The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said, and his intelligent ugly face showed no curiosity. And then he gave Laskell the benefit of his guiltless political nature by saying casually, “It’s just as well that you refused too.”

  It was at that moment that Laskell had the sensation about Nancy. For it was a sensation and not a perception—it was as simple and direct as if it were a sound or a smell. It was as if he could feel her existing in a circumambient reservation, as if she were not in the same relation to himself and Arthur that he was in to Arthur or Arthur to him. She was in a relation to something else, to herself, or to some special knowledge she had. But it was not until he was back at the Folgers’ and in his brass bed that Laskell understood what the sensation meant. Then it came to him with perfect certainty: Nancy had not said no to Maxim’s request. Arthur had said no for both the Crooms. Nancy had allowed him to think that the answer stood. But Nancy had not said no, she had said yes. She had separated herself from Arthur and had sought out Maxim and had privately said yes. It was surely the first separation of herself from Arthur that Nancy had ever made. It was very puzzling and rather frightening. But he did not know whether he was frightened for Nancy or by her.

  He lay a long time in the dark that night, listening to the very faint movement of the tree outside his window. Once more he turned over in his mind just what it meant to feel that the future was no longer real, or that, if it was real at all, it was coexistent with the present. And once more he thought of the future as a characteristic concept of the well-loved young man of the middle class, brought up on promises.

  And what has changed? he asked himself. Was it that he was not well loved? Or not of the middle class?

  Oh, surely of the middle class. Perhaps not so well loved as he once had been. And surely no longer young.

  He lay there, excited by that recognition, not depressed by it. He could not sleep, but he did not mind that. There was a kind of gratification in the grave and not very happy thoughts he had. He was not able to identify this gratification.

  There was much to think about in connection with the conversation he had been having. There were certain questions that occurred to him. For example, he found himself asking why Arthur, who was so political, had accepted the fact of Maxim’s break with the Party without inquiring into its reasons. He himself had avoided that inquiry, although Maxim had expressly given him the chance to make it. He had been ashamed that he had not gone into the theoretical grounds for Maxim’s action. But why had Arthur not done so? For Arthur was really political. Arthur’s agreement with the Party began where theory left off and where morals and will began. He had many differences with the Party and was sometimes even inclined to smile at the economic statements of the Party’s theorists. He thought the Party ought to exist for its moral influence in politics, but he went no further than that. Yet he had not asked for an explanation of why Maxim had broken.

  He had not, it was true, gone quite the whole way with Nancy in giving insanity as the reason. Still, he had not thought of explaining the break by attributing it to political disagreement. “What could be the matter with him?” was the only line of questioning Arthur took. He was quite willing, it seemed, to leave the Party as a fixed point from which all deviation implied something wrong with the person deviating. Not ever being at one with the Party was all right; but deviation, after having been at one with the Party, was wrong. Arthur was a political man, but even for him the Party was not really political, and a break with it was not an action in politics—in practical politics, as people said, wishing to make a distinction between that unfortunate kind of politics and some other, better kind—but rather an action in morals.

  And then: why had Arthur so severely questioned him when he had mentioned Lenin’s view of the need for small groups of professional revolutionaries, asking him if he really thought that the Party was conspiratorial? Yet Arthur had said that the affair of the secret letters had been Maxim’s business and therefore not to be inquired into. Then to confuse the matter further, why had Arthur felt that because of the secrecy it was as well that the Crooms and Laskell had refused to be involved?

  But Nancy was involved. Of that Laskell was sure. Why had she said yes? Was it because she, like him, had been reared as a well-loved child of the middle class, brought up on promises which had to be fulfilled? If at first Laskell had been ambiguously frightened by his knowledge of what she had done, now, as he thought of her in the light of their common past, thought of her as the spirited girl in the genteel suburb to whom so much was promised and so much given, he had a kind of tenderness for her action. It had a directness and innocence about it, a fresh, young immediacy.

