The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  Maxim opened the whisky bottle and poured drinks for them all. He did it with the same quiet significance with which he would have poured his own whisky. He was careless about the amount he poured, he had not the scientist’s interest in quantity, but each time he held the bottle over the glass it was as if he were making a subtle decision that involved universal considerations.

  He was still giving the whole of his attention to the drink and he did not look at Laskell when he said, “How are you feeling, John? Did you make the trip all right? I was worried about you.”

  “Worried? Why were you worried?”

  Maxim went on with what he was doing. Then he looked at Laskell with all his irony. Only the impossibility of Maxim’s knowing what had happened on the trip kept Laskell from believing that Maxim knew all about it.

  “You were on the verge,” Maxim said, as if it were pretty dull that he had to make any explanation.

  If Laskell were to press for the meaning, if he were to say, “On the verge of what?” he would get no other answer than that look of irony again. Maxim had the trick of really good fortune-tellers and palmists, of putting things so generally and so dramatically that what was said had to have some sort of relevant meaning, and then if you asked them what they meant, they looked at you with mockery and annoyance, as if you were being willfully stupid, you with all your intelligence and sensitivity.

  But in Maxim’s mockery there was now a new element, a kind of weariness. He still pretended to his knowledge of hidden motive, but the hidden things he pretended now to see were different from the hidden things he had pretended to see before. He looked at Laskell as if he were saying that there was now a virtue in what he saw. He smiled, as if in this obtuse and stubborn Laskell he saw things that made him very tender and forgiving. But he would not explain and he said very little during Laskell’s short visit that afternoon. While Kermit conscientiously reported his observations of New England—for he did not want it to be thought that his trip had been wholly for pleasure—Maxim sat squinting in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky.

  Nancy came to dinner. Whatever she felt toward Maxim, she came with at least some good will to the occasion, for she had piled her hair high on her head to display her ears in an almost ceremonious nakedness and she looked very pretty. But she kept herself remote, as if she had made an agreement with Arthur about her behavior and was living up to it as gallantly as she could. She said nothing to Maxim and did not look at him.

  Kermit had a fire going and the table set. His salad was ready for the dressing, the potatoes were nearly done. For cocktails he had brought champagne of a modest vintage, for he planned this as a festive occasion, and the two bottles were icing in a bucket. Kermit was a good practical cook, silent and without any of the sense of cachet that men so often cultivate about cookery. He had learned from guides and fellow hunters, not from chefs or books.

  When their glasses were filled, they all made that queer little abortive gesture of modern people when they drink wine, an embarrassed directing of the glass at the company—they cannot completely carry out so archaic a ritual as drinking to anyone, yet they cannot quite let the custom die.

  But Kermit said in his mild voice, from his great height, making the occasion specific, “We must drink to the new assistant editor of The New Era.” He said it in just the right voice to make it gracious but not solemn, and raised his glass toward Maxim. Maxim dropped his eyes. They drank to Maxim, all except Nancy, who twirled her glass and looked at the bubbles with curiosity. In the still air they could hear the snapping of Kermit’s fire as it burned down to the coals he wanted. Arthur and Laskell looked thoughtful.

  Arthur said, “John told us about your—your break, Giff. What are you going to do now?”

  Since it was clear that so far as work went, Maxim was employed by The New Era, Arthur must have meant that he wanted to know what Maxim was going to do about his political life. Arthur had asked the question in full good nature. He did not expect the answer he received and perhaps did not deserve it.

  “I’m going to secure my safety, Arthur,” Maxim said courteously.

  Arthur’s face darkened. He did not reply at once but seemed to wait for the first flush of his anger to subside. Then he said, “Do you mean that?”

  Maxim said with the same soft courtesy, “Yes, I mean it.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing to say—and mean.” Arthur spoke with the direct intention of insulting Maxim. But then he seemed to have heard the calculated note of contempt in his voice and he said earnestly, almost pleadingly, “Giff, I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  “If you choose to think so, Arthur, you may of course think so. You asked me and I told you.”

