What I've Learned About Being a Man

I should have known I was letting myself in for trouble when I agreed to do a piece for the 30th Anniversary Issue of Playboy and the editor who called me mentioned that the magazine had chosen as a subject "The Things I've Learned About Manhood That You Can Learn Only Through Experience." Manhood is a peculiar word in this day and age, objectionable to the ladies and with all sorts of dubious Hemingway overtones, and I was not sure that I wanted to defend my attainment of this particular eminence, if it actually existed, in the pages of a magazine in which the unabashed female figure plays such a large part.

Or anywhere else, for that matter. Since I was well into maturity 30 years ago and I doubted that I would have the editorial space to go back to the womb and through toilet training and the weaning process, as well as my schooldays, my first experiments with sex, the postpuberty period and World War Two, when my manhood should have been, to all intents and purposes, in full flower, I opted for a comparatively brief and rather impressionistic account of what I had done and felt in the past 30 years and hoped that the editors would be satisfied. They were--approximately. However, as editors will, they made some suggestions, all of which I considered sane and a few of which I considered helpful. So, with scissors and Scotch tape and some too-copious additions, I revealed more than I had first thought necessary about how one man, at least, survived the past 30 years. It remains for the reader to ascertain what, if anything, the years had to do with manhood or womanhood or any kind of hood at all.

•

Take any 30 years and try to judge whether they have been good or bad, whether you have suffered or exulted in them, whether in the giant scheme of things they have been worth while or worthless, whether in one comprehensive phrase you can put a name, a shape to them, whether you are glad they are over or whether, errors and disasters included, you would give your soul to relive them exactly as they were. If you are like me, it would take years of weighing and sober consideration to come up with a coherent answer.

The 30 years have passed, but the balance sheet is still open. As the accountants might put it, the bottom line has not yet been reached. (continued on page 188)Being A Man(continued from page 184) Contradictions become less obvious at the age of 70 than at 40--acts and decisions in retrospect become ambiguous, shifting in value. Did I say no when I should have said yes? Did I tolerate where toleration was weakness and, at other times, was I forbidding when acceptance would have been strength? Did I knowingly betray and condone betrayal in others? Did I buy when I should have sold; did I trust the wrong advisor; did I squander my means, both financially and artistically, or husband them as best I could? Did I forgive too easily or hate too long; were there men I allowed to walk free whom I should have put in jail; did I, out of pity and at an expense of spirit, endure people who bored me and turn away from people whose manners annoyed me but to whom I should have listened? On those occasions when I took bold steps and thought them courageous, was it merely senseless bravado? Did I work too much and play too little? Was I mistaken in proportion? Did I go to the less-amusing party, take the wrong girl home from the dance?

The questions haunt me, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable.

Where do I stand now? Am I as I am because my character and acts had been foreordained when the nebula was coalescing into the solar system or is everything I have done, from biting my fingernails as a child to getting drunk last Saturday night, the result of eternal free will? Would I have been a different man in another century or, as the behaviorists believe, have I been inexorably shaped by the era in which I find myself? If no man is an island, neither is he his own clock. Endlessly, we seek to find out to what hour the shadow on the dial is pointing. Man is an animal who seeks to measure, classify and set up comprehensive orders, and he seeks help where he can find it from experts in the field.

Because of their professions, historians and journalists (those instant baptizers and shapers of concepts) feel forced to put names to trends and periods of time. So we have the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the age of faith, the age of reason, the age of discovery, the Hundred Years' War, the Era of Good Feeling, the Industrial Revolution, the golden Twenties, the jazz age, the age of anxiety, the silent generation, the permissive decade, the space age and many others. No description has yet been accepted for the budding Eighties, but the word dread, in one of its forms, should certainly be high on the list of candidates for a place in the title.

