Tony Platt GoodToGo

SIGHTLINES (SUMMER 2007)

France: It’s early morning and I’m riding a beat up trail bike up a sizable hill towards the Gorge Verdon in Haute Provence, telling myself, “Attaquez la montagne comme Lance.” This is my penance for last night’s feast at the Bastide de Moustiers, and my insurance on tonight’s indulgence. Each day I go out, I try to beat the previous day’s distance. My tactic is to get into a steady groove, think about anything but what I’m doing, and keep my head down, looking only at the tiny piece of road that’s in my tunnel vision.

    On the way back down, I realize what I’ve been missing: huge wild forests, craggy foothills and alps, the piercing blues of Lac St. Croix, the crisp air warming in the morning sun, the smell of pine trees. They were all there as I was riding up the hill, but my mind was on other things.

Germany: I am in Berlin for a week, learning about remembrances of the Nazi past. Cecilia and I take the metro to the Bavarian quarter (Bayerische Viertel) and wander around what used to be called the “Jewish Switzerland.”  In 1933, more than 16,000 Jews lived here quite prosperously. Today it’s hard to find Jews in this neighborhood, but it’s easy to find the memorials that recall their presence. If you look up, sooner or later you’ll see some of the eighty metal plaques pronouncing anti-Semitic regulations. They are mounted on poles and lampposts next to run-of-the-mill signage that you see in any neighborhood. Interspersed with signs for “bus stop,” “no entry,” “open 9-5,” and “free parking,” you can spot “At Bayerischer Platz, Jews may sit only on yellow park benches,” “Jewish veterinarians may not open practices,” “Jews are expelled from all choral groups,” and “Post Office officials married to Jews must retire.”

    The eighty plaques are two-sided. On one side are simply designed pictograms that nostalgically recall glossy visuals in primary colors from favorite children’s books: a pair of golden braids, a cake on a doily, a bunch of cherries. On the other side are sparely written customs, edicts, and laws that document the gradual identification, segregation, humiliation, and disappearance of Jews, beginning in 1933. Though numerically dated, the texts are written in the present tense: “Jews are forbidden from buying newspapers and magazines”; “Jews are no longer allowed to have household pets.” When their designers, artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, first erected the plaques in 1993, local residents called up Jewish leaders and the police to report that neo-Nazis were installing fascist propaganda in their sedate neighborhood.

    When I spoke with Renata Stih about the plaques, I made a common mistake by referring to them as an installation. She corrected me quickly and sharply. “They are not an installation. They are a memorial, a Denkmal.” It’s an important distinction. Stih and Schnock submitted the idea for the plaques to a competition for a Holocaust memorial to be located in the Bavarian quarter. It was a surprise to many when the Stih-Schnock proposal beat out ninety-five competitors. Government officials no doubt had in mind something somber and monumental in the plaza, a site for reflection and wreath-laying. The plaques are the opposite of a grand monument: they’re decentralized and ordinary, catch you by surprise, put you to intellectual work, are open-ended, and blur the past with the present.

    It’s possible of course that you could walk by these plaques every day and not see them, or look up and see them, but treat them as just another visual stimulus. But if you look only down, you’ll eventually walk into a “stumbling stone.” This is the name given to plaques designed by Gunter Demnig in 1996. You can find them all over Berlin, cemented into the sidewalk, outside what used to be the homes of Jews. The stones provide information about the people who used to live there, when they left or were deported, and what happened to them. There’s no central authority that approves location and design. Local communities, schools, and churches decide to do something and create their own stones. You never know when you’ll stumble into one. They can stop you in your tracks.

California: It’s early afternoon, the tide is ebbing, a good time for my daily foray along the beach that runs from beneath our cabin at Big Lagoon down to Patrick’s Point. Along with the other penitents who make a pilgrimage to this wondrous place in Northern California, I move slowly at water’s edge, head down, scouring the millions of rocks for the rare black-green glint of jade that surfaces naturally polished from tributaries of the Klamath river and roiling Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, I hear a voice shouting from the nearby cliffs. I look up at the silhouette of a man with binoculars pointing out to sea and follow his direction in time to see whales spouting in plain view.

EXCEPT FOR SEX

    On a visit to England (February 2008), I spend some time with friends David Edgar and Stephanie Dale in Birmingham. I’m there to help David celebrate and ease his transition into the big 60. I’m also curious to see how his father, Barrie, is doing on his journey towards his 90th, scheduled for 2009. I last saw him almost a year ago.