  “But it’s so unlike you—it’s such a reactionary thing to say!”

  Perhaps it was an impulse of kindness in Arthur that made his voice so boyish, made it seem as if he were not appealing to Maxim’s better nature against his reactionariness but against his being unsportsmanlike, or even, going back a few decades, caddish.

  Maxim said, “That depends upon what you mean by revolutionary. Or perhaps, whatever you do mean by revolutionary, I really am what you say—perhaps I am reactionary.”

  But Kermit would have none of that. “Cut it out, Giff, we’ve been through that. I don’t know that I agree with all your ideas, but you’re not reactionary.”

  Maxim shrugged, refusing argument.

  Kermit said, “I agree with you in certain respects that things in the Soviet Union are not what we ought to admire. I think it ought to be said that we don’t, and I’m a little ashamed of myself for not having said it openly enough in The New Era. After all, we are a libertarian paper, and if a revolutionary experiment curtails freedom even temporarily, we ought to say so. And say it openly. After all, that’s the only way we are going to bring about any change: by saying things openly. And we have the right to say them, especially if we have a full realization that it is an experiment and that every social experiment, no matter how liberal its ultimate aims, is bound to generate certain contradictions and difficulties of a temporary sort. But it’s absurd to call that position reactionary.”

  “That is not my position,” said Maxim.

  But at the same moment Nancy said, “Are you going to say that kind of thing in The New Era, Kermit?”

  Kermit preferred to answer Nancy’s question rather than Maxim’s denial. “Yes,” Kermit said. “I’ve had it troubling my conscience in a vague sort of way for some time. You know how those things can be. In the back of your mind you have a vague feeling of illogicality, but it doesn’t come to the fore until something brings it there. After all, civil liberties are civil liberties, no matter where and no matter what the underlying philosophy of the particular state that negates them.” He turned to Maxim again and repeated what he had concluded before. “But Giff, it’s just perverse to call such a view reactionary.”

  Maxim shrugged again. “Call it what you like,” he said rather brutally. He helped himself to champagne, drank it off, and filled his glass again. “Call it what you like. It’s your position, not mine, so call it what you like. Names don’t bother me as much as they bother you. They don’t bother me at all. I’ve tried to tell you, Simpson, I’ve tried to tell you for weeks now what I think and you won’t understand. I can’t make you understand. I don’t think I’ll ever make you understand—it’s not in your nature, it’s not in your good-nature, to know what I’m talking about. But I want you to be sure that I tried. I’m taking a job with you simply because—”

  “Yes, I know,” Kermit said, smiling. His smile showed that he was hurt by Maxim’s tone, but was trying not to be. “I know. You’re simply ‘using’ me. You’ve told me that. All right. But I’m using you too. Don’t forget that—I’m using you just as much as you’re using me. There’s an area where we don’t agree. I grant that. I grant that I don’t understand that area. There are some things about you that I suppose I never will understand. Your bitterness and ho
pelessness and the way you overstate things. But I’ve made plenty of use of you. I’ve learned a lot from you and I think I’ll learn more still.”

  It was irresistibly disarming, even for Maxim. And Maxim admitted that he was disarmed. He was looking at Kermit with a sour irony, a kind of bitterly grudging admiration of Kermit’s method of argument. Kermit had disarmed him with his boyish earnestness and Maxim seemed to be admitting that this, after all, was an effective technique, as effective as one of his own. Laskell thought that it came very naturally to both Arthur and Kermit to be boyish when they were earnest. Maxim said with a final fatigue, as if there were no arguing with Kermit, “O.K.” But then he revived and said, “But get it straight, Simpson. You don’t understand. That’s right, you don’t. But you don’t even know what it is you don’t understand.”

