Growing Up Underground
Alpert, Jane
compared with her guest in the royal box at the Opera, the Empress Eugenic . . . . Reared for a throne, the Queen sat down without looking to see whether there was a chair or not to sit down on,...
...them...
...I'm out...
...Who was Jane Alpert when no one else was looking...
...One begins to suspect him of not trying vdry hard, of picking up garbage and trying to disguise i t as haute cuisine...
...There is no clue, however, to the meaning of his well-remembered greeting...
...A former radical Who jumped bail after pleading guilty to involvement in several bombings in the late 1960s, Alpert went underground for four years and eventually resurfaced tO serve a twenty-month prison term...
...Meatloaf, red cabbage, the old daybed, moldy tires in the basement, my mother's Chinese red chenille bathrobe, which faintly breathed out the myriad aromatics of countless breakfasts past, swept over me . . . My mother seemed stunned to see me squatting in the kitchen wearing a snowy GI overcoat . . . "When do you have to go back...
...These volumes are library bound, with gold lettering on a handsome dark green cloth cover...
...She was sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison and f r e e d a f t e r twenty for good behaviol...
...I was screaming against everyone and everything that had stood in my way--the boys who had rejected me, the man who had fired my father when I was nine, my absent father, my mother, my brother . . . . A telling phrase: stoodin my way...
...This strategy enables her to resort to a superbly useful confusion whenever her account of her activities threatens our "good opinion" of her...
...A FisOCul of Fig Newtons is Shepherd's third collection of short stories and essays and, like the preceding two, is framed by the predicament of the narrator-,here, a commuter stuck in a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel, indulging in flights of fancy and recollection to relieve the boredom and maintain sanity as he fights off an encroaching "Puerto Rican in a battered van, marked ACE PLUMBING SUPPLIES," who is about to beat him out of a precious inch of roadl and an airport bus that "sent a blast of diesel fumes that caught me f a i r and square, a clean s h o t . " In between we are treated to the story of a titanic laxative-eating contest in a dormitory...
...Gerhardie also shows an attractive sympathy for the culture and people of Russia, where, as the son of a British cotton-manufacturer, he was born and brought up in St...
...A FISTFUL OF FIG NEWTONS Jean Shepherd / Doubleday / $14.95 Joseph A. Rehyansky S eton Hall University, 1966...
...I cannot imagine, either, how even the most stubbornly conservative i n t e r p r e t e r of the counterculture could pat himself on the shoulder on the basis of this tacky, shrill chronicle...
...Every time I glanced around it stopped...
...for his euphuistic flair cannot hide the fact that the ideas couched in his pretty prose are almost always secondhand, mediocre, silly--and utterly commonplace...
...Alpert is prepared, of course, to let her unconscious (i.e., pain and rage and other damaging leftovers from an imperfect childhood) take the rap, but even there she is slippery...
...Got any salami in the icebox...
...The cell was bare except for the cot, a toilet, a sink with an open drain, and a roll of toilet paper...
...Nor did I find another clue to the meaning of this worrisome scrawl for another 14 years, until I hit page 182 of A Fistful ofFig Newtons...
...After sidling up to the edges of the antiwar movement when she was in her twenties, Alpert met a man who embodied her wish for power and then some...
...A father (attentive and loving), a mother (harried and undemonstrative), a handicapped younger brother (time-consuming and resented), good marks at school, some difficulty making fridnds--the usual mixed fortune...
...I paid my dues...
...insight and tragic sense than sneering Schadenj~eude, and above all with some acceptance that human beings, more than God, are most often responsible for their own disasters...
...Actually, they're my f a t h e r ' s , gifts from me to the man who introduced me to Shepherd, almost ten years before...
...Today, the memoir need not pose questions or offer clues, because it is meant to address itself to our prevailing anxiety--the fear of being lost in the shuffle...
...Every home has its own distinctive aroma, which reflects the diet, the skin condition, the personal habits, the state of deterioration of the sofa, of the specific family-that is holed up in that particular cubicle...
...And damn it all, she would make us sit up and take notice...
...One read about someone else's coming-of-age presumably in order to locate oneself in that process...
...Alexander Haig, Tom Wolfe, James Jackson Kilpatrick, George Gilder, Jack Paar, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Will, J. Peter Grace, Maj...
...Once underground, her politics, never c e r t a i n , shifted with the wind...
...The body of Chekhov (the name annoyingly mistransliterated as "Chehov") is gloatingly shown being taken away in a van marked " O y s t e r s , " followed for a while by the wrong funeral procession...
...When she threatened to go on a date with another man, Melville retaliated by planting a bomb in the arbitrarily chosen Marine Midlands Bank...
