No more poems for Ferguson, not for now in any case, and even if the adventure started up again sometime in the future, for the moment he had no choice but to think of himself as a poet in remission. The illness he had contracted in his mid-teens had led to a two-year-long fever that had produced close to a hundred poems, but then Francie had cracked up the car in Vermont, and suddenly the poems had stopped coming, for reasons he still couldn’t understand he had felt cautious and afraid since then, and the few poems he had managed to write had not been good, or not good enough, by no means ever good enough. The prose of journalism had rescued him from the impasse, but a part of him missed the slowness of poetic labor, the feeling of shoveling down into the earth and tasting the earth in his mouth, and therefore he had followed Pound’s advice to young poets and taken a stab at translation. At first, he had thought of it as nothing more than an exercise to keep his hand in, an activity that would bring him the pleasures of writing poetry with none of the frustrations, but now that he had been at it for a while, he understood there was much more to it than that. If you loved the poem you were translating, then taking apart that poem and putting it back together in your language was an act of devotion, a way of serving the master who had given you the beautiful thing you held in your hands, and the great master Apollinaire and the little master Desnos had written poems that Ferguson found beautiful and daring and astonishingly inventive, each one of them imbued with a spirit of melancholy and buoyancy at the same time, a rare combination that somehow joined the contradictory impulses at war in Ferguson’s eighteen-year-old heart, and so he kept at it in whatever spare time he could create for himself, reworking, rethinking, and refining his translations until they would be solid enough for him to come knocking on the door.
The door was the door of 303 Ferris Booth Hall, the student activities center located flush against his dormitory building at the southwestern edge of the campus, the building he was trapped in now, and assuming he didn’t lose his mind in the blackness first, he would have to write about this experience if he ever managed to get out of it, write some witty and provocative first-person article that the Columbia Daily Spectator would run because he was a member of the staff now, one of the forty undergraduates who worked on the student paper with no interference from the university administration or faculty censors, for even though he still hadn’t found the courage to knock on the door of Room 303, he had walked into the larger office at the other end of the hall on the second day of Freshman Orientation Week, Room 318, and had told the person in charge that he wanted to join up. That was all there was to it. No trial period, no test articles, no need to show them the stories he had written for the Montclair Times—just go out and do it, and if you met your deadlines and proved you were a competent reporter, you were in. Auf wiedersehen, Herr Imhoff!
The possible beats for freshmen were Academic Affairs, Student Activities, Sports, and coverage of the surrounding community, and when Ferguson had said, No sports, please, anything but sports, they had given him Student Activities, which entailed filing two stories per week on average, most of them short, barely half the length of the pieces he had written on high school basketball and baseball games last year. His contributions so far had touched on a number of political issues involving both left-wing and right-wing causes, the May 2 Committee’s plan to organize an anti-draft union on campus to fight against what they called “an unjust war of repression,” but also an article about a band of Republican students who had decided to back William F. Buckley’s candidacy for mayor because the current mayor, John Lindsay, had “drifted away from the principles of the Republican Party.” Other articles, which Ferguson called lightweight stuff and trivial fluff, had involved him in some parochial university matters, such as the thirteen freshmen who were still without dormitory rooms three weeks after the start of the semester, or the contest to name the new “café” in John Jay Hall, which was now offering “vending machine delicacies in a Horn & Hardart — style cafeteria,” a competition sponsored by the University Food Services that would reward the winner with a free meal for two at any restaurant in New York City. Now, in the days just before the blackout, Ferguson had been working on a story about a Barnard freshman who was facing suspension for having a male guest in her room at an unlawful hour, since the current policy allowed visits from men only on Sunday afternoons between two and five o’clock, and the accused’s guest had been with her at one in the morning. The girl, whose name was protected and could not be mentioned in the article, felt the punishment was unfair “because others do it and I was just the one who got caught.” No wonder Amy had lied and cheated to scam her way out of living in one of those dormitory-prisons when she was a freshman. Reporter A. I. Ferguson wrote the story as a straight news article, as he was obliged to do, but fellow first-year student Archie Ferguson wished he could have defended the girl by quoting the refrain from Les Gottesman’s poem in the first sentence of his article.
Let the facts speak for themselves.
Newspaper work was both an engagement with the world and a retreat from the world. If Ferguson meant to do his job well, then he would have to accept both elements of the paradox and learn to live in a state of doubleness: the demand to plunge into the thick of things and yet remain on the sidelines as a neutral observer. The plunge never failed to excite him — whether it was the high-speed plunge of writing about a basketball game or the slower, deeper excavations required to investigate outmoded parietal rules at a women’s college — but the holding back was a potential problem, he felt, or at least something he would have to adjust to over the months and years ahead, for taking the journalist’s vow of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike joining an order of monks and spending the rest of your life in a glass monastery — removed from the world of human affairs even as it continued to whirl around you on all sides. To be a journalist meant you could never be the person who tossed the brick through the window that started the revolution. You could watch the man toss the brick, you could try to understand why he had tossed the brick, you could explain to others what significance the brick had in starting the revolution, but you yourself could never toss the brick or even stand in the mob that was urging the man to throw it. Temperamentally, Ferguson was not someone inclined to throw bricks. He was, he hoped, a more or less reasonable person, but the agitations of the times were such that the reasons for not throwing bricks were beginning to look less and less reasonable, and when the moment finally came to throw the first one, Ferguson’s sympathies would be with the brick and not the window.