  Kermit made a little gesture with his head and mouth and eyebrows, as if to say that that might well be but that he had his own opinion. Laskell saw that he had been bullied by Maxim all the time they had been together. Kermit had learned how to take the bullying gracefully, with a little gesture to indicate an opinion held in reserve.

  For a moment they sat silent, waiting to see if Kermit would reply beyond his gesture. But Kermit did not say anything.

  Nancy said, “No, he doesn’t understand.” She said it very quietly. She meant that she understood but that a person of Kermit’s innocence would naturally not understand the depravity to which Maxim was confessing. She said in the same quiet voice, “Why did you come here, Maxim?”

  Her addressing him by his last name carried the question out of the present moment and immediate scene into a clear abstract realm of morality where perhaps the matter belonged. It was very striking. Laskell had been calling him Giff, and even Arthur, when he was most contemptuous, had called him Giff.

  Maxim looked down into his empty glass on the table. He took the stem between two fingers and twirled it slowly. It was an oddly elegant gesture for his bulk. He was smoking a cigarette and it had burned down to as small a butt as possible. He took one more pull at it, slowly, shutting one eye as the smoke curled up and stung it. He looked at Nancy and dryly said, “For purposes of corruption, I suppose you’d say.” He dropped the cigarette and ground it carefully into the earth with his toe.

  “That is exactly what I do say. You did your best to draw us in and now you’d like to undo your work. By every lie and insinuation you can utter.”

  She had risen and was standing with her clenched fist pressing down hard upon the table for support. But she was very quiet. It was impossible to interfere. They were both so quiet and kept the matter so precisely between them that none of the three men was able to enter the conflict to turn it.

  “Draw you in?” Maxim said with surprise. And his voice was filled with the politeness of centuries of humanistic culture, with the bows and curtsies, the fauteuils and carpets of many civilizations, as he returned the shot that Nancy had fired with such effect a moment before. “You are mistaken, Croom,” he said softly.

  It was more terrible than Nancy’s “Maxim” and Nancy flinched under it. They all flinched under it. They all saw what Maxim wanted them to see. They saw it even though it was a travesty that Maxim had conjured up—the committee-room in which politics was brought to the ultimate issue, in which, since the issues were final and lives were staked on them, the antagonists stripped themselves as much as possible of their ordinary human conditions, and of their names kept only what was essential for identification, Nancy giving up anything so charged with the irrelevant condition of femininity as Nancy or Mrs. Croom.

  For a moment Maxim let them take it in and then he said, “You are quite mistaken. I didn’t draw you in. The dialectic of the situation”—his voice permitted itself a note of intellectual bitterness which swelled as he went on—“mind you, the dialectic of the situation detached certain disaffected portions of the middle class from their natural class interests and connections, and attached them to the interests of the oppressed classes.”

  There was insult in his language. But his tone was politely explanatory. “You happened to be part of that disaffected portion of the middle class. It was not that you consciously responded to external necessities but rather that you expressed certain internal conflicts which reflected contradictions in the world outside.”

  As he went on it became clear that he was not insulting Nancy but rather the language that he was using. The force of his attention was not on Nancy now, but on his own words.

  He said, and closed his eyes and changed his cadence to show that he was quoting, “‘I should be the last to hold the individual responsible for conditions whose creature he himself is, socially considered, however much he may raise himself above them subjectively.’ I think that is verbatim. And in the logic of the situation—it is called the inexorable logic of the situation—you were drawn only to the ideational aspects of the movement, to the emotional superstructure of the movement, not to its base in reality. So much so, that when I made one single attempt to—as you say—draw you in, to involve you in the more practical aspects of the movement, I had no success whatever. I asked three of you—John Laskell and Arthur and yourself—to do a certain thing, to receive certain letters of great importance. You all three, every one of you, refused. And when I thought that perhaps I ought not take Arthur’s refusal as valid for his wife, too, and asked you again, when you were alone, whether you would give me this help, you refused again.”