The truth is, I believe, that human lives are difficult to lump under general headings. Signs and calculations are deceptive. The phrenologists' science, once considered informative, no longer leads us to believe that the bump on so-and-so's forehead is a guarantee of creativeness, that because of the conformation of his skull or a lack of a chin, an infant is a born criminal or a latent genius. Intelligence tests do not forecast for us who shall succeed and who fail; the life lines that crease our palms do not inform us of who shall live and who die; youthful wonders turn into humdrum clerks; the childhood virtuoso finds himself playing the organ in a provincial church or leading a high school glee club; chance and random opportunity, a yes or a no at a crucial moment, decide between fame and obscurity. Our years tend to divide up into moments, atypical, individual accomplishments, highs and lows, diversions from main streams that later may become Mississippis on their own. History is partial and replete with countercurrents--in the Dark Ages, were there no intelligences that were not illuminated? During the Renaissance, were there no artists who looked not for a rebirth but, prophetically, toward a distant future? In the age of faith, I am sure, we could find many who were faithless. The Era of Good Feeling must have included many citizens who had no kind feelings toward anyone and, certainly, at least a handful of politicians who prayed for the downfall of their fellow politicians and competitors. For myself, I lived through the golden Twenties and saw the ungilded slums; I didn't dance during the jazz age and I wasn't particularly promiscuous during the permissive decade.

My moments were my own and, while I propose the word dread for the Eighties, at the moment of writing this, I find myself absurdly happy. In the past 30 years, I have had my ups and downs, as anyone who has ever read the reviews of my books and plays can testify; but at the moment of writing this, I am content merely to be sitting at my desk and typing. This feeling of near euphoria is not the result of an exaggerated devotion to my craft or to the editors of this magazine, nor can it be traced to a narcissistic appreciation of the quality of my prose. The reason is much simpler: Two years ago, I was given up for dead by the medical pundits of one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world, and I am not dead but tapping away, looking across at the springtime lawn outside my window, where a brilliant-red cardinal is ruffling vigorously in a birdbath. I am not fool enough to imagine that my momentary lightness of heart is shared by my fellow citizens or by the inhabitants of other parts of the globe or even by my nearest neighbor or my wife or son. It is no secret even to the most casual television viewer that America, since the assassination of President Kennedy, has been passing through a period of intensifying gloom. For connoisseurs of native desolation, one could go back even further to the bloody fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, a tragedy that has been pushed back into obscurity by the other assassinations, by the erosion of our moral and political capital, by the war in Vietnam and the continuing massacres in its wake, the disgrace of Richard Nixon, the ineptitude of the Carter Administration, the humiliation of the Iran episode, the monstrous unemployment figures of the Reagan Presidency and, for good measure, the ravaging of our cities and the growing expectation of nuclear apocalypse. I read the newspapers as carefully as most people, yet I have the effrontery to announce that, at least for the time that it takes to write these words, I am a happy man.

There is nothing new in this. Woe is the lot of mankind, but so, in its irrepressible way, is joy. As the bombs fall around them, children play among the ruins, and lovers find each other and delight in their discovery. In besieged cities, doomed to fall, sentimental ballads are sung in the cabarets and audiences laugh at the jokes of comedians. Dying scholars continue with deep satisfaction the work to which they have given their lives. Parents celebrate the birth of children as the darkness closes in on tribes and races. Soldiers eat with relish and drink with glee before embarking on suicidal attacks. Somewhere, somehow, there is a streak of light, however ephemeral, in the surrounding night. That not wholly reliable reporter on human conduct, Sigmund Freud, in giving us the death wish also gave us the pleasure principle.

•

To say that I am not as happy today as I was 30 years ago is merely to state the obvious. Aside from the fact that in those calm, imperial days I shared the general American belief that my country was incomparably and benignly invulnerable and I could not imagine that some years later, a President would portray us as a helpless giant, I was, on the whole, an optimistic man. I was 40 then, sturdy and comparatively agile, and I am 70 now and the years have taken their toll. Whoever invented the phrase "the golden years" to describe approaching senility should be prosecuted for deception through the mails, and I, for one, have not been taken (continued on page 204)Being a Man(continued from page 188) in by this linguistic and geriatric fraud.

The possibilities, physical and mental, that were open to me 30 years ago have dwindled unpleasantly. I could carouse all night, work all the next morning and ski or play tennis till sunset, week in and week out. Now I begin to think longingly of my bed toward 11 o'clock and need my eight hours if I am going to be of any use on the morrow. I haven't been up a mountain or on a tennis court in years, have become overacquainted with hospitals and stare with enormous distaste at my crowded medicine chest. Travel, which used to be a passion with me, is now reduced to a minimum, as most often I walk with difficulty, leaning on a cane, and what sort of traveler is he who cannot stroll comfortably through a foreign city or a museum? When I think of it, which I try to avoid, I am disillusioned with myself. I had always believed that I would be a spry and healthy old party, one of those cackling wonders you see beating youthful athletes on the courts and coming down from the Alps, sun-tanned and hearty, after a week's skiing from one peak and mountain refuge to another. But it was not to be--creaky and damaged by the surgeon's knife and the overhearty usages to which I have previously put my body, I laboriously climb aboard an airport bus and young girls get up and offer me their places on the benches, and I could gladly strangle them. If I had rejected that last offered drink, not attempted the final run down the icy slope in the gathering dusk, dimmed the light of the desk lamp one hour earlier after a brain-draining day's work, would my step now be lighter, my eye clearer? The questions do not end here, but the catalog of complaints does, though any reader of a certain age could, without any undue strain of the imagination, I'm sure, compile his own list, lengthier and probably more dire than mine.

