Two points remained to be tied in after the interview but neither had, to our relief, any consequences: one was Kit living with Erwin; the other was Max’s fear that Caproni, the Life magazine photographer, had recognized his voice.
For point one, Erwin had told me at the last PACS meeting that he was thinking of subletting a friend’s apartment and letting Kit share it with him. He told me instead of telling Max because everyone found me a pleasanter personality. Max also made himself less available to the PACS Americans because he said he was worried about his own security, a statement I took to be a way of identifying with the deserters and giving himself importance. As for Erwin and Kit, at present they were both sharing Erwin’s room at the Hotel Louisiane.
--If he wants to give his floor to a deserter, it’s okay by me, said Max when I told him.
--Kit’s in the bed and Erwin on the couch, I explained. Do you think there is anything between them?
Max looked amazed.
--It never occurred to me. That’s more your line of experience. All those artists you married.
--There weren’t that many of them. And they weren’t all gay.
--The only thing that would worry me would be that Erwin might make a pass at Kit, and Kit would go running back to the army and all the way to Vietnam--horror-stricken at our depraved ways. But anyway, if it’s going to happen, it’s happened by now, or Kit has got the picture and it’s not gonna happen--either way, I have enough else on my mind.
--Speaking of which, what about Caproni?
--What about him?
--You said you were afraid he’d recognized your voice.
--Yes, but I think he would have said so if he had. Maybe not. He owes me a favor.
--Well, he was pretty aggressive.
--What makes you think that?
--What makes me think that? He was attacking Buster the whole time.
--I don’t worry about Buster under attack. Neither does he, unfortunately. I attacked him myself about walking out of that job, and I didn’t notice him any the worse for it. No, Caproni and company behaved exactly the way journalists usually behave: they want all the information they can get, and three-fourths of the time, aggression gets people mad and they spill things. It certainly worked with Buster.
--I must say, I’m beginning to share the general feeling about the Establishment Press.
--You have to know how to use them, said Max complacently. But everyone is not a Max, unfortunately. Caproni nevertheless might have remembered he owes Max a favor and kept his suspicions to himself about the voice behind the curtain being mine. You see, Caproni was, or should I say is, unless he has changed in the meantime, which I very much doubt, Caproni is a Dutch-Italian, or Italian-Dutch, probably the first way, with an Indonesian grandmother somewhere in the background. He was photographing away even back in the Tournon days. Let’s see, the great period of the Cafe Tournon was in the fifties. Caproni must be about my age, and then he was photographing away for a Dutch magazine. You know that Indonesia started life as a Dutch colony?
--Rice taffel.
--Yes. Familiar case of acculturation. You know what acculturation is?
--Get back to Caproni.
--Oh yes. Well, he’s a photographer and doing all right. Probably a pretty good photographer because whereas the Dutch weren’t as racist as most, still, an Indonesian grandmother was a colonized, and I suppose he had to fight his way through some tough competition from the local Dutchmen. Anyway, there he was in Paris in the fifties at the Cafe Tournon--photographing away--not at the cafe, you understand, but he was part of the crowd there--photographing away...
--You keep saying that.
--All right, I’ll make it brief. He had a Dutch girlfriend--another form of acculturation, integration of the colonized with the colonizers--although he probably had met her in Amsterdam and not Sumatra--whose grandfather was a millionaire. I don’t know what her father did, but it doesn’t usually much matter when your grandfather is a millionaire. And this millionaire--whose name I have long since forgotten if I ever knew it, which is unlikely--he came to Paris because he was worried about his granddaughter who was the apple of his eye and the light of his declining years and all the rest of it, and he was worried about her. There she goes off to Paris to study art or French civilization or whatever young girls are sent to Paris to study, and what happens?
Launched in his story, his question, for once, was rhetorical.
--She gets laid. In addition to being less racist than the other colonialists, the Dutch also seem to be more broadminded about other things like sex because the grandfather was not troubled about her being laid but about the kind of guy was laying her. This is where I come in, in case you’ve been wondering.
--I knew you’d come in eventually.
--That’s one thing about my stories, said Max. You always know who the hero is. In this case, Max the hero came in at a cafe table. Completely by chance. I was there early one afternoon sitting on the terrace, and the grandfather was there buying champagne for himself, and a little bit later for me too, and we got to talking. He asked me if I knew this guy Caproni and what I thought of him. He made no secret who he was, the old grandfather--actually he wasn’t that old--but explained about his granddaughter being the apple of his eye and his wanting to be sure she was all right because he was a millionaire and sometimes men take advantage of young girls because of their millions or prospective millions. For a moment I thought of taking advantage of her myself. But I was busy elsewhere, and Caproni seemed to be a nice enough guy, so I said so. I built it up more than that, of course, and like everything Max does, I did it well because the next thing I heard they were married.
