“Well, of course, George, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. But I still want to point out that you are the one who is going to suffer from any inconsistency between Leitner books and Leitner briefs.”
“I may even profit from it!” George exclaimed. “I wonder if I haven’t become too much of a stereotype. And you’ve had a hand in it, my friend.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Grant Stowe, the P.T. Barnum of law firms. Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, in the past ten years. You’ve been shaping me into a public image. The silver-haired, silver-tongued prophet of laissez faire! A kind of now stern, now twinkling Uncle Sam, first pointing a bony finger as in a war poster and then patting a small child’s tousled head.”
This was too much for Matilda. “How can you say a thing like that, George? Don’t you know that my husband worships the very ground you walk on? You should be married to him!”
“In a way I am, Matilda,” George said more gently now. “At least we walk on that same ground. But seriously, do you know what that fellow Frankfurter says of me? That I’m like Tennyson. Mellifluous, sonorous, high sounding—with no thought content.”
“Well, who cares what a smart-alecky Jewish law professor thinks?” Matilda cried angrily.
“I care!” George retorted. “And maybe, my dear, you have some of that same prejudice about our own Felix. What I maintain is that he is keeping me younger and making my image sharper. And that I like it. And that I like him! What do you say to that, Grant?”
“Simply that what goes with you, George, goes with me. I withdraw my objections to Felix Leitner and to his books. To this book, anyway.”
George chuckled, his usual serenity restored with victory. “I thought you’d qualify your general statement. You remind me of an old colored butler we had in Richmond. His name was Jesse. Once when Mrs. Dinwiddie and Jesse’s wife, who was her maid, were particularly pleased at the prospect of fine weather and a country fair, I said to him: ‘Jesse, our women folk seem in a good mood today.’ He looked at his watch and replied, ‘Say they’s in a good mood at this minute, twelve-sixteen.’”
Later that night when I was alone topside, smoking a cigar and watching the lights in the little village square by which we were moored, Frances Leitner came up and took a seat beside me.
“May I talk with you?” she asked. “I mean, of course, frankly and personally.”
“That’s as it should be between partner and partner’s wife.”
“I gather there’s been a sort of crisis, but that it’s passed. For the time being, anyway.”
“That is correct.”
“And that you were about to ask Felix to resign from the firm, but that Mr. Dinwiddie was against you and prevailed.”
“No, that is not quite the case. I felt that the publication of Felix’s new book might be harmful to the firm and that this was a matter that should be discussed. George did not wish even to discuss it. I bowed to his wishes. That is all.”
“But it could have resulted in Felix’s leaving the firm?”
“Conceivably. Anyway, it didn’t.”
“So now it’s all over? Just like that? And the five of us will continue the trip happily together?”
“So far as I’m concerned. There was nothing personal or acrimonious involved. It was simply a matter of opinion. Perhaps of philosophy. Hasn’t Felix told you about it?”
“He has. What I marvel at is the calm way in which you take it.”
“Why should I not take it calmly?”
“Because you’ve presumably lost what you consider an important administrative battle.”
“Perhaps. But a good administrator should be accustomed to losing battles. Even important ones.”
“You’re an interesting man, Grant. And a formidable opponent. You see all around a question, and you don’t lose your temper.”
“Oh, I’ve been known to!”
“Probably only because you figured you could gain something by losing it. I’m afraid that if I were pitted against you, I should become more interested in the battle than in what we were fighting about. You make the fighting so interesting.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“I don’t honestly know. Of course, you and I are pitted against each other. We believe in different worlds.”
“You mean because you stand somewhere to the left of where I do?”
“Oh, come now, Grant, you know all about me! You had to look me up carefully before you took Felix into the firm. You wanted to be sure I wasn’t a Communist. And you’re perfectly well aware that Matilda and I dislike each other. And that I don’t share your ecstatic admiration for Mr. Dinwiddie, although I am very fond of the old boy. The only person you haven’t made out is Felix. Why were you so sure that you could control him?”
“I wasn’t. I took a chance.”
“Didn’t you figure that respectability would get him in the end? That Wall Street and the Social Register would prevail?”
It was impossible to be irritated with this friendly, smiling, persistent and perceptive little woman. “Maybe they still will,” I suggested.
“Maybe. But I think you’ll find that Felix can be led just so far and no further.”
“He has no basic loyalty?”
“Only to truth.”
“You don’t think he may sometimes identify truth with Felix Leitner?”
Frances looked at me curiously. “Now why do you put it that way? Why don’t you ask me if he doesn’t identify truth with what is good for Felix Leitner?”
“I asked what I meant to ask.”
“That truth is Felix Leitner!” She shook her head almost sorrowfully. “You accuse him of extraordinary egotism.”
“I accuse him of nothing.”
“You suggest it, then.”
“Don’t you suggest it of me?”
“I suppose I do.” She actually reached over to give me a little peck of a pat on the shoulder. “But I respect you. I even like you. So we’ll continue our merry cruise. It should be fun for the watchers, anyway.”
“What will you watch for?”