...She "relUctantly agreed" to accept the lawyer her parents chose--"an expensive type in a silk tie and $400 s u i t ' ' - - a n d then let him go for an even more expensive one, but one with the proper leftist credentials...
...it also follows that war is most often a horribly stupid and bloody exercise and therefore often horribly wrong...
...I was dreading the return to Forest Hills as though it were a prison," From the horrors of living in a Queens apartment with middle-class, 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY" 1982 traditional but essentially indulgent parents, Jane escaped to the wilds of Swarthmore College...
...Out of theArmy...
...Everyone spills his story, from White House nannies to ex-heads of state...
...Qaddafi...
...She resented the need for a disguise, for the hated eyeglasses and the unflattering shade of h e r dyed hair...
...I don't have to go back...
...She stood by the sink, plucking nervously at her bathrobe...
...Perhaps I need Ovaltine's Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring...
...There are two observations I would like to make...
...Our supply is limited, so send an order today to ensure yourself a copy of this collector's item, sure to increase in value...
...Does an August spent by a teen-age Jane in outdoor play and tentative sexual experimentation with the children of family friends strike the unwary reader as benign...
...new views of Hohman, Indiana during the Depression, where the sun sets through a brasscolored sky...
...I'nevitably, with the appearance of this volume, the tired old comparisons of Jean Shepherd with Twain, Mencken, and his own hero, George Ade...
...George Demmerle, an undercover agent posing as a member of a group called the "Crazies," got the full story of the bombings from him and in November 1969, Melville and Alpet:t, along with Nate Yarrow, were taken into custody...
...That'~ what I was wondering as I sat through Shep's three-hour show It was supposed to last two hours, but at 11 o'clock he hollered to one of the stage hands: "Would you please call WOR and tell them to put on one of my old tapes?--I ain't gonna make it by 11:30...
...Possibly he was conscious of the failure, and continued for that reason to tinker with the text until he died...
...One might as well try to compare the achievement of Neil Armstrong with that of ChristoPher Columbus...
...The elegant vocabulary and classical reference serve only to heighten the vulgarity of such flea-market xenophobia, placing Gerhardie right on the level of the "mob" which he affects to despise...
...She manages to be both excruciatingly honest and resolutely self-protective--two qualities, I might add, which usually cancel each other out...
...But Alpert refuses to see any of this as unremarkable...
...Much better writers (like his model Tolstoy) have fallen just as far short in the self-cast role of Guru...
...If no one entered the cell while I was asleep and if I -remembered not to run tap water over them, they would survive...
...I tore offa length of toilet paper and wiped the sink dry...
...and other stories bound to enhance Shepherd's reputation as a humorist, savage wit, and truthteller...
...Such meanness and nastiness is unfortunately all too typical of the book...
...Obviously I was as unreal to her as she was to me...
...will be revived...
...political action is often horribly and lethally unpredictable...
...it follows that our leaders are often horribly foolish or weak or crooked...
...Probably the worst of these literary snickers describes Oscar Wilde's feeble deathbed assent to conversion by a Catholic priest, and then sends him offlike this: The supposed conversion--on a different plane of extremity--is reminiscent of a German bitch, blind, deaf, and halfparalyzed with old age...
...I come across "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories" which, a f t e r " S c u t Farkas and the Eighter from Decatur," turns out to be the best thing Shepherd ever did...
...Then I tore a second length, folded it several times, and laid it over the drain...
...I'm done...
...the love of money and the love of power (not to mention the love of people en masse) is often horribly corrupting...
...More than anything else, Growing Up Underground is the story of a girl who wanted to be noticed--at any cost...
...the many real-life Moll Flanderses who populated eighteenth century London did not kiss and tell...
...Growing Up Underground is confession without revelation, alternately infuriating and saddening...
...What she proved instead was her commitment to J a n e Atpert...
...There is persuasive evidence here, too, of the a u t h o r ' s growth as an artist...
...Home for good...
...The riddle--Who am I?--has given way to more pressing questions: Who am I when no one else is looking...
...There, at a demonstration protesting conditions at a nearby black school, she had her first taste of unbridled, irrational omnipotence: As if hypnotized, I was frantically stamping my feet, cheering "Freedom...
...straight off: The first is that Growing Up Underground is not set in a political context, except !n the most superficial and ready-made way...
...Not to be outdone, Alpert responded with an even more brazen action: Dressed like a debutante, in " a white A-line dress, kid gloves (to avoid leaving fingerprints), and a touch of makeup," she traveled by New York City bug with a bomb in her purse and placed it in the Federal Building at Foley Square...
