Though she spent most of her time in our house rustling patterns, cutting cloth, pinning, basting and sewing, she would never do any of those things on Sunday. This self-imposed idleness made her extremely irritable, and Sundays, as a result, were the days when she was most mischievous.
One Sunday, when she was complaining peevishly that she could do nothing and that nobody paid any attention to her, I asked, to annoy her: “Why don’t you sew, Grandma?”
“Because it’s Sunday,” she snapped.
“Why can’t you sew on Sunday?”
“Because my mother was a Quaker.”
“What are Quakers?” I asked.
I saw come over her face, on which the flesh was prematurely translucent, an expression of gentleness and reflection that I had never seen there before. She began to talk, more to herself, I felt, than to me, about the Quakers—how they were quiet, how they sat in meeting without saying anything. She began to describe the “plain dress” with her usual thoroughness about clothes. With a chuckle, she mentioned the “thee” and “thy.” She talked about the meeting houses—how they were usually built on hilltops, were built of stone, with little white porches and green shutters.
“What was inside?” I asked.
She paused for a moment. Then she said: “Peace.”
XX
My grandfather Chambers was a bully and a blusterer. He also had a keen political brain. In my early days he was, I believe, the city editor or news editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. He was a short man, with a bald head (about which he was acutely sensitive), a Foxy Grandpa expression behind his gold-rimmed glasses and a corporation that preceded him through doors. He was a gross eater and a heavy drinker. Every year, with the panting of the hart for the water brooks, he made straight for our house. My mother looked forward with dread to this annual visitation. For our house was only a kind of landing strip for my grandfather’s great circle swing around the Long Island bars.
My brother and I, while tactfully sympathizing with my mother, secretly looked forward to his coming. He was the only member of the family who blanketed us in a completely natural, warm, animal affection. No sooner was he inside the house than he would sit down and invite us to commit mayhem on his kneecaps, grunting in a voice that grew louder and more anguished with each of our ineffectual efforts: “Ouchl Ouch! Ouch!” Then he would rumple our hair and say in a tone of lingering love: “Grandpa surely does love his little jack rabbits.” It was unqualified: Grandpa simply did love his little jack rabbits. Nobody else ever treated us like that.
My grandfather’s habitual tone of voice to his wife, his daughter and my father was a snarl. At times, it was a blast like a buccina. I can remember standing on the ground floor of my grandparents’ house in Germantown while my grandfather’s voice floated down from the third floor in a hog call that rattled the decorative plates in the rack that ran around the dining room walls: “Ma-a-a! Where in hell are my lightweight dra-a-awers?” This was mild; often he cursed like a pirate. Around his grandsons, he was strictly blasphemous (rather than foul). His cursing, it seems to me, had become almost wholly a reflex. He cursed, by ear, for euphony. The frightful imprecations in the frightening voice were his flowers of rhetoric.
He never turned his blistering broadsides on my mother, my brother or me. He saved them for my father, his wife, his daughter, and the world. Throughout my father’s boyhood that voice had struck terror into him. And much that was agonizingly mute in my father’s nature may be laid as much to his father’s bullying as to his mother’s coddling.
Grandfather approached Falstaff in girth, and equaled him in capacity for liquid intake—chiefly beer. His father, a doctor, had died when my grandfather was about twelve years old, and the boy went to work as a printer’s devil to support his mother and sisters. He had grown up in print shops and graduated into a rough-house school of journalism, where hard drinking was a professional talent.
During his working year, he kept this talent fairly well in check. But he had scarcely arrived at our house when he would announce a little sheepishly (for everybody knew what he really meant): “I must go downtown and get shaved and cleaned up.” Off he would toddle, returning at nightfall, somewhat unsteady, but happily primed “to take the boys out for some root beer tomorrow.” It was our root-beer binges with Grandpa that made his visits a nightmare to our mother. But my grandmother, who always accompanied her husband, would plead tearfully: “Oh, Laha, let him take them or he will be brutal to me.” So, in the morning, we would set off, each clinging to one of Grandfather’s hands, perfectly delighted to go.
Our course seldom varied. My grandfather’s memory was good. He remembered from year to year just where his favorite haunts were and he disliked to slight one of them. We always made at once for Freeport, Long Island, where there was a cool and spacious waterside taproom. There, while we filled up on unstinted schooners of root beer and heapings of free lunch, Grandfather would fill up in his own fashion, going occasionally to the rail of the porch, which overlooked the tide where, with no trace of self-consciousness or discomfort, he would disgorge like an antique Roman—and be ready for more.
Presently, we would take a motor launch for Point Lookout or Long Beach, where he would slap his chest and draw in great lungfuls of sea breeze, extolling the health-giving virtues of salt air as we made a beeline for the lager fumes. Later, we would cross Long Island by trolley to the North Shore, where other taverns beckoned from the hills around Hempstead and Manhasset Bays. Sundown would find us in the taprooms of Brooklyn or Jamaica. Long after dark, we would venture home, we children so tired by then that we could scarcely keep awake, each of us still clinging to one of Grandfather’s hands. This was somewhat more necessary on the return than at the departure, since, by that time, he was no longer quite sure of his footing and depended on us to help him across streets and on and off conveyances. We felt especially proud to be able to help him. He never disgusted or frightened us. However loud or rude he might be with others, he was always supremely gentle with us. We always felt perfectly safe with him.