Existence is a word we all have to deal with early in our lives, though as we grow older, it tends to blot out almost all the other words beginning with the letter E in our vocabularies. We exist, happily or in misery, because we want to exist. In the movie M*A*S*H, the theme song--written, it so happened, by a 14-year-old boy--told us that "suicide is easy," and so it is. I have contemplated suicide several times--once when I was 25 and half the audience left a preview of a play of mine before the first act was over and I felt dishonored for life, and another time when I was stricken because of the breakup of a love affair. Reason prevailed both times--I went on to other plays and other women and rejoiced in my decisions. The third time could not really be called suicide. I was in a hospital, and I was suffering unbearably and wanted to die. But my head was not in command. My heart, blindly and without regard to medical or psychological facts, continued to beat, while my hands were tied to the bars that surrounded my bed, making me helpless to end my pitiful days. So, one way or another, I am here because of various decisions and, despite the prohibition of the act of self-destruction in religion and law, anyone reading this is here because of his or her own choice and, I hope, is content because of it.

The death of others is a different matter. Like nostalgia, the obituary notices of the newspapers become a stubborn addiction for what are called, in genteel Americanese, senior citizens. In my case, because I started my career as a professional writer quite young and in my early 20s made my friends in the theater, in the movies and in the publishing world, death seems almost daily to be sweeping away beautiful women I once adored, as well as the wise and honorable men who instructed me and whom I admired and loved, leaving me with melancholy hours of reflection on the rise and fall of generations.

My memories, like those of most of us, consist of lights and shadows. Restricting myself, for the purpose of this essay, to the recollection of the past 30 years must, of necessity, rule out the heights of ecstasy of my youth and young manhood and the thunderous depressions that accompanied them. That is not to say that the 30 years have been placid--far from it--but I like to believe that I have achieved a certain sober measure in my response to victory and defeat in my maturity. Some passionate souls, on reading these words, may feel that in confessing this I am conceding yet another defeat in the battle against age, though for those who think as I do, it represents an inevitable compromise with reality.

Overall, I must consider that I have been a fairly lucky man. My first marriage, while stormy, was consistently interesting, and the interval between my divorce and my second marriage (incidentally, to my ex-wife) was briefly entertaining, though there is finally a dismaying difference between being a roving bachelor at 20 and a sexagenarian lecher. The twilight hour comes when the thought of embarking on a sportive escapade with a beautiful young woman is outweighed by the claims of continuity, mutual and unexpressed understanding, private jokes, comfort in adversity, automatic support in times of trouble and hours spent in cordial silence in the long and tranquil evenings. In short--love. It is not the love of popular songs. It is not a blinding stroke of passion; it is not love at first sight but love at 1000th sight. It is not limitless and mysterious, as the ocean was to Columbus' men, who feared they might drop off the edge of the world if they continued their voyage; it is within known and gracious boundaries, there are harbors in plenty. Let old writers remember Goethe foolishly pining over virgins, Mark Twain lurking outside the cabin of a young woman with whom he was smitten on a liner on the way to Europe. There are exceptions, of course, but I am not one of them. I bow to the general rule, which is--in physics, at least--that there is no force without a counterforce. Although not all willingly observe that law, there it stands--immutable. Whatever the reason, I became a much better husband the second time around.

There are also children. In my case, only one--a son. I am pleased with my son and he amuses me. I believe that, now a grown man, he is pleased with me, though not always equally amused, and he is slowly and traditionally becoming the father as I recede into the son and he has linked me with the immemorial round of germination and growth by following the normal filial procedure of consecutively beating me at every sport in which we have ever competed.

He may not be the man I might have wanted him to be, but I hope he is the man he wants to be. One way or another, he is a gift of life to me that I cherish.