...GROWING UP UNDERGROUND Jane Alpert / William Morrow / $12.95 Daphne Merkin Ours is a culture enamored of public disclosures...
...This self-proclaimed utopian visionary sat in the women's house of detention and worried about the fate of her contact lenses: I looked around in the moonlight for a place to put...
...Mother Right," for example, the essay published while she was still underground, is a frenzied denunciation of leftist politics in the shape of Sam Melville after her conversion to feminist politics in the shape of Robin Morgan...
...The only thing she will not do is accept responsibility...
...how did he know?--two years later, in Vietnam, sitting in a hex t e n t , listening to the heat, and thumbing through a mildewed copy of Playboy...
...it has no Daphne Merkin is an editor at McCall's and former book critic for the New Leader...
...Joseph A. Rehyansky is an enlisted veteran o f service in Vietnam with George S. Patton llI's llth Armored Cavalry Regiment, a aontmbutor to National Review, and a lawyer...
...His account of tile squaIid slaughter of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in a Siberian cellar is unique in the book--vivid, deeply felt, moving, untouched by the facile sarcasm and Schadenfreude which spoils so much of the rest, including the other death scenes...
...Behind it was a hell-bent sense of entitlement, a startling inability to tolerate the aspects o f reality that failed to gratify...
...Private life left private no longer suffices...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, EIIiott Abrams, Lewis Lehrman, Charity Wheeler White, Shmuel Moyal, Huntington Cairns, Eric Hoffer, Anne Armstrong, Norman Po~horetz, Jeff MacNelly, Doris Grumbach, Ernest van den Haag, Paul McCracken, Brock Yates, Ray Price, James Wechsler, James Glassman, John Roche, John Chamberlain, William Satire, Neal Kozodoy, Henry Salvatori, David Meiselman, Martin Peretz, Charles Horner, Edward Banfield, Victor Lasky, Raymond Aron, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Hugh Kenner, Frank Shakespeare, William Proxmire, Patrick Cosgrave, Jean-Fran~;ois Revel, Luigi Barzini, Tom Charles H uston, Clay La Force, Fred Silverman, John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans, Dana Andrews, Richard Whalen, Richard Lugar, Henry Regnery, Charles Peters, John Lukacs, Leonard Garment, Michael Kinsley, Tom Winter, Nathan Glazer, Alan Reynolds, Antonio Martino, Colin Welch, Robert Bleiberg, Herb Stein, Roger Starr, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, Jeffrey Hart, David Packard, Robert Nisbe L James R. Schlesinger, Thomas Murphy, Suzanne Garment, Roger Rosenblatt, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, David Stockman, Richard Allen, Ernest Lefever, Sen...
...In his defense it might be said that if his hatred was clumsy and a little too infected with petulance and spite, he did try to hate the right things...
...He was paroled in 1972...
...Hammett, Adin K. Woodward, Robert Lekachman, and many others...
...long after I was too hoarse to make a sound...
...O'Rourke, William M.H...
...Released on $20,000 bail raised by her unflaggingly responsible parents, the ever-impressionable Alpert was persuaded by Robin Morgan Bound EditiOn TODAY," Orders for 1981 bound editions of The American Slmetator (volume 14) are now being taken...
...I am vindicated...
...Hayakawa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger, Clayton Fritchey, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynthan, Midge Decter, James Q. Wilson, David Brinkley, Woody Allen, Joseph Coors, Irving Kristol, Henry Fairlie, Alan Abelson, Charlton Heston, Senator Jake Garn, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Hitchcock, Gen...
...It smears the portraits even of those whom Gerhardie professes to admire, using "God's Fifth Column" (i.e., the "comic spirit") as an excuse for venting spleen and contemptuous bad temper on his caricatures...
...I unbuttoned my GI overcoat, pretend36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982...
...Payment enclosed City [] Bill me later State Zip X2MP I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 35 to become a fugitive and thereby prove her commitment to the revolution...
...At least one--' 'The Marathon Run of Lonesome Ernie, the Arkansas T r a v e l e r " - - i s a fleshed-out and detailed retelling of one of his old radio bits, a story I first heard about 20 years ago and have never forgotten--at once funny, sad, surrealistic, and uniquely American...
...It is here that the story becomes interesting: Melville, who had the least money and the least savoir-faire in dealing with the "straight" world, was denied bail, sentenced to eighteen years, and eventually killed during the Attica riots...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Please enter a Please Print [] new Name [] renewal subscription to The American Spectator for one Address year (12 issues) for only $18...
...True or not, it is a cheap shot, and the book overflows with these...
...And so were we...
...But I write Shepherd a note telling him how much I enjoyed it, and I quickly receive a short but warm reply...