  With his eyes on Nancy’s face, Laskell saw that Maxim’s odd point of honor had been communicated. He saw the puzzled, stopped look that Nancy wore as she understood what Maxim was saying to her, that he was telling her he would not even now betray her secret. She had opened her mouth to reply. She had been on the point of replying to this man she so hated. But he had stopped her, if only for this moment.

  But Arthur said, “Maxim! Do you mean to say that after we both refused together, you went and asked Nancy by herself?”

  “Yes. But she refused.”

  “That was a fine, son-of-a-bitch thing to do,” said Arthur.

  “It was,” said Maxim. Then he explained demurely, “But you see, I was a member of the Party then.”

  Arthur had nothing to answer and Maxim went on with his lecture to Nancy. “So you see, I have very little hope of drawing you one way or another. You will go the way of the dialectic, whatever way that happens to be for you, and so, no doubt, will I. You can be sure that the thesis is now being prepared with reference to me and my kind: ‘Certain disaffected portions of the professional revolutionary class will be infected by the virus of the rotting bourgeois culture from which they originally sprang on the impulse to make the revolution serve their individualistic aspirations for romantic action and utopian morality and will betray their revolutionary commitments to wallow in the slime of idealism from which they came.’ In a short time I will be known as Maxim & Co. Perhaps you yourself can see the froth of the counter-revolutionary mad-dog on my mouth. As for you, you will, I hope, go a nobler way.”

  They were all silent, deeply embarrassed. Even Kermit felt that Maxim had gone too far. He got up and laid the steak on the grill. Laskell had been complexly moved by the outburst, for he had only once before seen Maxim yield so completely to merely personal feeling. Yet at the same time that he felt an obscure pity, he felt a kind of disgust. Maxim might be right in all he said about the movement, but Laskell was sure he would never again be able to look at him without disgust. However good the reasons, he thought, that make a man desert his cause, he will always be unpleasant to see, his moral equilibrium will never restore itself. Better, perhaps, to stay in the self-hatred of an enforced conformity than to enter the self-suspicion of even reasoned and justifiable treachery.

  The spectacle of Maxim was shocking enough to carry Arthur past his anger. It was as if one could not be angry with a Maxim in this condition. Arthur said, “Giff!” using again that boyish note of straightforward appeal that was so winning. He tried to
recall Maxim to his former and better self. “Giff! What brought you to this point?”

  It was clear that Maxim could not be given a single opening, for now he lifted his head and looked at Arthur, his lower lip caught reflectively between his teeth, and said very gravely, “There was a fly in it.”

  It took them all a moment to recall the dirty joke with whose tag Maxim had answered Arthur. They all hated him for the brutal levity of the answer.

  But Arthur was not to be drawn into anger again. He said, as if Maxim had given him a perfectly satisfactory reply, “What’s your position then?”

  “Position?”

  “Yes, position,” Arthur said, his mouth now set and his jaw out.

  Maxim gave way. “I have no position, Arthur,” he said kindly. “At the moment I am hors de combat. Simpson has given me a job on his magazine at—what is it?—forty dollars a week. I’ll work for Simpson for a while, at least until I am sufficiently established, and then I’ll see. I’ve lost, you know, the work of nearly half my life.”

  It was true—nearly half a life. This they knew, this even Nancy knew, but she was evidently not willing to let herself be touched by it. She said, “But meanwhile, all the suffering people all over the world— You’ll sit and consider while they die in their misery?”

  For a moment Maxim did not answer. Then, “Is it not strange,” he said, “do you not find it strange that as we become more sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, we become more and more cruel? The more we think of the human body and the human mind as being able to suffer, and the sorrier we feel for that, and the more we plan to prevent suffering, the more we are drawn to inflict suffering. The more tortures we think up, the more people we believe deserve to be tortured. The more we think that people can be ruled by fear of suffering. We have become our brother’s keeper—and we will keep him in fear, we will keep him in concentration camps, we will keep him in straitjackets, we will keep him in the grave.”