  John Laskell had never looked at the Crooms from so much distance before. But he found the distance by no means at final odds with his great affection for them. Quite the contrary, as the excitement of thought began to wane and sleep began to come, he thought of the Crooms with a new affection. They did not have the secret of life, of the perfectly simple character, but that only endeared them the more. Not until he saw that they did not have it was he aware that he had ever believed that they had had it.

  After this evening, Laskell and the Crooms did not of their own will revert to the story of Maxim. And perhaps, though that was doubtful, it would never have been mentioned again had it not forced itself upon them. It did so three days later. Laskell was at the Crooms in the afternoon and Nancy gave him his mail. She said as she handed it to him, “There’s a card from your friend.”

  “My friend?” said Laskell. He knew whom she meant, but he said, “Have I only the one?”

  “Your Maxim,” Nancy said dryly.

  “My Maxim? Surely as much yours as mine. Or as little mine as yours.”

  “I saw the card, John. Really, Kermit Simpson is not a responsible person. And you must be held to blame too, you really must.”

  For the postcard bore the printed name of The New Era and on it Maxim had typed a brief message: “I greet you from my existence.” He had both typed his name and signed it. There was an asterisk at the end of the single sentence of the message, and it referred to a footnote below. “A man,” the footnote read, “is the cause of existence but not the cause of essence of another man (for the latter is an eternal truth): and so they can certainly agree in essence, but in existence they must differ, and on that account if the existence of one of them perish, that of the other does not consequently perish; but if the essence of one of them could be destroyed or made false, the essence of the other must also be destroyed. Spin. Eth. Bk. I, Prop. XVII, note.”

  “Have you read it?” Laskell said.

  “No. Of course I haven’t read your mail.”

  “I’m sure he meant you to read it. At any rate, you’ve read enough for his purpose. You read his name and The New Era. You know, as he wanted you to know, that on a certain day in August Gifford Maxim wrote from the office of The New Era. I’m sure he’s sending out as many postcards as he can. Here, read it.”

  She took it as if it were dangerous or befouled. “What does it mean?” she said when she had read it through.

  “Did we ever really know what Maxim meant by anything? The quotation is from Spinoza’s Ethics—I don’t know what he means to say by it.”

  This was not wholly true. But he spoke bitterly. He was angry with Maxim for this trick. He did not want to hear from Maxim on this presumption of friendship. He did not want the presumption of friendship to be the pretext for the further establishment of Maxim’s monomaniac existence. So he would not let his mind rest on whatever meaning the card had. But he did not tear it up. He put it in his pocket.

  And then a few days later they had forced on them yet another evidence of Maxim’s existence and of his redoubtable efforts to establish it. The August issue of The New Era arrived for the Crooms and Gifford Maxim’s name was on the masthead. He appeared as an assistant editor. There was no announcement of his having joined the staff, simply the addition of his name to the names of the two yo
ung men who were also assistant editors. But on the cover was the announcement of an article: “Spirit and Law.... Gifford Maxim.” This, no doubt, was the article, “the literary article,” that Maxim had waved at Laskell the day of his visit. Perhaps its inclusion in the issue was the reason for the issue’s being so late. And when the Crooms handed him The New Era in wry silence, Laskell felt enough connection with the article to admit that if they wanted to hold him to account for its publication, they had some justification.

  The New Era was a long, double-columned, rough-stock publication, similar in appearance to the American and English liberal weeklies, although Kermit Simpson made a point of saying that it had been modeled in format as in policy on the old Freeman. Maxim’s article ran to two pages, an unusual length for The New Era’s literary section.

  “Have you read it?” Laskell said.

  “Not yet,” said Arthur.

  “No,” said Nancy.

  Laskell took it out to the lawn to read. It was an essay in the form of a review of a new edition of Melville’s Billy Budd, Foretopman, a limited and costly edition. “It is now twelve years since the discovery and first publication of the masterpiece of Herman Melville’s old age. Yet even now Billy Budd is not generally known to American readers.” It began so, and Laskell thought that Maxim had established a new existence indeed: he wrote quite in the Anglican manner of Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. But the older Maxim appeared in the next sentence: “The Porpentine Press has just brought out this great work in an edition scarcely calculated to give it wider currency. Five hundred copies on handmade, woven rag-paper at fifteen dollars a copy, the type hand-set and prim and self-conscious, and then distributed so as to insure the scarcity-value and snob-value of each of the numbered copies—thus does ‘culture’ ape the values of the market-place.” It was not until much later than Laskell learned that all this was Maxim’s joke. There was no such edition of Billy Budd, there was not even such a press as the Porpentine.