Other gifts were more difficult to accept. I had to learn to calm my earlier rage at the inequities of existence and accept more philosophically the idea that I could not change the world to my liking and should be grateful for the things that I could accomplish. Serenity was beyond my powers to achieve, but I did learn--except on certain notable occasions, such as the evening I tried to kill a French critic at a cocktail party--how to control my temper and exhibit more patience at the shortcomings of others as well as my own.

If this essay sounds like a paraphrase of Cicero's De Senectute, so be it.

•

In the course of the past 30 years, I have had some painful decisions to make. One of the most bitter was to give up the theater and prohibit myself from writing any more plays. It made me understand the lover whose unrequited passion is lavished on a great beauty who capriciously rejects (continued on page 222)Being a Man(continued from page 204) him out of hand, leaving the forlorn lover no alternative but to turn away if he wishes to save his sanity and self-respect. I am almost reconciled by now to the effects of my decision, though when I see certain productions in the theater, there is an old, dark flicker in my breast and I have to comfort myself with the thought that I have probably saved myself from many a late-blooming ulcer and for more pleasant mornings than those I lived through when the reviews came out after the opening nights of my plays in New York.

Like all but the very worst writers, I cannot feel that I have lived up to the hopes I entertained when I was young. Although complacency is impossible, I can claim that I have worked steadily, at my own pace and, except for infrequent incursions into the world of film dictated by the IRS and by financial necessity, I have written to no one's dictates but my own. Although I have won very few prizes and feel that if one day I wandered by mistake into the American Institute of Arts and Letters the police would be called, I have my own evaluation of my worth and do not have to fight the impulse to hang my head in shame when I see my name mentioned in The New York Times, a journal in which a review of my second book of short stories appeared. The reviewer, whose present whereabouts are unknown to me, ended his haughty article by saying that criticizing my work was like breaking a butterfly on the wheel. Since that day, I have published some 25 more books, and perhaps I may be forgiven for muttering under my breath, "Some butterfly."

Many of the critics who have savaged me at one time or another in the course of my career are now dead and unmourned, and others have slipped back into well-deserved obscurity and dim teaching jobs at third-rate colleges. In addition to being allowed to enjoy such benevolent turns of fate, I once had the good fortune to happen upon a novel by a critic who had been particularly rude about me and found, not unexpectedly but still with a gratifying lift of the spirit, that it was unreadable.

Revenge, I can say with some satisfaction, is one emotion that carries over with no diminution of strength into the eighth decade. Meanwhile, despite the academic disrepute my sporadic popularity has brought me, I find that I can bear with fortitude the burden of being widely read in many languages and remember with a chuckle the rueful remark of a friend of mine, a writer whose work is generally received with hosannas by the critics but whose income does not rank him among the first 500,000 taxpayers in the country. "I approve, of course, of splendid reviews," he said, "but I would find it difficult in my heart to condemn splendid royalty statements."

Apart from my professional roller-coastering, I find that I have done, mainly by chance, certain things that have enriched my life. Chief among these was my decision to live in Europe since 1953. I had gone with my wife and infant son to the French Riviera for a summer vacation, with return passage booked on the French Line for September 1951. Some American friends who had been living in Paris were on the point of going to New York for a few months, and they kindly offered us the use of their apartment in Paris until they returned. The glorious and almost incurable virus of the city worked on me, and a year later, fully inoculated, I canceled our tickets to New York and in 1953 gave up my place on the East Side of Manhattan and settled in as a resident of France. I have written too much about Paris to repeat in this article my sensible reasons for this act. A whole new civilization, varied and constantly surprising and instructive, seemed to be opening up, and the flood of fresh impressions supplied me with a rich new range of materials for my work.

Not only was I exposed to current Europeans in their present modes of life and fashions of thinking and to the lasting evidence of their long history and complex cultures all around me, but I was also thrown into the heady company of an adventurous and ambitious group of young Americans and their pretty girls formed around the budding Paris Review. Since at various times there were George Plimpton, Bob Silvers, William Styron, Arthur Train, Peter Matthiessen, Ben Bradlee, Tom Guinzberg, Philip Roth, Blair Fuller, Sadri Khan, John Marquand, Jr., and James Jones, among others, it was a rewarding and often hilarious experience that the difference in geography and generations would have most likely made impossible on our native soil.

The early Fifties were good years to get away from America. McCarthy and his minions were devastating the political and cultural landscape of the United States. Black lists, Governmental and quasi-Governmental spies were everywhere, perjurers abounded, innocents were hounded into poverty and disgrace, friends didn't dare to announce their opinions in any tone louder than a whisper and the prevalent sound of the time was of closing doors.

