Another collection of Williams's, which is more to the point of what you
are bringing up, is Life Along the Passaic River, in
which he describes his own relationship as a doctor of these patients
and in the format of the short story, with a kind of candor that you
won't hear from social scientists. He works in beautifully his own anger
and annoyance and resentments and lusts that we are traditionally
trained not to talk about. We have to have it analyzed out of ourselves
before we even approach it. What a fraud that is, it's never analyzed
out of anyone. But we do learn to be coverse and maybe sly. There is a
difference, and maybe there is no difference, but anyway, to answer what
you are talking about with what do I bring to them … well, I would
imagine that the answer would come forth, I hope, if I may be
presumptious enough, this has been written about by … do any of you know
Gabriel Marcel? Well, Marcel has written about this, Kierkegaard has
written about this, this comes across constantly in the three novels of
Walker Percy, how do we get along with others? And this, I know that
existentialism has become a kind of fad, which has both come and gone,
but this has to do with being, and presumably, in some of these homes, I
began and proceeded to be and ended up being a royal pain. In other
homes, some things happened, in other homes, some other things happened.
And this is various and diverse and it's hard to catagorize as these
variations in human life that we all are. So, in some of these homes
there were these moments, in other homes, there
were some other moments. And that is something, now, if you want me to
give, to get more officious about it, I can say this, "Look, in certain
cases," I brought a child …" this, we'll all be happy with, and boy,
does this make us feel great … I brought a child, in Roxbury, a black
ghetto section of Boston, to the Children's Hospital, who needed medical
help. Great! "He not only was taking something out of him in these
interviews, he was performing an active service." I participated in the
hearings and etc. that ultimately led to the food stamp program. I was
involved in that. Great! The proceeds from Still Hungry in
America went to the Southern Regional Council for distribution
among the needy. Great! We can all understand that. There is a family
here that I got in touch with an agency there and this came out … O.K.,
I'm not denying that. I don't want to say that I don't do that. But I am
not going to go on the defensive, to the point that I feel that this is
the only thing that, you know, I can fall back on for the justification
of this work and that anything else is "exploited." I do not apologize
for those moments that we had, some of us, in the course of this work.
By "some of us", I mean me and my wife and even occassionally my oldest
boy who went with me to Alaska to talk to the Eskimo people and what
happened there. And I don't mean only the good moments, the bad moments
too. It isn't necessarily hurtful and exploitative when a strange. kooky
guy comes on the scene and talks and maybe a little news is exchanged,
you know, something. That doesn't have to be looked upon as political
oppression or manipulations for the point of view of aggrandisement in a
professional career. I'm not saying that that isn't something that
should be taken into consideration too, but why do we have to strip
these meetings, these encounters, these moments of the fact that they
have to do with human beings on the planet, for a moment, a brief moment
of eternity, that we are in addition to social
scientists and social observers and all these things and this … we are
after all, men, women, people, citizens, a lot of things. But you see, I
think … we get into these … everything in the university has to be given
a structure and maybe everything in life does, and obviously, it ill
behooves anyone who gives a structure of a book to his experience, to
denounce that to the point that he sounds like he doesn't do this, but
everyone else does. Obviously, everything that I … I hope that you
understand that this is not, the strenuous load of this crankiness is
directed not at you, but it is a self-directed thing. It has to do with
my own arraignment of myself and an examination of myself, and I don't
mean for counter-transferency by the way, but for, you know, I mean the
kind of arraignment that one would call upon Kierkegaard of as a model,
rather than the latest psychoanalytic supervisor, of which there are
plenty in civilized towns like this. I guess that I'm being signaled to
depart on to the next moment. I'm sorry that … having said all of this,
I of course, immediately proceed to assuage my own sense of misgivings
and incompleteness and failure by saying, although I'm sorry if I've
been somewhat provocative, but I think I know, I want us all, at this
moment, one would say, using Erikson's model of thinking about things,
you know …at this moment, in this history of the work that we are doing,
one needs, first of all, the courage to fight the powers and
principalities, which I presume that you all have, or you wouldn't be
here. Secondly, the willingness to undercut oneself without destroying
your ongoing, by you know, getting a little sense of humor into this.
There is room, you know, in all this work for a little bit of humor, a
little bit of willingness to relate oneself to some larger sphere of
things, namely, you know, a lot of other kinds of people. Writers and
thinkers, essayists, just plain people are interested in talking to
people. My father is just an ordinary human being,
but I remember as a boy that he used to tell me about when he would go
down to London from Yorkshire, he was interested in talking to people.
Well, he wasn't doing it because he was a social scientist or anything,
but he … I have to tell you one more thing, even if we are going to be
late over there to that thing at Duke … we went to South Africa, my
father, my son and I went to South Africa at the end of August to give
this lecture on the apartheid. They bring in outsiders to say things
that South Africans cannot say. We stopped off in Rio de Janeiro and on
the beach, my son and I went for a long walk and we came back and my
father was talking to four young people of a whole range of racial
backgrounds, by sight, who … he struck up a conversation with. He wasn't
doing any fieldwork and he had no taperecorder, but they were smoking a
lot and he told them that they shouldn't smoke so much. And that led to
a whole series of things and then he went and bought the some ice cream
to tell them that it was much better to have some of this ice cream than
to smoke all those cigarettes, "it is going to hurt your lungs." Part of
this he was doing with some Spanish, he knew spoke Portuguese, and
broken English and whatever. So then we came back, and with this mind
that I have, which is just like all of our minds here, I said, "Oh, this
is interesting. He's talking to these people, I must get … " [Laughter] So, I started questions, you
know, other kinds of questions and then they didn't seem as interested,
they were beginning to get ready to leave. So my father resumed by
talking to them about the cigarettes and then of course realized what I
was. I was hungry and greedy. We were going to leave the next day and I
thought, "Ah ha, I'll just snatch something and get it." Meanwhile, my
father, who has no methodological training and you might consider
politically to be rather conservative, not as liberal and generous and
kind as I am, had got something going. Him and them. That's because I
haven't worked it out, I have problems with my father … thank you.