing up a blend of wisecracking apathy.” Drive-by sex substitutes for the revolution. Stopping off in Reno, Sigal watches people on street corners and motel roofs staring toward the government’s desert test site. “What’s going on?” he asks men in Stetson hats. “Nuclear device,” one of them says. “That was the phrase one of them used, nuclear device. I asked him if he meant an atom bomb, and he looked at me. I was a square.” These men, stunned into euphemism, talk kiloton ranges, weather, altitude. “I asked again what time the atomic bomb would be exploded. They stared at me again. I had done the square thing. I excused myself and called it a nuclear device.” One of the Stetsons “put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Son, there ain’t no call for you getting sarcastic. That’s the only thing that stands between us and the Russians.’” The bomb, 380 miles away, lights up the dawning sky. “An intake of breath swept the crowds… as the eyes caught the white glare that spread over the whole dawning sky, a sharp, slow splurge of light that brought forth appreciative Ah’s from the crowd. One of the Stetsons said, ‘God, that’s beautiful.’” Later, Sigal wanders “the bleak, blinking streets thinking about Hungary,” where people are thrillingly, if futilely, rising up against the Stalinist regime. Everywhere, America looks “rapaciously, lifelessly ‘modern.’” As he drives, revolted by billboards, charged up on whiskey and Dexedrine, a Greek chorus of radio bulletins spits out news of Hungary—and soon enough, dreadfully, of the Soviet onslaught that crushes what remains of his old-time religion. He is long gone from the Communist Party, but some residue of nostalgia binds him to the comrades with whom he had shared illusions. “It has been written that one cannot have Socialism. One is a socialist,” he writes. “It is true.” For no apparent reason, he breaks out crying.
For him, communism was insurgency and solidarity—a way of life and a morality, not an economic or political arrangement.
What did I make of this at the time? I loved the narrator’s loyalties, his let-it-all-hang-out grousing, his penchant for theories of what killed America, his uncertainty about those theories, his honesty about his flaws and flops (“I have never been afraid of self-pity”). I loved his belief that writing matters, that genres are cages, that writing is an art of fluidity, not boxes. I loved the long sections he devoted to political sagas—the battle between Communists and socialists over control of the United Auto Workers; running the mimeograph machine for a proletarian poet during a strike in North Carolina—and his lust for solidarity. Above all, I was touched by his urgent need to know if it was “possible to have a small circle of friends, friends of grace and purpose, not incestuously, but on a basis of mutual respect, work, and a kind of humorous, informal dignity in the United States.” The narrator was like Woody Guthrie with a college degree and a penchant for political argument. As John Leonard would later write, “It was as if On the Road had been written by somebody with brains.” I didn’t mind much that the book was overlong, more than five hundred pages of wound-licking and self-purging. A rough-hewn cautionary tale felt like a fit tombstone for the Fifties’ fraudulent sanities and grave defeats. It comes as no surprise when Clancy writes, “This is the chronicle of how I started to go mad.” The last bulletin he hears, on shipboard, about to depart for Europe, goes, “This is Budapest. Budapest Radio. Budapest Radio. Help us. Help. Help. Help.” I turned the final page and lay in bed thinking, This will never happen to me. My movement was different. Stalin and McCarthy were dead. The New Left was independent, unillusioned, rambunctious, joyful. Lucky me, I had the sixties to look forward to.
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