The disease was not held within the confines of the United States. People whom I took on faith later turned out to be CIA or FBI agents or paid informers who, I am now forced to believe, reported on my comings and goings in an eerie mixture of unsupported accusations, outright falsehoods, mistaken identities and purposes, rumors and political witchcraft. On one memorable occasion, while I was spending the summer in the Basque country along the Spanish border, I was summoned to our consulate in Bordeaux to be grilled on what I could only suppose was the Government's suspicion that I was engaged in what were then known as un-American activities. Wisely, when I drove up to Bordeaux, I left my passport at home, as I had heard that such proceedings were very often the preliminary to the confiscation of the precious document on the flimsiest of reasons or for no stated reason at all.

When I got to the consulate, an officer solemnly asked me to be seated facing him across his desk and spoke the fatal words: "May I see your passport, please?" Disingenuously, I said that I had left it in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The officer showed no emotion but asked for another piece of identification. I had my French driver's license in my wallet but did not know how far the writ of the State Department ran and didn't want to take the chance that sooner or later, I would have to explain to an irate gendarme that my permis de conduire was locked in a file in Washington.

I made a show of searching for something that would prove that I was the man I claimed to be and came up with a card entitling me to enter the gaming room of the casino in Biarritz for the summer and handed it over. The officer did not change his expression but propped the card on the desk against an inkstand in front of him, then went over to a huge, old-fashioned safe against the wall, twirled some dials and came back holding a thick folder that contained, I discovered in the course of the following interview, a list of questions, compiled in Washington, that the officer was, in the line of duty, to put to me.

My dossier contained a dubious mixture of facts and inventions and went back as far as 1936 and into the Fifties. It turned out that I had signed quite a few petitions, most of them in support of Loyalist Spain and civil-liberties cases, but there were many petitions I had never signed nor had even heard mentioned anywhere. Along with these, there were reports of meetings that I had never attended and organizations I did not know existed but with which I was accused of being associated.

There was no whopper in the dossier as wild as the assertion I found long after in the FBI papers I asked for under the Freedom of Information Act, which started that I had been a colonel in Intelligence during the war in Italy, disseminating propaganda--a curious bit of news for me, considering that at the time, I was a Pfc., and the closest I ever came to Italy was during a few hours with a 90mm battery above Menton on the French side of the border. There was also no hint in the full half hour of interrogation that I had ever broken a single law of the United States, and the officer was beginning to show more and more embarrassment as he droned on, staring all the while at the Biarritz casino card propped up in front of him. At the end, he asked if I would swear that I did not intend to bring down the Government by force and that I upheld and would defend the Constitution. Since I had already sworn to these conditions twice before, when I was inducted into the Army and when I received my passport, I swore and signed the necessary papers, upon pain of perjury, whereupon the officer broke into a relieved little smile and said, as he gave me back my entry card, that he had had no orders to confiscate my passport anyway. We shook hands, and on the way out, the secretaries in the office brought out copies of The Young Lions for me to autograph, and my wife and I had an excellent lunch in one of the great Bordeaux restaurants. It was expensive, but if the Government of the United States could spend as much of my taxes as it must have on the detective work it took to assemble the mostly fictitious history of my misdeeds, I felt that I, too, could indulge in a little private extravagance.

I must admit, though, that I did not enjoy the lunch as much as it deserved. Although I pretended to my wife that I took the matter lightly, the evidence of the Government's mistrust of my loyalty to my native country left a sour taste in my mouth that took years to disappear, and France on that sunny afternoon in Aquitaine seemed, in comparison, like an anachronistic enclave of legality, justice, reason and freedom of thought and expression. I could not rid myself of the nagging suspicion that in the consul's office, I had failed in my duties as a citizen of a country whose Constitution guarantees that all Americans are guaranteed against unreasonable search and seizure and implies that eternal vigilance is the price we pay for maintaining our rights and the rights of others. Given the fact that I was accused of no crime, there was no doubt that the consular officer's questions bordered on unreasonable search and his temporary guardianship of the Biarritz casino card could certainly be construed as unwarranted seizure. Should I, as a true upholder of the Constitution that I had sworn to defend, have refused all questions? I had not, and the delicious, rich food lay heavily on my stomach. Almost automatically, conditioned by the assumptions of powers our Government has accumulated through the years, I had bowed to authority, much as I had in making out my income tax and obeying the order of a sergeant to stand at attention. Toying with my dessert, I realized I was in gray country, where rights and duties were ill defined and contradictory, where surrendering the minutiae of my income and expenditures had put me in thrall to a tyrannous bureaucracy, since if you know what a man makes and saves or squanders, you know more about him, and not only in economic matters, than a strict application of the law should permit. As for the sergeant, it might have been my opinion that it was wiser for him to say, "At ease," but I straightened to his command. It occurred to me on the drive back to Saint-Jean-de-Luz that America had not been created by poltroons like me.