  Maxim gave a few more sentences to the sins of the Porpentine Press and spoke sharply of the line-drawings which illustrated the book in, as he said, “a bad imitation of the worst manner of Rockwell Kent.” Then he launched into his subject. As Laskell read, he was filled with astonishment. He had never speculated on what views Maxim might come to hold and now that he had the opportunity to see what they were, it was almost unbelievable. Not unbelievable that anyone should have them, but that Maxim should have them, and presumably not all of a sudden but developing them at a time when everyone believed him to be holding views exactly opposite.

  Because, as Maxim said, the story of Billy Budd was not well known, he undertook to tell it briefly. He established the great triangle of Billy Budd, Claggart, and Captain Vere—Billy Budd, The Handsome Sailor, the youth of so great a natural goodness that everyone loved him, and physically perfect except for the one flaw, his stammering inability to speak when under great emotional stress; and Claggart, the master-at-arms of the English frigate, a fallen gentleman, the man of evil, who is drawn to goodness but envies and hates it; and Captain Vere of the frigate Indomitable, “Starry” Vere, as he is called, the man of passionate but reasonable virtue, of intellect and duty, a captain potentially as great as Nelson. Maxim quickly told the story of Claggart’s perverse persecution of Budd, his denouncing Budd to the Captain for mutinous schemes, the Captain’s dislike of Claggart and his intuitive trust of Budd, the confrontation of Budd and Claggart in the Captain’s cabin, the accusation made, Budd’s confusion and anger rendering him incapable of speech, so that his answer had to be his blow on Claggart’s temple, Claggart’s falling dead and the Captain’s cry, “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang.” Such is the goodness of the young sailor that even the small minds of the ship’s officers are moved to be merciful. But they are swayed by “Starry” Vere’s speech to them, in which, though torn by his paternal love for the young man, Vere argues for the necessity under law of condemning him to death. Maxim quoted the scene of the hanging at dawn, so that his readers might have the full force of it, Billy’s utterance, as the noose was around his neck, of his only words, “God bless Captain Vere!” the words “delivered in the clear melody of a singing bird on the point of launching from the twig,” the massed ship’s-company echoing the cry without volition and almost against its will, the Captain on the quarter-deck momentarily paralyzed by the cry; and then the going aloft of Billy, which is made to appear as an ascension rather than a hanging, the sudden light in the sky and the hanged figure miraculously not twitching in its death-throes.

  “The modern mind,” Maxim wrote, “is not really capable of understanding this story. I mean the modern mind in its most vocal part, in its radical or liberal intellectual part. For such people, Billy Budd will be nothing more than an oppressed worker, and a very foolish one, an insufficiently activated one, nothing more than a ‘company man,’ weakly acquiescent to the boss. And Captain Vere will seem as at best but a conscience-ridden bourgeois, sympathetic to a man of the lower orders but committed to carrying out the behests of the established regime.

  “Melville, of course, intended no such understanding of the matter. The story is a political parable, but on a higher level than we are used to taking our political parables. It is the tragedy of Spirit in the world of Necessity. And more, it is the tragedy of Law in the world of Necessity, the tragedy that Law faces whenever it confronts its child, Spirit. For Billy is nothing less than pure Spirit, and Captain Vere nothing less than Law in the world of Necessity. We have, of course, a story of God the Father, of Christ and of the Devil, but this we must not interpret in too traditional a way.

  “I have said that Billy is pure Spirit, but that is not quite accurate. He is not wholly pure. He has a flaw, symbolized by his impediment of speech. And he sins, despite the fact that the man against whom he directs his anger is Evil itself. His blow is given out of an impotence.