...I h a v e n ' t got the book yet...
...an unforgettable story of a 24-hour stint of KP on a sealed troop train during World War II ( " I t mugt have been about the tenth or fifteenth hour that I became conscious, dimly through the hullabaloo and the scorching heat, that somebody in my immediate vicinity was snoring fitfully...
...A line about his father sticks in my throat, reminds me of mine, and brings tears to my eyes (or maybe it was just a dysentery cramp...
...PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip c~ >r The American Spectator, Bound Editiom P.O...
...Among the Left, however, she acquired heroine status --personifying uncompromised resistance to the system...
...From the security of that made-up family," Alpert pontificates, "I felt capable of taking on the world...
...which may give that epitaph at least a touch of honor...
...From there on in, it was easy...
...Who the hell was it...
...Three years is a long time...
...Do I disappear...
...Paul Laxalt, Joseph A. Califano, Garry Trudeau, David E. Davis, P.3...
...One mark of a writer of real stature, as opposed to one who just manipulates language with euphuistic skill, is that he treats the events and consequences which give rise to such bromides with more wisdom than petty irritation, more charity and wit than shallow sarcasm, more...
...After fifteen or twenty minutes of this i r r i t a t i n g phlegmy sound, I realized that it was me...
...Out of what...
...Once upon a time, autobiography was the province of men and women of achievement...
...She turned on the hot water in the sink and instinctively began to swab the cupboard top with a damp Brillo pad...
...George S. Patton, III, Fred Ik16, Philip Crane, George W. Ball, Tom Stoppard, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patrick Buchanan, Albert Shanker, Lewis Lapham, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, Jude Wanniskl, Jack Kemp, William Rusher, Richard M. Nixon, William E. Simon, Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Thomas J. Lescher, Norman Mailer, Clare Boothe Luce, Gerald R. Ford, Metvin Lasky, Nelson Polsby, Roger Milliken, Randolph Richardson, Thomas Sowell, Sidney Hook, Jim Fallows, Edith Efron, Gen...
...And what happened to Alpert...
...I I I I I I I I I I I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.O...
...Although people in the movement were almost sacrificially generous in giving her sanctuary, Alpert throughout seemed less concerned with the cause than with the minutiae of her appearance...
...ALSO: Ronald Reagan, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ben Wattenberg, Peregrine Worsthorne, S.I...
...no longer does his kid brother Randy "mewl and puke" under the sink when he d o e s n ' t get what he wants--he bangs his head against the wall until the Old Man, having had enough, suspends him by one ear, and whomps his behind...
...I reject these comparisons partly because they fail to do Shepherd justice, but primarily because they are grotesquely inadequate: He speaks to us of an era, of attitudes and phenomena, of which these predecessors, however worthy, knew not...
...As Gerhardie goes on, generalization crowds out detail, the air of supercilious smugness becomes more suffocating, while the pronouncements wax more banal...
...Only when her mistress bent down close to her and shouted ioudly in her ear, 'Scho-ko-ladeI,' she would turn over and twitch feebly with her forelegs, in a faint shadow of reminiscent pleasure...
...She lay in a corner all day, oblivious to the world...
...Kathy Boud i n , h e r s e l f a fugitive, risked a special visit.to try to argue Alpert out of her much-publicized " r a d i c a l - feminist" principles . . . . In the late fall of 1974, post-Watergate, Alpert turned herself in...
...All was forgiven...
...Tolstoy is laid to rest with much derisive rumination on his preaching of love and his failure to love his own wife...
...William Randolph Hearst, Jr...
...Think again...
...the other is that Alpert appears to recognize this fact without actually admitting to it...
...I t is true that much of the material handled by novelists and historians is fundamentally banal: People and nations are often horribly cruel to each other...
...Again the snoring commenced...
...Please provide street address for UPS delivery...
...even in hindsight, she takes her growing pains seriously...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, IN 4740~ Who reads The American Spectator...
...Yep...
...I had stopped thinking about Franklin school, the citizens of Chester, the evils of racism and poverty . . . . In its place was something else, a f,ry that tore out of me with a life of its own, primitive as infancy...
...Petersburg...
...Their " f u n " came to an end because Melville couldn't keep his mouth shut...
...The American Spectator bound volume is an excellent reference work for anyone interested in the year's past events and personalities --covering everything from the demise of Jimmy Carter's presidency to the maniacal rule of Col...
...For those who might be tempted to conclude that Shepherd writes only for the funny bone, I'll offer this one passage, which memorializes his unannounced return home, at 2:30 in the morning, from three years of service during World War Ih Instantly, I was engulfed in the totally familiar smell of my own family nest...