He paused.
--I don’t know whether or not Caproni ever found out I was the one made his marriage for him.
--You probably told him.
--Oh, if I’d seen him I certainly would have told him. But I left for the Sahara or something right afterwards. and I’m not sure I ever saw him again until the interview the other night. And then I didn’t see him, of course. For one thing, they didn’t invite Max to the wedding--but then, for another, it was in Amsterdam, and I couldn’t have gotten away just then anyway.
Neither this vignette nor the Kit/Erwin relationship had any consequences. Erwin did not try to make Kit who, along with Manfred, was one of the few deserters who had no trouble getting girls. Caproni had not recognized Max’s voice or, at least, never gave him away to the police. But you never know until afterwards, as Max often said, what information is relevant and what is not. It is always information. Erwin and Caproni were in the no-consequences category of information acquired. So was Manfred’s being hooked, since it had not prevented him standing up to the police. Perhaps a novel could be written on Erwin’s love life, Caproni and the millionaire’s daughter, and why Manfred was a junkie, but none of these affected developments in the deserter movement. Drug culture advocates might maintain that the very fact of taking drugs gave Manfred the necessary courage in an emergency. Except he had not been on drugs when he had been awakened at five-thirty in the morning in an abandoned car along the Seine. And even if Caproni had told the police that Mr. Watts was Max, hence a foreigner, hence expulsable, it is extremely unlikely that they would have expelled anyone just then in 1967. Although they did not know it, at the time, they were waiting for the failure of the May ‘68 revolution in order to start their repression.
This interview, by the way, is the last of the interviews we ran that I shall present here, although, except for the sacred month of the August summer vacation in France, the interviews continued on to the eve of May ‘68. At the time, we all thought of them as a way of publicizing what we believed, correctly as it turned out, would turn into a deserter movement which quickly linked itself with the arrival of Richard and the Bond, with the Resistance Inside the Army movement. However, the psychological effect on the deserters of these open confrontations with “the media” was very beneficial to them. First of all, during the interviews, the deserters were more important than people like Max and me, who were normally in authority positions. The roles were reversed. During the interviews, the deserters took center stage--when Max was muffled, more or less, behind a white sheet. The journalists anyway clearly preferred the deserters. In everyday life, we got them jobs and places to live and scolded them when we thought they behaved irresponsibly. In January ‘67, when Manfred and Buster arrived in France, we stepped right into the role of Master Sergeant and sent them to the Compagnons Batisseurs without consulting them, and they left without consulting us, just as they had left the army. By the time the Life interview took place, Buster was using the interviewers as a fitting and approved, by us at least, target to release his aggression. The interviews were also a testing ground for all the things he was learning about the role of the military, the class struggle, and imperialism. A third function was to let the deserters meet each other and exchange experiences. Although no one else in your company had deserted, you were not a weirdo because you had. There were others like you in Paris or Sweden or Canada. Richard and Carson, for example, became good friends after the Life interview and continued to see each other as long as they were all in Paris.
Transition between May 1967 and May 1968
Manfred decided that Paris life was for him and, as far as I know, is still there. His political participation in the deserter movement had confined itself to that important but one shot action of demanding political asylum, and getting, if not asylum with a three year residence permit, at least official tolerance for American deserters in France. Objectively, Manfred played the same role as David Mitchell, a conscientious objector back in the States. I already have mentioned him here as the ideal “refuser” from the middle/upper class PACS point of view. Mitchell had gone to jail rather than to the Vietnam War, unlike Buster and Manfred who had chosen the Army rather than jail. Mitchell made a political case out of his refusal to go, just as Manfred made a political case out of his desertion. They both went to jail for their beliefs, but Manfred got only ten days whereas Mitchell got a few years. This does not mean the French government was any more clement than the US; it just wasn’t a French war any more. Mitchell has probably returned to the life he led before the war, as has Manfred, although Manfred probably prefers his life in the marginal world of Paris to life in the New Haven inner city.