  “Yet, as Spirit, Billy is pure enough to make the tragedy of Captain Vere. Vere must rule the world of Necessity because Claggart—Evil—exists. The belief of the modern progressive is that Spirit should find its complete expression at once. Everything that falls short of the immediate expression of Spirit is believed to be an ignominious moral inadequacy. To such minds, Captain Vere is culpable because he does not acquit Billy in defiance of all Law. To them, Vere’s suffering at being unable to do so is a mere sentimentality. It is even an hypocrisy. The modern progressive believes that he will not palter with anything less than perfection. He considers this the mark of his virtue. But perhaps it is rather the mark of his lack of belief in the truth and reality of Spirit. He can-not believe in Spirit unless it is established in institutions. He cannot believe that he really exists as Spirit unless he sees himself matched exactly in external forms. It is not the strength of the inner life that makes this demand. Rather it is the weakness of the inner life that will not tolerate any discrepancy between what Spirit can conceive and what Necessity can tolerate. Melville’s perception is that Spirit and the Law that is established in the world of Necessity are kin, yet discontinuous. It is not merely that Vere understands that Billy is his son, the Isaac to his Abraham; it is that Billy understands that Vere is his father and blesses him in his last words. Spirit blesses Law, even when Law has put the noose around his neck, for Spirit understands the true kinship.

  “As long as Evil exists in the world, Law must exist, and it—not Spirit—must have the rule. And Vere’s is the suffering, his is the tragic choice of God the Father, who must condemn his own son to death. But not as in the familiar transaction of Christian theology, as a sacrifice and as atonement, but for the sake of the Son himself, for the sake of Spirit in humanity. For Billy Budd is not only Christ, he is Christ in Adam, and is therefore imperfect, subject to excess. But we cannot understand Vere’s suffering choice because we do not understand tragedy. And we do not understand tragedy because we do not understand love.”

  The essay did not stop there, but went on to speak at l
ength of tragedy and love.

  It was as well that it did, for Laskell had found that he had been a little caught by Maxim’s words. One sentence in particular, in which Maxim spoke of the reign of Spirit being in the everlasting future, while modern men thought that they could establish it now, suited what Laskell had been thinking about the future. But as Maxim went on to speak of tragedy and love, using the words over and over again, the odor of corruption came to Laskell and freed him from any enchantment with Maxim’s mind. Tragedy and love, love and tragedy, tragedy depending on love, love depending on tragedy: Maxim wove a crooning litany of the two words until Laskell felt an intellectual nausea and thought that there were two words that decency could not utter, however real were the things they represented. Perhaps only because Maxim spoke them, and spoke them so often, Laskell felt that never again could anyone say the words tragedy and love.

  He sat in the canvas deck chair and wondered how it was possible for a man who had once so loved freedom and the future to make so impassioned a plea, in the name of tragedy and love, for the status quo, the accepted thing, the rule of force. Maxim was no disaffected revolutionary. He was the blackest of reactionaries. He was not a man who had no party for his progressive but divergent ideas. He had moved so far as to be on the other side.

  “What do you make of it?” Arthur said when Laskell brought The New Era back into the house.

  Laskell shrugged in impatience. “I don’t know. Read it yourself and see.” He felt at that moment a disgust for the whole world of ideas that allowed such shifts as Maxim’s to be made so easily. He wanted to be off by himself.

  The Crooms brought themselves to read the essay and their response to it surprised him. He himself could not understand it save as proof that Maxim had thrown over all his aims and hopes. Maxim took pleasure in explaining that Spirit—as he called it—was not yet ready to establish its rule on earth. He meant that it would never establish its rule. Perhaps Maxim did not really believe in his own elaborate obfuscation, his vague religiosity that demanded an understanding of tragedy and the exercise of love and required events to stand still while “Spirit” perfected itself, which, of course, it would never do. Laskell did not know which was the more repulsive, a Maxim who really believed this or a Maxim who pretended to believe it because he thought he would be the safer if he made clear and absolute his difference with the Party.