...The Empress Eugenic . . . first glanced round to make sure...
...And, if that's what he meant, how did he know...
...The game I was playing was essential to my stability, but it was also more dangerous than I dared admit...
...So ravenous and unselective a mass curiosity suggests, I think, something newly misshapen in the way we think about ourselves...
...Jean Shepherd...
...I can tell you: She was that most common of creatures, a rebel with insufficient cause...
...I want to order bound editions of the 1981 The American Spectator at $35 each...
...He was having too much fun...
...Just when you conclude that she has supplied all the psychological evidence contributing to her delinquency-the personal pathology of her i, elationship with Sam Melville easing the way to a more dramatically enacted maladjustment--she abandons that tack and breathlessly begins spouting bits of movement ideology- "We believed that the world could be cleansed of all domination and submission, that perception itself could be purified of the division into subject and object, that power playing between nations, sexes, races, ages, between animals and humans [[], individuals and groups, could be brought to an end...
...an appreciation of a true tour de force in tantrum-throwing on a bus bound for summer camp...
...If, like Linda Lovelace, you are too busy---or too lazy--to jot down your impressions, professional collaborators will do the work for you...
...You mean you're home for good...
...Those who come to it hoping to learn more about a particularly ugly period of dissent in American history or about the kinds of people who became involved in radical politics during the late 1960s will be d i s a p p o i n t e d - - unless they come prepared to believe that Alper.t's unexamined and longstanding will to power is paradigmatic...
...My God," says Shep, looking at the first one, "Where the hell did you get t h i s ? " He writes something friendly and innocuous on the cover...
...There, in " L o s t at C , " an epic about grade school and high school wherein the author--damn his h i d e - - r e v e a l s virtually every secret known to kids for avoiding getting called on in class (when all else fails, "repeat silently, with intense concentration, the hypnotic command Don't call on me, Don't call on me, Don't call on me, sending out invisible waves of powerful thought energy until the teacher's mind is mysteriously c l o u d e d " ) , Shepherd boasts that " t h e years passed, punctuated by occasional tight squeaks, but.my true identity as a faker was never really in danger of exposure...
...An index is also included...
...What did he mean...
...compared with her guest in the royal box at the Opera, the Empress Eugenic . . . . Reared for a throne, the Queen sat down without looking to see whether there was a chair or not to sit down on, convinced, as unshakably as she reigned by divine right, that a seat would be duly pushed up for her...
...Is that what you mean...
...Removing my lenses, I placed them on the folded tissue...
...Enclosed is my check for...
...A sexy drifter, eight years her senior and many years ahead of her in derring-do, Sam Melville stocked her refrigerator with stolen explosives and showed her everything she didn't yet know about sex and drugs...
...It begins, as such psychodramas do, with a childhood that could fool you into thinking of it as more or l e s s normal...
...Her sense of timing was unerring...
...Yarrow, who came from a more affluent background but was r e p r e s e n t e d by a relatively inexperienced lawyer from the same law commune that represented Melville, decided not to appeal his sentence...
...I don't even have a copy of this one anymore.'" He looks me up and down, full-length, quickly but thoroughly, and scrawls, "For Joe, A real faker...
...On the outbreak of World War II we are given this reflection: Germans [like locusts] seem to be thermotropic, but their movements are due not so much to the heat of the sun as to that of Mars...
...Jane Alpert's "autobiography," Growing Up Underground, is a perfect instance of the "new" 'memoir--a form freed of the burden of enlightenment...
...This is supposed to be one more example of God's sense of hum0r...
...Several more bombings were to come, according to plans drafted by the " g r o u p , " a bewilderingly on-again-off-again collection of budding t e r r o r i s t s who seemed never to share views about anything--not even about the delicate issue of political violence...
...aura to it...
...I am still wondering--what did he mean...
...This is not a conclusion I care to d r a w - - n o t , at any r a t e , on the basis of an account whose sole purpose seems to be the a u t h o r ' s self-vindication...
...On all these counts Gerhardie fails in this book, and fails badly...
...In God We Trust--All Others Pay Cash has just been published, and Jean Shepherd will be autographing copies before his show...
...Then, looking at the second one, "Holy cow...
...The reader cannot hope to pin her down: Alpert is always decamping and, being an extremist by nature, she tends not just to abandon outposts but to raze them...
...She was angry, for calculable and incalculable r e a s o n s , but f.~r worse, she was ignored...
...Instead, stuffed under my arm, are the only two record albums Shep ever cut...
...Some of the gtories have appeared in print before, and some are new--at least to the printed page...
Vol. 15 • May 1982 • No. 5
