“I hope he’s not!” Felix retorted, his eyes widening into one of his rare expressions of alarm. “What on earth could he say?”
“Something about it’s not affecting his friendship with Alger.”
“But that would be taken as impugning the verdict.”
“And if it were?”
“Aren’t you forgetting the separation of powers? A high official of the administration has no business attacking the judiciary.”
Hamill seemed to pull up a bit at this. “But it’s not attacking the judiciary to say that a jury may have mistaken the facts. Surely, that must happen all the time. Can a man not state his mind?”
“A man, yes. A secretary of state, no. Mr. Acheson has no right to undermine his own authority and prestige by identifying himself with a man who, after two extensive trials, has been found guilty of perjury in denying that he was a traitor.”
“I take it from that that you consider Hiss guilty!”
“I am not convinced. I think it quite possible.”
“You believe a rat like Chambers? A known Communist? A proven liar? You take his word against a man who was trusted by everyone in the State Department?”
“A jury did. Why shouldn’t I? And Chambers had no motive to destroy Hiss.”
“There was a lot in all that that never came out.”
“Well, I can’t go into that. But I stick to my guns about the question of a statement. When a man takes public office he should give up the right of expressing his private opinion on matters outside his department. Particularly when such expression may give rise to the suspicion that he is allied with traitors.”
“Do you mean, sir, that Mr. Acheson or myself could be suspected of actual treason?” Hamill glanced about the room, his face congealed as if ready either to explode in laughter or in wrath, as the situation might require.
“I most certainly do,” Felix replied calmly. “The president himself may not be exempt in the hysteria that we’re running into. The same thing happened after the First World War. It’s something we’ll simply have to live through.”
“And you think we should take it lying down!” Hamill now thundered. “Where are your guts, Leitner?”
“I don’t have to prove them, Hamill. The way you evidently think you have to prove yours.”
“Dorcas, we’re going home!”
The diminished party that sat down for dinner half an hour later was too dismal to be described. Gladys was grimly silent, and when the guests left, shortly after their coffee and brandy, I made no move to stay on with the Leitners. For once in my life I fled. No part of any account of Felix’s life was going to be worth sitting through that scene.
***
The next thing that happened was Dean Acheson’s famous statement at a press conference that he would not “turn his back on Alger Hiss.” The uproar that followed this almost drowned out the statement made by Ambassador Hamill to a reporter as he boarded a plane at Idlewild on a mission to London. Mr. Hamill gave as his opinion that the jury had misconceived the facts of the case and that the verdict would be reversed on appeal. Indeed, no notice might have been taken of the remark had it not been for Felix Leitner’s column two days later, which read in part as follows:
It is impossible not to feel some sympathy for Mr. Acheson’s outbreak. He was goaded by reporters who were determined to make him repudiate Alger Hiss. In a moment of understandable temper he made a statement that simply affirmed his personal regard for a friend in grave trouble. Of course, he should have refrained from comment. Responsible public servants should be willing to forego the luxury of publishing their opinions in controversial matters unconnected with their departments, where such publication may jeopardize the success of their policies by undermining their public support. But Ambassador Hamill had no such excuse. No reporters hounded him. He thrust his opinion of the Hiss jury into an interview on quite other matters. Like the frog in Emily Dickinson’s poem, he had to tell his name, the livelong day, to “an admiring bog.” And far from limiting his statement to an expression of friendship, or even loyalty, he denounced the trial as a rank miscarriage of justice. Already the whole back of Red baiters is on his trail! How are foreign governments to know what credit to give to the words of an emissary so denounced at home? Mr. Hamill should resign his trust and learn the lesson that ministers of state lose nothing by the dignity of silence.