“To see if you can recoup the ground you’ve lost with Mr. Dinwiddie. It should be like watching the hare and the tortoise. Felix can bound ahead brilliantly. After all, he snatched away the senior partner from under your very nose. But we all know who won the race.”
Perhaps it was just as well that our cruise was almost over. In two more days we moored under the walls of Aigues-Mortes, the beautiful, miraculously preserved little medieval seaport from which Saint Louis embarked on his crusade. Matilda’s temper had become very short, and I had been under some apprehension of an explosion. As it was, we parted company with the Leitners very politely, and the Dinwiddies and the Stowes proceeded north to Paris by rail.
I had been perfectly serious in speaking to Frances of her husband’s ego. I was not in the least impressed by his vaunted search for truth. I had come to the conclusion that my choice of him for a partner had been an error. The man was an egotist, pure and simple. He was incapable of conforming to any pattern, noble or ignoble. Sooner or later he was bound to separate himself from the team, whatever team it might be, and redefine himself in relation to it in less than complimentary terms. The reason that he was so dangerous was that the pleasure that he derived in separating himself from the team was greater than any material or even moral advantage that he might possibly derive from staying with it.
I had allowed Frances Leitner to believe that I never lost my temper and perhaps to deduce from this that I never hated anybody. I did not want her to know that I was beginning to dislike her husband. The man was a kind of monster of self, and nothing in his subsequent career has served to mitigate this harsh but considered judgment.
***
Some months later I sat in the United States Supreme Court building, not at counsel’s bench, where Felix Leitner and others of my firm were sitting, but with the public, in back, and listened to George D
inwiddie argue the rights of East Coast Inland Coal and certain of its employees against two labor unions in a case arising under the National Labor Relations Act. I had not even told George that I should be there; I preferred the anonymity of my public seat.
Never had I heard George Dinwiddie more eloquent or more persuasive. The old man’s voice rose to near passion as he described the plight of the non-union man, hounded by pickets, bombarded by threatening letters, his family living in fear, his future dark. The great employer company was exalted to the role of a defender of his liberty, perhaps of his very life; the unions were shown as captious, cranky, despotic. If we were to preserve the old-line, independent artisan, the Yankee individualist, if we were to resist a new world of gray uniformity and egalitarianism, we had to brandish the due process clause before the very fangs of the enemy. George came closer to a tirade than I had ever heard him. He veered and soared and yet, like a kite, he was always attached to the ground by a firm cord. I recognized that cord as the anchor cable of Felix Leitner’s logic. It was an astonishing performance, a union of fire and steel.
But the first question from the bench was from Roosevelt’s first appointee, Hugo Black. He had a volume in his hand, and I had little difficulty in recognizing the color of the dust jacket.
“Let me read you a sentence, Mr. Dinwiddie, from a recent publication by Felix Leitner, whose name is associated with yours in the brief before us today. He writes: ‘To deny Congress the power to regulate the relations between business and labor in our time would have been like denying the Venetian Republic the power to regulate its canals or telling an American frontier state that it had no jurisdiction over horse trades. A great nation must be able to solve its mercantile problems, whatever were the fixed ideas of a handful of southern planters a century and a half ago.’ Would you like to comment on that, Mr. Dinwiddie, in the light of the argument you have just made?”
“Who was it who said: ‘Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!’” George replied with his most winning smile. “Well, I say: ‘Oh, that my partners would not!’”
But Justice Black would not let him off so easily. “I believe it was Sir Francis Bacon who wrote: ‘Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.’”
“Very good, your honor! But did he not also say: ‘Some books are to be read only in part—and not curiously’?”
Obviously, George had been prepared for the attack. But the decision went against us five to four. I was too familiar with the line-up of opinion on the Court at that time to believe that any of the judges had been influenced by the inconsistency between Leitner the advocate and Leitner the author, but there was no question about its influence on the subsequent decision of Magnum Steel to transfer its next big constitutional case to Sullivan & Cromwell. I received the following epistle from Magnum’s president:
“It hurts me to do this, but I have no option, in the opinion of our directors. Of course, you will continue as our general counsel, but let me tell you frankly that we do not intend to be represented by your firm in the federal courts so long as Mr. Leitner is associated with your litigation department.”
I did not show this letter to George Dinwiddie at the time. I thought it would be better to let him draw his own deductions from the action of Magnum. In time he did, and less than a year later he told me that, following a long weekend’s discussion with Felix, the latter had decided to withdraw from the firm.
Roger Cutter (3)
I HAD KNOWN Felix Leitner since my childhood, but it was at Seal Cove, Maine, in my twenty-second year that we first became friends. Seal Cove contained a small but rather intensely intellectual summer community of which my parents and the Leitners were charter members and of which the Lassiter Troys were the undisputed leaders. Lassiter Troy, who in 1938 was in his early eighties, was the splendid, white-haired veteran of American repertory, a relic of the school of Henry Irving, who had performed across the nation in Cyrano, Richelieu and The Green Goddess, and was to many school children of the generation preceding mine the physical embodiment of King Lear and Macbeth. I had seen his farewell performance as Falstaff and had admired the powerful, resonant voice and the gravely mocking, sharply staring eyes, even though to my more modern way of thinking his interpretation smacked more of Santa Claus than of Shakespeare’s dissipated old reprobate.