    In March 2007, Barrie Edgar, David’s then 88 year-old father joins us for Sunday dinner in Birmingham, as he does most Sundays when his son is in town. Last year his wife of sixty plus years died and he moved into a fancy retirement cum nursing home, inappropriately titled “The Sunrise.”  It has three floors, he tells me: “a bistro and lounges on the ground floor, suites on the second, and the memory impaired on the top floor.” He’s in a suite, but he knows the layout and what might come next. “I can always tell,” he says, raising his eyebrows skyward, “who’s next for the third floor.”

    Barrie is recovering from a fall and a brief stay in hospital. David was very concerned that he might not make it, but here he is today, walking slowly and stiffly with a stick, but impeccably dressed in white shirt, tie, grey slacks, patterned socks, and smart cardigan, his hearing only a tad impaired.

    Father and son are very close and tuned into each other’s nuances, despite being on different sides of the barricades: David is a left-wing playwright with an impeccable pedigree, going back to the days of agit-prop; Barrie is a lifelong, resolute Tory, with a whiff of nostalgia for the good old days. Yet David makes sure that his father gets a good seat at his latest plays, and Barrie basks in his son’s success. In this case, family trumps politics.

    At night Barrie doesn’t like to drive and asks to be picked up, but during the day he drives his own car. He tells me proudly that he recently passed the driving test. David worries about him on the road, but, Barrie tells me, it’s his salvation. “Oh, it would be dreadful to give up my car. Dreadful!”  He sits straight up at the dinner table, his elegant hands punctuating the conversation. As a former theatre man, he talks with precision, even posh, listens carefully, and participates fully. David clearly gets his dry wit from him. Barrie adores David, and treats Stephanie, David’s partner, with loving courtesy.

    And there’s nothing wrong with Barrie’s appetite: he eats the whole three-course meal, with wine before and during the meal, followed by a snifter and black coffee afterwards. The meal is a traditional Sunday works – smoked salmon followed by roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, and cauliflower and cheese sauce – exactly the lunch I had most Sundays with my family during my teen years when we lived in “the country” outside Manchester in an immodest mansion dubbed “Gainsborough.”

    As Steph and David clean up in the kitchen, Barrie and I talk. He has a smoker’s cough, which prompts me to say, “All we need to finish off this great meal would be a cigarette or cigar.”  He smiles, and we talk about our history of smoking. He gave it up some four or five years ago, reluctantly. I gave up nicotine some twenty-five years ago when my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Barrie’s wife died from smoking-related cancer, my son made it to his 40th. We both miss smoking.

    He tells me this story, as I remember it the next day: “My idea of heaven would be to work all afternoon in the garden, digging and planting. Then I’d come in tired and aching, and run myself a hot bath. I’d sit in the bath with a glass of wine and my pipe. Always had my pipe. My father gave me my first pipe when I was 17, never a day without it until I gave it up recently, doctor’s orders. I would lie in the hot bath, all my aches going away with the steam of the hot water [he raises his arms and flutters his poetic hands in the air]. I can hear my wife in the kitchen banging away at steak and chips, my favorite dinner. Ah heaven, can’t think of anything better. Except for sex.”

    We both sit there under a chandelier of candles at David and Steph’s dining room table, smiling to each other and enjoying memories of the hot bath and good dinner to follow, and the sex. “No pipe, but I think I’ll have a brandy,” Barrie says, wanting to prolong the pleasures. And he does.

    In February 2008, I’m back in Birmingham. Recently, Barrie has been in hospital again; he lost a great deal of blood. But there’s no sign of him losing steam this weekend. He’s still on the second floor at Sunrise, still driving during the day, and still holding his own with the best of the drinkers and trenchermen.

    Barrie participates in all of his son’s birthday hoopla, including a pre-party dinner on Saturday evening and a kick-off celebration of David’s 60th at a tapas restaurant the following day. And he stands out from the dressed-down artsy crowd in his white shirt and immaculately knotted silk tie.

    Plus, the old trouper has a plum role in the family-produced, postprandial entertainment, “The Life and Adventures of David Edgarlby,” a satirical take on David’s most popular play (“Nicholas Nickelby”), currently in a very successful revival.  For once, David has no hand in writing this drama. He sits with the rest of us, as his relatives ham it up, panto-style. Meanwhile, Barrie relishes lines that poke fun at his “little boy,” who towers about a foot over his dad. “Calls himself my son! Can’t sail, can’t put up a shelf, no interest at all in the garden – calls it ‘That green stuff outside.’ What kind of block is he an old chip of?”

