THE PRISONER

...At first he had known very little about the other prisoners and they had cared very little about him because he was strange and odd and they were patriotic citizens of New Hampshire not easily convinced that their Attorney-General would engage himself on an errand other than of simple justice...

...My roommate gave me a broom handle to get it open...

...One of them said hopefully that, now that it was raining so hard, maybe my friends would go away, and a Negro prisoner said, 'Don't expect that...

...I was only half aware that four inches of snow had fallen and yet, when May came, and I knew that eighty miles away the camp was beginning to open, I was tempted...

...Here you would be taking a few steps and you were hitting the wall...

...He says that he is glad that he had not caved in and had not informed, but henceforth he says nothing which is smug and nothing which is vindictive...

...Nothing teems to have come of the offer...

...It is not given to many of us, when we are old, to be offered the challenge that he was offered, and it is given to even fewer to accept it as bravely as Willard Uphaus did...

...Uphaus was director...

...But Willard Uphaus refusid to deliver...

...The expression was 'taking a shave.' They would take a shave and stand before the mirror and then nobody would come...

...You could not," he went on, "get to the window near my cell...

...The Attorney-General replied, in the flat terms practical men use to predict the future, that Uphatis would deliver when the chips were down...

...there is, of course, no reason to know what the judge would have thought of the proposal if anything had...

...And yet those of us who are outside are bitter and Willard Uphaus who was in is not...

...we spoke of his mistakes as a way of describing our own virtues...

...To do tras, he said, "would be to bear false witness against my brother...

...I figured that with sixty-six round trips I did a mile...

...Uphaus answered that lie would talk about himself as long 'jfcs the Attorney-General wished, but jjjjje would give him no list...

...after 355 days, the State having grown weary of this stubborn old man, he was set loose...

...I often think that there must be something that I could do for Louis Wyman...

...And yet they were lonely, and, after awhile, as Willard Uphaus sat in his prison alone on the upper tier, the men below him—whom he could not see—put out mirrors so that he could see the pictures of their children and talk with them about their debts and the troubles which had brought them there...

...But this is not walking...

...But the bottom was opaque and the top was dirty...

...Sometimes you could stand on the bars and look out...

...It looked," he remembers, "like a post office...

...Walking is seeing things...

...But, even so, there are always exceptions and for them, be the buji-ness done as succinctly as possible: In 1955, Willard Uphaus was sufp-moned by Attorney-General Louis Wyman who, as his state's investigator of subversive influences, had concentrated on World Fellowship, a summer camp near Concord, of whSdi Dr...

...Now we can never do that again...

...THE PRISONER by MURRAY KEMPTON It would be strange if there ware sentient persons still who did not know of Willard Uphaus, who, hardly a year ago, was an obscure, slightly cranky pacifist, at large in New Hampshire, a corner of the United States as removed as Death Valley used to be...

...The rest is what Willard Uphaus learned, felt, and remembered during that year when he was being changed into a monument to history...

...I have come," Uphaus said, "as I never had before, to think of the place of the body...

...I would walk the catwalk from my cell to the window all day," he t said...

...He used to set them around his cell, sorted according to state and nation of origin...

...Wyman <fc-manded a list of World Fellowships guests...

...Such is the history up to now...

...He's a political prisoner.' "Afterwards my friends were thoughtful enough to call over the loud speaker and thank the prisoners for the price they had paid...

...Then it was over and they let us out and we had a coffee break and the bitterness dissolved...

...It fitted an idea with which he had become more intimate than tver before in his seventy years—the idea of shared experience...

...And yet never before in all my life have I had quite such a sense of the seasons coming and going...

...He always, on that one day a week, had too many visitors for his quota...

...They felt when they were free and they felt when they were in prison that nobody loved them...

...He seemed to me once—and I was wrong—before all this happened, an old bore who talked too much...

...I used to think to myself, 'When you are without friends and without a lawyer, then God help you.' " Willard Uphaus was different from them because he had friends...

...For I am restless whenever there is anyone outside the Fellowship...

...And altogether," he said, "I got 3,700 letters...

...they're gonna stay.' "One of the men below shouted at me: 'You could walk out tomorrow if you wanted to.' "And some more of them were saying the same thing when another man said: 'Don't you understand...

...It is climbing a fence or stumbling into a ditch...

...He's not like us...

...Willard Uphaus, who rejected every blandishment to come out, accepted this one with pride and gratitude...

...In December, 1959, Se went to the New Hampshire Houfs of Correction to serve an indefinite term for affronting Attorney-Geneifil Wyman...

...It was right in the summer and I wanted so much to go out I almost said, 'Good God, this is enough.'" The longest night of all for him was a cold and rainy one last October when a group of his friends came up for a twenty-four-hour vigil outside the prison...

...I began to feel terribly how much they were paying the price with me, being locked up for twenty-four hours...

...I suppose it is so that we can learn the difference and so that we will remember it every time we hit the wall that they put men in prison...

...There were so few of them with a criminal intent...

...The superintendent locked the prisoners in their cells for all that period—fearing a disturbance— and, as the night went on, Willard Uphaus's prison companions commenced to growl and cry out at him...

...The worst of times was the day the visitors were supposed to come...

...He went to the United States Supreme Court and was rebuffed by a five to four majority to which Justice Black gave this majestic dissent: "My guess is that history will look with no more favor upon the imprisonment of Willard Uphaus thjpi it has upon that of [John] Bunyan loathe many others like him...

...MURRAY KEMPTON, columnist for the New York Post, recently spent several hours with Willard Uphaus...

...It was their loneliness that he remembers most...

...But people can see and feel the suffering body...

...His grace stands proving us wrong...

...You could lock up the Bill of Rights and it would make very little difference...

...He had gotten himself talked about as a Communist fellow-traveler...

...Yet one thinks of him alone in his cell and one thinks of Justice Black alone in his chambers, hope long past that anyone is listening, telling us how ashamed our children's children will be of us who put Black and Warren and Douglas in the minority and Uphaus in jail...

...A faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania wrote to him and asked his permission to gather together a group of persons each of whom would offer himself to the State Supreme Court to serve one month in prison in Uphaus' place...

...He remembers the House of Correction as a wise and ancient bird might remember his cage...

...Restless he remains at seventy, restless and wondering what he can do with the years that remain of his life...

...for we are his debtors so long as we live...

...Willard Uphaus is now a part cjf that history...

...1 asked them why they kept it that way, and they said it was for our privacy...