The effect of this in Georgetown may be imagined. As people were quick to point out, the Red baiters had not been on Stuart Hamill’s trail until the publication of the column. It was Felix, they cried, and not the House Un-American Activities Committee, that had called Hamill’s rash but largely unnoticed statement to the national attention. What was Leitner trying to do but destroy the ambassador? Ah, yes, there it was, what they had always suspected, they muttered and snarled, the envy of the Jew, the distrust of the person who has never been quite included, the malice of the academic against the man of action, the resentment of the boy who was not sent to a New England private school. Oh, yes, they had always known about him!
I had to go to New York at this time to help my now ancient, widowed mother move into a new apartment, and when I returned a few days later the storm was still raging. When I went to the Leitners to report for work, I found Felix alone in his study. He told me that Gladys had moved out.
“Moved out?” I asked, open-mouthed.
“She’s gone to Lila’s for a week. But she expects me out of here when she returns. The house, the contents, everything, of course, is hers.”
“She’s leaving you!”
“I think rather she expects me to leave her. I’ll go to the Mayflower until I find an apartment.”
“Felix!”
“It’s all right, Roger, it really is.” Seeing my distress he rose to put an arm briefly about my shoulders. Then he walked to the window and stood with his back to me. “It’s been coming a long time, and perhaps it’s just as well. Now I shan’t be concerned every morning with what her reaction will be to what happened the night before. She has developed this obsession that everything I do is designed to pull her down. It seems to have been my fate to be married to women who think I want to torture them. It’s only because they try to make their life in me. And if I don’t fit, I’m repudiating them. I guess I wasn’t made for marriage, Roger. Perhaps some day, when women have achieved a real equality with men—I mean an emotional equality, not just votes and jobs—marriage may be feasible for the individualist.”
“I suppose what she really minds is your not minding the scenes she makes.”
“But I do mind, Roger. You have no conception of how much I mind. Because I try to put an enamel layer over myself, I may seem immune. But Gladys’s scenes and jibes are poison to me!” When he turned, I was shocked at the vivid red on his cheeks. I could not recall ever having seen such a color on his complexion before. “I want peace and quiet. God, I think I must hate her!”
In the weeks that followed, Felix went into seclusion at the Mayflower. He saw nobody but myself, and he told me more of his thoughts and emotions than he had ever done before. He was sad, at times bitter, at times almost angry, but always firm and clear.
It was the principal difficulty in his life, he told me, that he had had to live in the great world. It was one thing to be a poet, a philosopher, a historian. Such a man could retire from the world, at least while he worked. He could seek a cloister and be alone with his books and thoughts. But a political commentator could not do this. He had to read, of course, but just as importantly he had to live in the world. He had to be acquainted with presidents, ambassadors, cabinet officers, legislators. There was no substitute for the personal interview, the direct impression, the unrecorded question and answer. Nor could it all be-done in offices. The social occasion was indispensable, with the relaxation that came with women and wine.
“Everyone in this world wants a friend, Roger. Most people, indeed, feel entitled to friendship. Even presidents want friends. With them, fri
endship may be a one way street, but they still want it. Nobody has ever really been able to accept the fact that I can have no friend but truth. It is absolutely essential for me to meet people, at parties, at lunches, over drinks. And once I’ve done it, they feel, even when they don’t acknowledge it, that some kind of duty of loyalty, however slight, has been established. And so, inevitably, ultimately, they feel betrayed. The women, of course, are the worst. I don’t suppose there really has ever been anyone who had understood me but you.”
This must have been the happiest moment of my life, I glowed, I pulsated, with the fervor of my ultimate intimacy. But even then I had a little moment of doubt. A horrid little doubt. For if I had really succeeded at last in adjusting myself totally to Felix’s needs, did I exist at all?
Roger Cutter (7)
FELIX never married again. I am sure that his two experiences had taught him that freedom was necessary to the career of the political journalist—at least as he conceived it. More and more now he turned to the ascetic life. He reduced his homes to a small Georgetown house run by an efficient black couple and a room for the summer in the Blaine Hotel in Butterfield Bay. His hours of work became absolutely regular. From nine until noon he read newspapers, press releases, magazines, congressional records, court opinions. He would then have lunch, never with more than one person, a key figure in whatever matter it was that he was investigating. The afternoons were devoted to writing his column, which appeared twice a week, or to further study. The evenings and weekends were given to more general reading. Social life was limited strictly to two dinner parties a week, and then he was always home by eleven. For exercise he walked his dogs, a pair of huskies, in Rock Creek Park.