    At the end of the show, Barrie takes his bows with the rest of the cast as the guests whoop and holler, then he strut-limps back to his chair. He graciously accepts accolades and modestly apologizes for fluffing one of his lines. As the party dissolves, family members and a few friends return to David and Steph’s house for gossip, the opening of presents, and later a light supper. Barrie, his tie still knotted firmly in place, is one of the last partygoers to leave.

A MAN WALKS INTO A CHURCH ....

I’m in England for almost three weeks. Sandwiched between my brother’s 60th birthday party and David (Edgar’s) 60th birthday party, I get to play in London and visit old friends, as well as friends getting older. I was looking forward to reconnecting with Stan Cohen. We were both part of the 60’s radical criminology movement, though from different perspectives and sites. Political sectarianism kept us – well, me – in different revolutionary camps. We’re not personally close, but with the collapse of the New Left in all its permutations, we are now on the same side, even on the Israeli Question, which usually divides Jews in the Diaspora. I’ve always appreciated his intellectual work and his activism, the two intimately connected. We are about the same age; and we’ve both moved about a lot during our careers.

When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1960, he was studying at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. While he was in transit from South Africa to England in 1963, I was leaving my homeland for grad school in Berkeley. For a while he was teaching in southern California in radical Santa Barbara; my activism cost me my job at Berkeley and, luckily, landed me a job until retirement at a local state college. Stan was an important figure in post-60s radical sociology, best known for helping us to understand how “moral panics” fuel law and order campaigns against “muggers” and “wayward teens.”

He’s been a committed public intellectual all his life, battling apartheid in South Africa and Thatcherism in England. He tried without success for several years to bore from within Israel (at Hebrew University, 1979-1995) against its militarist state. Since 1997, he’s lived in England, teaching and helping to nurse his wife through a chronic illness to her death from cancer. Now he’s the sicko. He’s been ill for several years with Parkinson’s and various other maladies. Not too long ago, he had spinal problems and was in hospital for a few weeks, immobilized, unable to move his legs. He was “reet poorly,” as they used to say in Manchester when I was a kid – a euphemism for “at death’s door.”

A couple of years ago when he took early retirement because of health reasons, his friends organized a conference and book of essays in his honor. When I told a friend that I was planning on seeing Stan, he said, “You better steel yourself. He’s not in good shape.” But when I called Stan at home, he said, “Let’s meet at my office at LSE.” He’s only been “back at work” a few weeks, coming in once a week to teach a class on “Crimes of the State” to visiting NYU undergraduates. (I doubt if they’ll like what he has to say about Israel.) It is something of a shock to see Stan. Sitting in a chair, he moves continuously like a marionette pulled by hidden strings until he finds a comfortable position. This only happens some days, though his body is usually in pain. Not surprisingly he has trouble, he says, with memory and finding the right words. Don’t we all?

But there’s nothing wrong with his mind or his politics. One of his most recent essays is a blistering critique of the fawning complicity and self-induced myopia of Israeli intellectuals (“The Virtual Reality of Israeli Universities,” Independent Jewish Voices, January 2008).He is now writing a new introduction to the second edition of his book, States of Denial. And despite his physical limitations, he’s into teaching again, trying to jump-start overly compliant students. Stan takes me out to a local café for coffee and we slowly walk the bustling neighborhood. He’s hoping that exercise will ward off another surgery. Our conversation turns personal, to our families, and our losses.

Close to Covent Garden he takes me into his favorite men’s shop, J. Simons, where he buys stylish American jeans and a shirt, and reminisces about working as a teenager in his immigrant father’s clothing store in Johannesburg. He encourages me to buy a vintage 50s jacket that I spot but, for now, resist. Life is still up for grabs. Stan also tells me about his partner, who is “a Ph. D. student, Swedish, thirty years younger, beautiful.” Some people object to the liaison, he tells me. To hell with them, I reply, and he laughs. Another reason they get on so well is that she also has a chronic illness. Which reminds him to tell me the first of several jokes. He’s a lovely storyteller, skilled at peppering his conversation with parables.

“Talking about Jessica [his girlfriend] reminds me of a joke,” he says. “A man walks into a church, goes into the confessional. The priest asks him why he’s here. ‘I’m an old man and I have great sex every day with my young girlfriend,’ he says. ‘What’s the problem,’ asks the priest, ‘Are you a member of this parish?’ ‘No,’ says the old guy. ‘I’m not even a Catholic, I’m a Jew and I don’t even believe in God.’ So,’ says the priest, ‘Why did you come here to tell me this.’ ‘Because,’ says the man, ‘I’m telling everybody.’”

Before I leave, I ask him to sign a copy of the book that has just come out in his living honor, both of us chuckling at the irony. And with that, we say our surprisingly intimate goodbyes.

February 17, 2008, London