We gradually lost contact with him. He had made the right choice at the right time--done the right thing, as they say--and if he wanted to stop there, it was his business. Sometimes he came to interviews, but he was always very silent, as if he had expressed himself once and for all in that first film interview and, unlike Buster, had no desire nor need to repeat himself. He stayed a loner as far as the deserter movement was concerned, a loner with what the anthropologist Joubain had described as tribal reflexes. He lived erratically, sometimes with money, sometimes broke, sometimes travelling around Europe, sometimes in jail. He had learned to speak French fluently, and if he was in jail, we usually got a letter in French through the Quaker Center where he asked us for a stake, which we always sent. The movement owed him a standing debt, and he asked for payment only when necessary and for as much or as little as he thought sufficient for his immediate needs. In that he was like Buster, who preferred to take a few days here and there, rather than a month’s vacation. Manfred preferred a reliable source of support rather than a lump sum and goodbye. And we were pleased to be that source.
We had once been afraid that the press would try to make a story out of what appeared to be Manfred’s backsliding--i.e. going to jail. However, he usually was sent to prison for theft, never on drug-related charges. And the French government never revoked its tolerance for deserters from the Vietnam War. Once a legal right is acquired in France, it usually is as hard to get it revoked as it was to get it in the first place. The spotlight shifted away from Manfred, the situation changed, and Manfred stayed on in France.
The last time I saw him was in a shoe shop on the Boulevard Saint Germain. I had gone in to price shoes, decided they were too expensive, and was turning to leave when Manfred tapped me on the shoulder. He was there with a girl, buying her a pair of shoes. I asked him how he was doing, somewhat unnecessarily since he was doing well enough to buy his girl a twenty-five dollar pair of shoes, and he told me he had just gotten back from a singing tour with a band in Holland and Belgium. I guess Simon’s plan to send him to Hanoi to sing over the radio for the American troops had not been so unrealistic after all. Anyway, Manfred was singing with a pop group and making a living. Or bringing hash across the border to sell in Paris, said Max when I told him about it. If he was, he never got caught.
Manfred took a handbill out of his wallet and showed me his name written on it, soloist with a pop group.
--But how do you travel? I asked him. You can’t cross the border on your residence permit.
--Oh, I have a passport now, said Manfred.
--How did you get that?
Manfred bent his head.
--You see, he said sadly, there was this poor Martiniquais who committed suicide and didn’t need his passport any more, so I took it.
Afterwards I wondered a little how Manfred had just happened to be there, wherever “there” was, at the time. But that was none of my business, and I did not see Manfred as a murderer. I also wondered briefly if the poor Martiniquais in question was Chico, but then Chico had not had a passport himself.
As for Buster, he was fired from his job before he had time to quit. He and his three Spanish co-workers got a girl to come up to one of their rooms, and all four of them laid her. Successively, Buster told Max, and said the girl had agreed beforehand. He had been number two and had left immediately afterwards. But the girl had called the police and said she had been beaten and raped, and the police found all four of them. Buster was questioned, but the police let the matter drop. Max was not surprised. He said that most of the single immigrant workers in France lived in a state of perpetual sexual starvation, and this sort of incident was fairly common; with no money to bring their wives to France with them, no money to get girls in France, and usually no place to take them if they did get them, the men did what they could. The Spaniard had been lucky to have a room. African workers paid for the use of a triple layer bunk when they were not working; when one left for work, another got his bunk. The American deserters fell into this category of the labor force, and the police had not singled Buster out as anything special. But we thought it best he leave Paris for awhile and sent him to the South of France.
We went him to a group Max knew of near Nice. Most of them were our age and older. They had broken with the Communist Party after the Second World War, were sympathetic to young Leftists but had been running a very legal support of anti-Vietnam activities. In their hands Buster underwent a complete psychological change, became the nearest thing to a provincial Frenchman that he could, except that he maintained his rather individualistic version of French. He eventually went off to Canada with one of the girls in the group. The last we saw of him was in Newsweek, appropriately enough. The deserter movement had outlived Life Magazine which had folded sometime not too long after our interview with them. Buster was giving an interview to Newsweek as one of the leaders of the Toronto deserter movement. He had once said he thought Max had a great job, so I guess it was a happy ending for him.
Jim O’Kelly and Keith Pearson were second wave deserters and the top of an iceberg that was to float into Paris, Sweden, and Canada for the duration of the Vietnam War. I became friendly with Jim after the war, since he stayed on in Paris and, partly thanks to John Cavanaugh’s help and friendship, made a very good career as television sound man. And for all I know, he is there to this day. John did not like Keith Pearson, however, and disposed of him in the PACS way by sending him “anyplace but here.” Sweden and Canada were both possibilities. John sent Keith to Canada, at his own cost, as well as two other deserters. But even for a wealthy man like John, parcel post was no solution once deserters began to come regularly over the border. By 1968, John’s interest, like mine to a certain extent, had turned toward local revolution. Keith himself went back to the US Army and probably denounced us as communists, but the CID and CID knew all about us by that time. As Max said, “Never underestimate the enemy.”