Routine, he insisted, brought the only true liberation. If one did the same thing every day, one did not have to argue with people who tried to urge one toward variation. Felix would not even talk on the telephone, except on business. His secretary, Miss Farish, a loyal, industrious spinster, would take your message. A hostess would be asked whom Mr. Leitner was being invited to meet and what time dinner would actually be on the table. The rare weekend house guest would be told what hour to arrive, what hour to leave and during what periods Mr. Leitner was not to be disturbed. As Felix’s fame grew and his years increased, everybody but the bitterest old friends came to accept his arbitrary ways. Indeed, his regularity, his austerity, even his famed coolness of manner began to seem to younger friends the appropriate characteristics of an internationally renowned seer.
If the need for concentration was not considered by some a quite adequate excuse for such rigidity of form, Felix’s health could be pleaded in addition. After sixty he was afflicted with fibrillations of the heart which, although supposedly not dangerous, required a minimization of excitement and a maximization of orderliness. I think that Felix may have regarded this ailment in the cheerful light of an additional safeguard of his chosen schedule. It also protected him from women. Despite what people may have thought and said about Julie Pryor, she never achieved anything but an amitié amoureuse.
She told me this herself, and Julie was not a woman to mince such matters. She was (and still is) a ravishing blonde—blue-eyed, tall, willowy, with marvelous dresses that always seemed to pour over her slender but voluptuous figure. Her voice was high, affected, cultivated, absurdly affectionate, sweet. She went in for demonstrative gestures; she was a great kisser and hand-clasper, even a hugger. The word “darling” seemed always on her lips. Yet at the time of the episode that I shall describe in this chapter, Felix was seventy-five and she, sixty.
She had always been a man’s woman. When young and poor, though of an old Philadelphia family, she had made two brief marriages to men of means more apparent than actual. Her third husband had been a crook who had robbed her of what little she had gleaned from the first two, and she had found herself at forty, alone, childless, and perilously on the verge of sinking to shabby roles. As she once described this to me: “Friends with boring old husbands who wanted to distract attention from their own peccadilloes would ask me for the weekend, purring, ‘Dearest Julie, nobody can keep Tom in a good humor like you.’ And then they’d make me a present of last year’s Dior or Givenchy!”
A lucky marriage to old Sam Pryor, the realtor, who died a year later and bequeathed her a legacy that was adequate for her support even after she had settled a lawsuit with his angry children, gave Julie the independence that she had long craved, and she turned from the pleasures of the bed to the pleasures of the political hostess. Her charming little Frenchified parlor in Georgetown was the perfect site for a salon, and I was naturally convinced that she was planning to make Felix its principal and permanent ornament. But she soon convinced me otherwise.
“I know what you’re thinking, dear Roger, and I don’t blame you at all. We women are a predatory lot. But you can put your mind at rest. I have no desire whatsoever to inveigle Felix into marriage. I have had four husbands, which already makes me a bit ridiculous. A fifth would turn me into a kind of monster, a Wife of Bath! And then consider what I should lose. Poor dear Sam Pryor wrote a will that cuts off my income if I remarry and sends it back to those ravenous brats of his. So I would bring Felix nothing! And what could he leave me? Such little principal as he still has is tied up for his children, and the income from the column would stop with his death. Which, however much we hate to think of it, could come any time.”
Well, it certainly made sense. There was very little gain for Julie in becoming Mrs. Leitner. Furthermore, she would be taking on the responsibility for the time when Felix might become incapacitated or senile. Surely it was better for her simply to act as hostess at his small dinners, which she ably and charmingly did, and have her days free from the austere routine of Felix’s household. Yes, I could see that she had made the wiser choice.