The psychic wounds might have been deep after the encounter in the consulate, but the practical damage of the whole affair was small. Aside from being sporadically blacklisted for some years by the television networks, which might have been a blessing in disguise, I have not really been bothered since, though the American Legion stopped movie companies from making a film of my novel The Troubled Air, which was outspokenly anti-Communist but equally outspoken against the forces that would smother all opposition to their blackmail tactics in the popular arts. To prove that malevolence was not confined to the West Coast, a team of producers who had several highly successful and innocent musicals running on Broadway and who commissioned me to fashion The Troubled Air into a play were warned by groups of ardent patriots that if they went through with their plan to present my dramatization in New York, their current plays would be picketed nightly and their casts blacklisted. To their eternal discredit, the producers cabled me in France that the deal was off, and I started work on a novel instead.

The wisdom of this move was underlined for me by the movie mogul Jack Warner, the only one of my accusers whose name I ever learned and who, in a fit of unmanly millionaire panic and a sweaty maneuver to prove the purity of his citizenship, had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that I was one of the writers once employed by his company whom he had fired for trying to slip Red propaganda into their scripts. In a restaurant in Cannes, where he was well known, I had publicly and loudly called him a liar, the most printable of the epithets I had used that evening, and had steadfastly refused to shake his hand whenever the vagaries of Hollywood and Parisian fiestas had thrown us together. Finally, considerably later, as I was walking down the Avenue Georges Cinq in Paris with a less timorous producer, Darryl Zanuck, we met again, and once more I refused when he offered me his hand.

"I don't know why you're like that," he said plaintively. "You ought to thank me for knocking you out of the movie business. Look how successful you've become since then writing books,"

The years were not lacking in laughter.

•

In my private attempt to live in the best of all possible worlds, I made another decision that I never regretted, one that, like the move to Paris, came about by chance.

A good friend of mine, the writer Peter Viertel, who was an enthusiastic skier, was spending the winter in the Swiss Alps, in a small town called Klosters, and I let him persuade me to go there for a month to learn how to ski. I had skied a little in America, with ludicrous results, and had been too busy, I thought, to take vacations in the middle of winter.

I had not been prepared by my bumbling previous attempts to remain more or less erect on skis for the new and exhilarating sense of freedom and speed of the sport and the magnificence of the towering mountains, their snow fields glittering in the tonic winter sun. I was suddenly hit by the revelation that it was foolish to endure grim months under the sullen skies of the Paris basin, at a time when the temper of the inhabitants, never overcharming, was at its most testy, when this vast and delightful playground, transiently peopled by attractive hedonists in bright clothing, was so easily accessible. The town was warm and cozy, the natives helpful and anxious to please and everything, from the postal service to the trains, T-bars and banks, worked--a pleasant change from almost every other place in the world I had been in before. An added advantage that I discovered when I settled in the next winter was that I could work much better in a small town, where the telephone did not ring incessantly and one was discreetly left alone when solitude was required, than in the bustle of a city. The fact that for a good part of each day I dealt with people whose language I didn't understand helped me marvelously in concentrating on more important matters, such as how to get from chapter one to chapter two of a novel.

When I was chided by more puritanical colleagues for choosing to live and practice my craft in a resort devoted to mindless recreation, I defended myself, only half-jokingly, by saying that because of a quirk in my character and the memories of my early hardships, I worked best out of a vestigial proletarian resentment of the privileged classes, and in Klosters, I could deeply resent the fact that while lucky visitors sported around the clock in the great Alpine playground, I had to labor in the pits of creation.

Whatever the cause, I had entered my most productive period as a writer--in my opinion, at least--even though my actual suffering, like my resentment, was minimal and was more than made up for by early-morning runs down an untracked slope in feathery new powder with my son, as well as by leisurely evenings with new friends of every nationality and vocation, including a multitude of Swiss, men and women alike, who bore no resemblance to the condescending image painted of them by their neighbors as a stolid, grasping race, cramped by Calvinism and moneygrubbing and speaking French, German and Italian in uproariously comic accents.