From observing my grandfather carefully, I presently concluded that his air of public fierceness was almost wholly a fraud, that he was no fiercer than I was. But the world, which had taught him a good many unpleasant things, had taught him that it was a good deal of a fraud itself, and he meant to take it on its own terms.
By the time I was nine or ten, my grandfather had dragged me through most of the saloons in eastern Long Island. An atmosphere of alcoholism is admittedly not the best for two small boys. Apart from that, my mother need never have worried about us. Saloons, I early discovered, were singularly tranquil places. As a rule, my brother and I would be seated at a table as far from the bar as possible. From time to time, my grandfather would bustle over to make sure that our plates were heaped with free lunch, which, in the quantity we made away with, should have made both of us violently sick. I do not remember that it ever did.
Nor do I ever remember anything but a kind of buzzing order in those intemperate havens. Occasionally, the drone of conversation at the bar would flare up into loud words. This would be followed by some cautionary remark and a general over-the-shoulder glance at my brother and me. Then the conversation would lapse again into its easy, somnolent drone. The chief effect of my precocious pub crawl seemed to be that, having seen the inside of so many saloons, I never had the slightest curiosity about them. I neither liked nor disliked them, never went into one alone and seldom went in with anybody else, except for a later period in my brother’s life. But I do not believe that my brother’s drinking was in any way inspired by his early exposure to the swoosh of taps. I myself am one of those untempted people who dislike the taste and smell of liquor.
This old reprobate was the first man who sat down with me and explained to me the world in terms of politics and history. He first made me aware that politics is history in the making. His chief interest was national politics, in which his knowledge and experience
seemed to me vast. My chief interest, from the beginning, was foreign affairs in which he seemed much less at home, though he had a realistic grasp of the main lines of political force. He never tried to switch my interest to his. Instead, he urged me to keep up those clipping books in which I used to paste the heads (so that I could memorize the faces) of leading European statesmen and dynasts (a practice that paid off years later when I was foreign news editor of Time). Almost every week, I wrote him a letter with my boy’s thoughts about current history. Almost every week, tired or ill, he wrote me back, guiding, correcting and directing. It was he who taught me that the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars were the first tremors of world war, and that the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire meant the downfall of Europe. And though in all other ways I was always his “little jack rabbit,” in our political talks and letters, he invariably treated me as one political intelligence speaking to another. This was his temperance, and for it and for his mind, I respected him deeply.
He was a selfish, gross and in many ways, I suppose, a vicious old man. I loved him dearly because he loved me without reserve in the simplest human terms. My affection for him never diminished or changed.
XXI
About two hundred of my grandfather Whittaker’s books lay in barrels in our attic, just beyond the incubator where we hatched our chicks. One day, when I was eight or nine, my reading curiosity took me up there. I lifted from the top of one barrel a big book whose pages were dog-eared, evidently from much turning by my grandfather. It was an old-fashioned book. The text was set in parallel columns, two columns to a page. There were more than a thousand pages. The type was small. I took the book to the little diamond-shaped attic window to read the small type in the light. I opened to the first page and read the brief foreword:
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social damnation, which, in the face of civilization, creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny which is divine with human fatality—
“So long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by hunger, and the stunting of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved;-
“So long as, in certain areas, social asphyxia shall be possible—
“So long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”
I did not understand half the words. How should I know what “human fatality” meant, or “social asphyxia”? But when I read those lines, there moved through my mind a solemn music that is the overtone of justice and compassion. A spirit moved upon the page and through my ignorance I sensed that spirit.
The book, of course, was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables-The Wretched of the Earth. In its pages can be found the play of forces that carried me into the Communist Party, and in the same pages can be found the play of forces that carried me out of the Communist Party. The roots of both influences are in the same book, which I read devotedly for almost a decade before I ever opened a Bible, and which was, in many respects, the Bible of my boyhood. I think I can hear a derisive question: “How can anyone take seriously a man who says flatly that his life has been influenced by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables?” I understand. I can only answer that, behind its colossal failings, its melodrama, its windy philosophizing, its clots of useless knowledge, its overblown rhetoric and repellent posturings, which offend me, like everybody else, on almost every page, Les Misérables is a great act of the human spirit. And it is a fact that books which fall short of greatness sometimes have a power to move us greatly, especially in childhood when we are least critical and most forgiving, for their very failures confess their humanity. As a boy, I did not know that Les Misérables is a Summa of the revolt of the mind and soul of modern man against the materialism that was closing over them with the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of industrial civilization—or, as Karl Marx would later teach me to call it: capitalism.
I took the book downstairs and read for the first time the first line of its story: “In 1815, Charles Francois Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.” I do not know how many times I have since read that simplest of leads, which has for me, like many greater first lines, the quality of throwing open a door upon man’s fate.