Mrs. Troy, a fine, plain, faintly grim New England crone, had never been on the boards and had never, I suspected, quite approved of the world of paint and pasteboard, but her conjugal loyalty (unlike his) had been absolute, and in a marriage that had lasted more than five decades she had kept his homes in trim order, brought up his children with a discipline rare in theatrical circles and invested his earnings so as to turn them into a small fortune. The Troys, like most of our Seal Cove community, lived in a camp, but their principal log cabin boasted an immense two-story living room with a balcony that ran around three of the walls, a huge stone fireplace and an alarming collection of heads and fangs and spread antlers. This room was the social center of Seal.
My parents’ cabin was the next down the cove, not nearly so large but commodious, in the easy style of pre-World War I arrangements. Daddy, a professor of philosophy at Columbia, moderately famous in that day, could never bear to be separated from his books, and he had built shelves to the ceiling in our living room. But although he was inclined to read at night in the city during Columbia’s term, he loved the social life at Seal, and his great bearlike figure and shaggy, shaking gray head could be seen at any party at the Troys, where he loved to take active part in the most complicated charades, leading his obedient team in or out of the hall like a drill sergeant after preparing, or performing, his scenes. Mother was quite different. She never participated in the games, but made up a serene audience of one, engaged in the needlepoint that she always brought with her, her broad clear forehead and un-waved gray hair creating for her inner privacy a barrier that was pliant yet unyielding, a kind of willow fence, a sash of some pale Indian material that protected without unduly decorating.
The summer of 1938 was a dark one for me, for it followed the spring in which I had suffered a near-fatal attack of diabetes. One of the complications of this terrible disease was the development of sexual impotence, at first believed by the doctors to be temporary, but which, alas, has not proven so. As I was still virgin to woman, a situation more common in a man of twenty-two in that day than now, my deprivation was only prospective, but its effect on my psyche was nonetheless shattering. I developed none of the physical characteristics of a eunuch, but I felt that I had been turned into something unclean, a kind of leper. It seemed to me now that sexuality was essential to a man’s success in any field, even the arts, and that I was condemned to be at most a dilettante. But worst of all was Daddy’s attitude, or more strictly speaking, what I deemed to be Daddy’s attitude.
I had felt from infancy that he was disappointed in me. It had not made things easier that he had tried so hard to conceal it. He had too much imagination not to feel the load that his great personality and reputation placed on the shoulders of an uninspired and uninspiring only child, but his attempted playfulness was a bit like that of a bulldog with a kitten. And then he had never really loved me. He never really loved anyone, even Mother. He had too much ego. He might, like other egotists, have been capable of a great romantic passion—he was supposed to have had a tempestuous love affair with the actress Bella Simes, long before his marriage at the age of forty-five—but passions have little place in the family circle. Daddy perhaps could light a bonfire in his heart but not a candle. He may have suffered for me in my deprivation, but only as he suffered for all the ailing. I had no business, in his mind, to be a freak. I was his blood, was I not? He endured me; he was scrupulously kind, heavily gentle. But I felt his shame.
Mother’s lack of response to my trouble was almost worse. She had remained an old maid in marriage, a darling old maid, to be sure—sweet, unruffled and affectionate—but she was always disappointing in the way s
he failed to respond to the deeper love that she evoked in me. It was not that she actually rejected me; she was always happy to run a hand gently through my hair or lightly touch her cheek to mine. But she never understood that people needed more of such responses than she did herself. She did not really comprehend that the pleasures of sex could be much of a loss.
When I first learned from Felix Leitner that my father had confided my condition in him, I felt a moment of wild resentment, but Felix quickly made me understand that I was wrong.
“Only a man of your father’s imagination could accept the fact that you obviously need a younger parent. Believe me, Roger, he wants me to tell you things that neither he nor your mother can tell you. You see, he knows he’s failed you. It’s hard for a proud man to admit that.”
“But why should you do his job?”
“Because I care.”
Did he? Felix Leitner? And yet there was that about him that stopped denial in my throat. If he, who knew everything, said that he cared about a plain, sexless young man, undistinguished in mind or spirit, who was I to deny it? Did not gods care?
Mountain climbing, as we called it, though none of the hills along the coast were over three thousand feet, was a popular diversion in Seal Cove, and Felix took me up the steep trail of Blaine’s Peak on a beautiful afternoon when we could see over a sapphire sea as far as Bald Rock, twenty miles out in the Atlantic. Climbing, to one as self-conscious as myself, was the perfect way to communicate. I was always ahead of or behind my companion and only had to look him in the face in the moments when we paused to rest.
On the first level area above the tree tops, where we stopped to gaze down at the shore line, Felix announced that he wished to discuss my “condition.” He folded his arms and eyed me with the famous stare, half quizzical, half defiant, with just a hint of amusement that he adopted when addressing chiefs of state on some topic known to be distasteful to them. It worked immediately to dispel the last shred of my resentment. If he was going to honor me thus, what could I do but humbly acknowledge the honor?
The House of the Prophet Page 14