After Buster left, Richard took Kit in hand. Erwin Adler had been all right theoretically, but had panicked whenever Kit took initiatives--like the time he had wanted to fly to England, or when he got drunk and kicked in all the headlights on the cars parked along the Boulevard Saint Germain. Both Richard and Kit helped with the increasing stream of deserters coming into France, but the new arrivals represented their own past, and the work with them was no solution for their future. Max and I were the older generation, and although we had gotten them started, they had to show us they could make it without us. In any case, our solutions were not theirs. We tried to give them as much contact as possible with the French student groups, but neither Richard nor Kit had ever been university students, and they never really learned enough French to participate in the meetings. This was the situation when May ‘68 broke loose in Paris, and a whole new world created itself for them and for everyone else in France. Even those who were appalled by it had to admit it was new. For the two months of May and June, all individual problems were swallowed up in the revolutionary movement.
15 MAY ‘68--SORBONNE
--So you see, I don’t know.
--Slowly, slowly. What is it exactly they want you to do?
--I just told you, said Richard resentfully.
--Well, tell me again. Uncle Max needs time to think. The last I heard, you were supposed to go out to Nanterre to speak about Resistance Inside the Army, and I had many doubts on that subject. I’m all in favor of bringing the good word to the students, but I consider it a very secondary priority compared with getting the word out to the GI’s. And if you get sent to jail, bud, we’ll all really feel the loss. I don’t want you to get swell-headed or anything--
--Okay, okay. That’s exactly what I’m asking you, Max.
--I don’t know what you’re asking me. I’m trying to find out.
--I just told you. Henri says Nanterre has been closed, and they’re moving the meeting to the Sorbonne.
--Oh, the Sorbonne! Well, why didn’t you say so! I feel much better about the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne is perfectly okay. Sure.
--It is?
--Look, bud, I’ll give you a short lesson on French history. Capsule size. The Sorbonne is one of the oldest universities in Europe. Along with Bologna, I think. Bologna’s in Italy. Both were established sometime in the 12th century. Shortly afterwards--or at least by the 16th century, says Uncle Max, dismissing 400 years of history with a flicker--the students got--were given, theoretically, but possibly because of their own pressure on the authorities--they were given an independent status in many respects. Now how this affects you is that the Sorbonne is the one place the police can’t go. I mean, there is practically a four hundred year precedent. Whereas Nanterre is a new creation and does not benefit from this tradition. Maybe it does in theory, but it ain’t the Sorbonne. At any rate, the cops were certainly out at Nanterre the other day. Besides, it’s a big sprawling campus and who knows where it begins or ends. Wide open to police cars. But the Sorbonne is a building right in the middle of the Latin Quarter, and there has never been any question of the police blundering into it “by mistake.” Or on purpose. The inviolability of the Sorbonne is one of those traditions of French politics like not invading a church was in the Middle Ages. A tacit agreement. Like where you demonstrate. The Left demonstrates in the Latin Quarter and around the Bastille and the Republique; the Right on the Champs-Elysées. At various times in the past, before the last war, for example, the Right got control of the Latin Quarter--national fascist groups calling themselves the Camelots du Roi or Action Francaise, but after the Liberation, the Left students re-established themselves on what had been traditionally their home ground, the Latin Quarter--so named because students in the Middle Ages spoke or at least studied mainly from the Latin texts--and it’s been pretty much that way ever since. The Right, of course, doesn’t put much emphasis on demonstrations. Every 14th of July they drag out their armed might and march in front of the reviewing stands along the Champs-Elysées, but that’s about it. Where was I?
--You said it was okay if I spoke in the Sorbonne.
--Sure. I’m much less worried about you there. We’ll see if you’re questioned about it the next time you get to the Prefecture to get your carte de séjour renewed. When did you say the meeting is?
--It’s against imperialism.
--I didn’t say what. I asked when?
--Oh, on May 3rd. I think it’s a Friday.
--Fine. I won’t go myself, but it’s okay if you go.
§ § §
Richard had pretty much gotten used to the idea that there was nothing doing with Alex, June’s daughter. He didn’t hold it against Henri, who was French and a revolutionary and a much more impressive character than
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