I read and reread Les Misérables many times in its entirety. It taught me two seemingly irreconcilable things—Christianity and revolution. It taught me first of all that the basic virtue of life is humility, that before humility, ambition, arrogance, pride and power are seen for what they are, the stigmata of littleness, the betrayal by the mind of the soul, a betrayal which continually fails against a humility that is authentic and consistent. It taught me justice and compassion, not a justice of the law, or, as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends human justice whenever humanity transcends itself to reach that summit where justice and compassion are one. It taught me that, in a world of force, the least act of humility and compassion requires the utmost exertion of all the powers of mind and soul, that nothing is so difficult, that there can be no true humility and no true compassion where there is no courage. That was the gist of its Christian teaching. It taught me revolution, not as others were to teach me—as a political or historical fact—but as a reflex of human suffering and desperation, a perpetual insurgence of that instinct for justice and truth that lay within the human soul, from which a new vision of truth and justice was continually issuing to meet the new needs of the soul in new ages of the world.
I scarcely knew that Les Misérables was teaching me Christianity, and never thought of it that way, for it showed it to me, not as a doctrine of the mind, but in action in the world, in prisons, in slums, among the poor, the sick, the dying, thieves, murderers, harlots and outcast, lonely children, in the sewers of Paris and on the barricades of revolution. Its operation did not correspond to anything I knew as Christian in the world about me. But it corresponded exactly to a need I felt within myself.
Les Misérables gave me my first full-length picture of the modern world—a vast, complex, scarcely human structure, built, over a social abyss of which the sewers of Paris was the symbol, and resting with crushing weight upon the wretched of the earth. Dickens’ novels showed me much the same thing, in a series of glimpses rather than in one appalling view of the human pit. But Dickens’ novels, when they did not merely bore me, left me completely unmoved. His tear-jerking scenes jerked no tears from me, though I sometimes resented their efforts to. I knew that the unfortunate hero would always come into a legacy, or a kindly eccentric would intervene to snatch the good outcast or the lost child from the engulfing evil which was, after all, rather quaint. And though I did not know that there was such a thing as a problem of evil, I recognized that Dickens’ way was too easy a way out, and no more an answer to the problem that he had raised than life insurance is an answer to the problem of death. Moreover, Dickens was entirely secular. Again, while I did not know the difference between secular and spiritual, I felt it. I brushed Dickens aside and plunged into Hugo.
It was, above all, the character of the Bishop of Digne and the stories about him that I cherished in Les Misérables. As a boy I read them somewhat as other people read the legends of the saints. Perhaps it is necessary to have read them as a child to be able to feel the full force of those stories, which are in many ways childish, and appeal instantly to the child mind, just as today they appeal to what is most childlike in me as a man.
That first day, when I sat in our living room and read how the Bishop came to Digne, I knew that I had found a book that had been written for me. I read how the Bishop moved into his palace with its vast salons and noticed next door a tiny hospital with its sick crowded into a few small rooms. The Bishop called in the director of the hospital and questioned him: How many rooms are there in the hospital; how many sick; how many beds in each room? “Look,” he said at last, “there is evidently some mistake here. You have my house and I have yours. Give me back my house and move into yours.” The next day the Bishop was in the
hospital and the patients were in the palace. “He is showing off,” said the solid citizens.
The Bishop’s views on human fallibility fixed mine and made it impossible for me ever to be a puritan. “To be a saint,” he sometimes preached to the “ferociously virtuous,” “is the exception; to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but be upright. To commit the least possible sin is the law for man.... Sin is a gravitation.”
He first raised in my mind the question of relative human guilt. Everybody was praising the cleverness of a public prosecutor. A man and woman had been arrested for some mischief. There was no evidence against the man. By a trick, the prosecutor convinced the woman falsely that the man had been unfaithful to her. She testified against him. “Where are the man and woman to be tried?” asked the Bishop. “At the assizes.” “And where,” asked the Bishop, “is the prosecutor to be tried?”
The Bishop lodged in my mind a permanent suspicion of worldly success and pride of place that never changed in all the changes of my life. He was not one of the “rich mitres.” In Paris he did not “catch on.” He was not considered “to have any future.” For, said Hugo, “We live in a sad society. Succeed—that is the advice that falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging corruption.”
The story about the Bishop that I liked best also involved the question of worldly appearances. One day the Bishop had to visit a parish in the steep mountains, where no horse could go. Few bishops would have gone there, either. The Bishop of Digne went, riding on a sure-footed donkey. The solid citizens of the town turned out to greet him. When they saw the Bishop climbing down from his donkey, some of them could not hide their smiles. “My bourgeois friends,” said the Bishop pleasantly, “I know why you are smiling. You think that it is pretty presumptuous of a poor priest to use the same conveyance that was used by Jesus Christ.” Thus I first learned the meaning of the word bourgeois, so that, unlike most Americans, I was quite familiar with it when I came across it later in the writings of Marx and Lenin.
Witness Page 19