Julie and I thus became the team “in charge” of Felix Leitner. I had now achieved my ultimate ambition and had become his principal research assistant and general manager. It was too late for him to argue that I should make a life of my own: he had to accept the fact that I had no other life but his.
“What will you do when I die?” he asked me once.
“Write a book about you.”
“That won’t take the rest of your life.”
“Then I’ll write two!”
The years, as if responding to the smooth sails of Felix’s well-regulated existence, sped by. He wrote no more books or articles; he seemed to have found his ultimate form of expression in the newspaper column. Like a poet who has spent a long lifetime on odes and epodes, on dramatic monologues and epic verse, and who at last falls back on the sonnet series as the perfect vehicle to drive his mind and heart in tandem, so did Felix now polish and repolish, cut and amplify, the jewel-like essays that, twice a week, conveyed his sense of a rash and giddy world to his adoring readers.
The columns were all the same length, almost to a word count. They usually feel into three sections: the statement of theme, a marvel of clarity and conciseness; the basic discussion, which contained the essential literary part, sometimes dramatic, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes almost poetic, a brief but exhaustive exercise in alternative arguments and points of view; and finally the conclusion, usually framed in a Leitner paradox. Felix dealt ordinarily with foreign affairs or government news, but he also noticed great events, such as the moon landing or the cure for polio, or the obituaries of famous men, and every six months he would compose a piece on what he once described to me with a dry smile as the “eternal verities.” There was something of La Rochefoucauld in his method; as the great Frenchman strove to catch life in epigrams, so did Felix seek to hammer his columns into reflections of the essence of the political scene.
“I’m not such an ass as to think I even approach my goal,” he told me once, “but I like to think that my columns, taken together, may provide a capsule history of the postnuclear age.”
Felix had regarded the atom as the ultimate challenge to mankind. According to him,
it had changed all our concepts of war and survival and required entirely new mental and emotional processes. Man could no longer afford the romantic luxury of fighting a vicious enemy to the death; a greater courage had to be found in compromise. The free states and the enslaved communities had to recognize that neither could predominate. There could be no more unconditional surrenders, no more... but I am not going to get into Felix’s philosophy. That will be another book, a bigger one, my second. This one is addressed to his personality.
The years of Felix’s life from the age of sixty to that of seventy-five, from 1950 to 1965, seemed to pass rapidly. They were not marked by important personal events, or even major trips or moves. There were no domestic embroilments. Felix’s son, Frank, had finally found a moderate contentment running a gas station that Felix had purchased for him in New Mexico. Frank’s problem had been the hardest that a brilliant parent can face: it had taken a psychiatrist to perceive that the boy was a near moron and pathetically ashamed of it. Felix’s daughter during this same period was intensely occupied in New York with her rather tumultous marriage to the artist Stephen Cast. With his small court of two dogs and two domestics, with his secretary and Julie and me, Felix led a placid existence within the walls of routine. His life was a greenhouse where his genius flourished.
Oh, there were storms, of course, but they were the storms of journalism. They hardly penetrated the quiet house on Q Street. I remember Felix’s chuckling over the screeches that greeted his description of Eisenhower’s failure to defend General Marshall from Joe McCarthy’s smear as “the most dastardly public ablution of the primary tactile organs since Pontius Pilate.” I recall his evaluation of the Bay of Pigs as “a marine operation that brings to mind the genius of Philip II and Medina Sidonia.” There were gaffes, to be sure, as when he promised his readers that the Soviets would never attempt to build a missile base in Cuba and that De Gaulle would not abandon Algeria. And there were triumphs, too, as when he solemnly warned Senator McCarthy, at the peak of that demagogue’s career, that “the day will come when the United States senate, unlike its abject predecessor of Roman times, will rise from its vile posture of opportunistic groveling and redeem itself with a clarion censure of these lewd and reckless tactics.”
The House of the Prophet Page 24