Eventually, I found that I could no longer get any work done in any city without a horrendous expenditure of nervous energy, and I gave up Paris as I had given up New York and retreated to the village and used it as a base of operations for most of each year, learning to love it not only in the busy winters but when it fell quiet, the tourists and sportsmen gone and the place given over to farming, lumbering, trout fishing, reading, picnicking on the banks of foaming brooks, daydreaming and dawdling on mountain trails. At this writing, that original one-month vacation has turned into 31 years--with, I hope, many more to come.

As a reward for my loyalty, on my 70th birthday, not long ago, the town band serenaded my wife and me as we stood on our balcony; the assembled citizens sang Happy Birthday to You; we were paraded to the town hall in a sleigh drawn by two horses; the mayor made a speech and gave me the key to the city; and for the weekend, a sign bedecked with flowers and Swiss and American flags and reading Irwin Shaw Avenue was put up on the main street. Looking at it, my wife said, "This would never happen in front of Elaine's."

My choice of a way of life, however gratifying it might be to me, hardly met with universal approval in America, where, unless you are running away from the police, living abroad is considered by some xenophobic viewers with alarm as a form of treason just short of selling military secrets to the Russians. Critics mentioned the diminution of their literary powers that Stephen Crane and Bret Harte suffered when they chose to live away from what reviewers like to call roots, though they said nothing of any damage to Henry James, T. S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway attributable to their sojourns in foreign parts. And as far as I know, it is not generally believed that James Joyce's picture of Dublin was flawed because he wrote Ulysses in Trieste and Zurich.

Harold Robbins, that stern judge of the American language, even went so far as to allow himself to be quoted to the effect that I had lost my gift for the nuances of American speech because of my absence from New York. The truth is that I met an infinitely greater variety of Americans in Europe than I ever met in the United States, where the circles I moved in were inevitably made up mostly of people who, like me, were concerned with the arts. And talk of exile for anyone with a few dollars in his pocket is foolish in this age of the jet. I make use of Swissair often enough and stay in America for lengthy enough stretches to make sure I know who's winning the pennant in any year and what the boys in the back room are talking about this week.

•

Among the things I learned abroad were the words of Edith Piaf's favorite song, Je ne Regrette Rien. Although she sang it bravely, with the most sincere emotion, I did not believe her. If she were anything like me, and I believe she was--at least in the sense that we are all brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and fathers and mothers--we cannot honestly say of our lives, "I regret nothing."

As for me, I could almost say that I regret practically everything. I regret that I am not six feet tall; I regret that I am not Tolstoy; I regret that I never could run the 100 in ten flat; I regret that I am tone-deaf and cannot carry a tune; I regret that I missed a touchdown pass on a cold autumn day; I regret some of the girls I made love to and the offers of others I turned down. I regret that I did not look to my left on a dark Paris street the night a taxi roared in from the side and nearly killed my wife and me; I regret the choice of certain doctors and the signing of certain contracts. I regret turning away from moments of infidelity that held infinite promise and moments of fidelity that assured months of boredom. I regret things I have written and things I have left unwritten. I regret having lost sight of many charming friends and having kept in close touch with others who have not charmed me. I regret my accent in French and my lack of any ability to learn German. I regret that I haven't done spectacularly better in the past 30 years or spectacularly worse. I regret that I did not write the line "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each," though I imagine I have heard the ladies faint, far off, in the surf at Coney Island. I regret having met Hemingway and never having met T. S. Eliot, Stephen Crane, Delmore Schwartz, Alexandre Dumas or Willie Mays.

I regret that every time I make a decision, I immediately feel I should have made the opposite one. I regret this moment and its question: Was I right in agreeing to do this piece, or should I have spent my time doing something else, such as planting a row of corn, learning Latin, getting a new hip put in?

Only time will tell, the saying goes, but even that isn't true. I've had all this time to think about it, and I still can't answer the question I posed at the start of this article: Would I do it all over again?

Would you?

"Did I say no when I should have said yes? Did I tolerate where toleration was weakness?"

"There is a dismaying difference between being a roving bachelor at 20 and a sexagenarian lecher."

"Many of the critics who have savaged me at one time or another are now dead and unmourned."