Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  With Jim himself it was a point of honor that he should never agree completely with anyone or anything. He had never swallowed Marxism whole, he used to say in a slightly boastful tone, as if he had achieved a considerable feat of acrobatics. It was true; he never swallowed any doctrine whole. Like a finicky eater, he took pride in the fact that he always left something on the plate. There was something peculiarly American and puritanical about this abstemiousness of his; in other countries children are taught that it is bad manners not to finish everything that is set before them. But at Yale a certain intellectual prodigality had been cultivated in the students; it was bad taste to admire anything too wholeheartedly. They thought “bad taste” but they meant “dangerous,” for the prodigality was merely an end product of asceticism: you must not give in to your appetites, physical or spiritual; if you did, God knows where it would land you, in paganism, Romanism, idolatry, or the gutter. Like all good Yale men, Jim feared systems as his great-grandfather had feared the devil, the saloon, and the pope.

  Naturally, for boys brought up under these influences, systems of thought had a certain wanton, outlawed attractiveness; and Marxism was to become for Jim’s generation what an actress had been for the youths of the Gilded Age. During the first years of the New Deal, there were many flirtations, many platonic friendships with the scarlet woman of the steppes. Jim, being courageous, went farther than most. And, at first glance, that balkiness of his, that hesitation, that unwillingness to take the final step, might have appeared to be merely a concession to tradition, another bone thrown to the Eli bulldog, who was always extraordinarily hungry.

  Actually, it was deeper and more personal than that. If other people on the left stood in superstitious awe of Jim, Jim also stood in awe of himself. It was not that he considered that he was especially brilliant or talented; his estimation of his qualities was both just and modest. What he reverenced in himself was his intelligent mediocrity. He knew that he was the Average Thinking Man to whom in the end all appeals are addressed. He was the man that Uncle Sam points his finger at in the recruiting posters, that political orators beseech and ad-writers try to frighten; he was the stooge from the audience that the magician calls up on the stage, the foreman on the Grand Jury, the YOU in “This means YOU.” He was a walking Gallup Poll, and he had only to leaf over his feelings to discover what America was thinking. There was something sublime about this, but there were responsibilities, too. The danger was that you would lose your amateur standing. It was essential to remain—not aloof, exactly, for that implied some aristocratic hauteur—but accessible, undecided. It was so easy, so fatally easy, to become a professional innocent; one day you were a bona fide tourist, and the next you were a shill in a Chinatown bus. If you were not remarkably alert, you might never know it had happened.

  Jim Barnett, however, was alert, and he took every possible precaution. His mind and character appeared to him as a kind of sacred trust that he must preserve inviolate. It was as if he were the standard gold dollar against which the currency is measured. It would be wrong to debase it with lead, but it would be equally wrong to put more than the specified amount of gold into it. The dollar was supposed to be impure in certain unalterable proportions: you could not change that without upsetting the whole monetary system. Jim’s function, as he saw it, was to ring the new ideas against himself, and let the world hear how they sounded. It was his duty, therefore, to “be himself,” and his virtues and his weaknesses were alike untouchable. On the one hand, he could not drop into the life of a Communist front man, because this would have involved a suspension of individual judgment, a surgical sterilization of the moral faculty that was odious to him; on the other hand, he could not lift himself into the world of Marxist scholarship, because, to put it frankly, this might have overtaxed his powers, might (who knows) have crippled him for good.

  It did not occur to him, or, indeed, to anyone else, that he was taking the line of least resistance. This state of being unresolved, on call, as it were, was painful to him, and he used to envy his friends who, as he said, were “sure.” The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thoughts troubled him a good deal. He found, for example, that he liked to drink and dance and go to medium-smart night clubs with medium-pretty girls. Yet he believed with Veblen that there was no greater folly than conspicuous consumption, and his eyes and ears told him that people were hungry while he had money in his pocket. This was a problem all well-to-do radicals had to face, and there were any number of ways of dealing with it. You could stop being a radical, or you could give your money away. Or you could give a little of it away and say, “I owe something to myself,” or give none of it away, and say, “I’m not a saint, and besides I have something more important than money to contribute.” The Communist Party in those years did its best to settle this delicate question gracefully for prosperous fellow-travelers. It was reported that Browder had declared that there was nothing worse for the movement than what he called “a tired radical,” and that men and women would be better workers for the cause if they let themselves go and enjoyed life once in a while. This pronouncement was widely quoted—over cocktails in the Rainbow Room, and sometimes (even) over a bottle of champagne in more intimate boîtes; it was believed that this showed “the human side” of the Party leader, and gave the lie to those perpetual carpers (tired radicals, undoubtedly) who kept talking about Communist inflexibility. The example of Marx and Engels was also cited: they had had great Christmas parties and had called the young Kautsky a mollycoddle because he would not drink beer. (And how right their judgment had been! Forty years later Kautsky had betrayed the revolution by voting war credits in the German Reichstag, and Lenin had called him, among other things, an old woman.) Jim Barnett tried all these formulas on his conscience, but stretch them as he would, he could not make them cover the abyss between the theory and the practice. He decided, at last, to let the abyss yawn, and in the course of time he fell into it.

  The second year Jim was in New York, he went to work as assistant editor on one of the liberal weeklies. The whole staff was instantly delighted with him, from the septuagenarian editor and publisher down to the red-haired telephone girl. He brought a breath of fresh air into the office, the women told each other, while the old man muttered happily about “young ideas,” and the men of forty-odd, Harvard graduates who remembered Jack Reed and who were rather dried and historical themselves, they, too, welcomed Jim Barnett in their own way, shaking their heads over him and prophesying with a certain relish that he would soon lose his illusions and resign himself, as they had done, to the world. The gratitude and joy everyone felt translated itself at once into action. The magazine began—with an alacrity that was almost fatuous—to smarten itself up. The advertising manager had herself an expensive permanent, Labor and Industry took to using mascara, the library got a set of modernistic chairs, some of the new lamps with indirect lighting, and a thick-piled gray rug from a neo-cubist furniture store on Eighth Street. Tea was served in the afternoons; a new format was planned for the magazine; the switchboard girl began to listen in to phone calls; and the managing editor asked a well-known Marxist hothead to do a series of articles on the New Deal.

  All this attention embarrassed Jim a little. It did not go to his head. He even opposed some of the changes, in the manner of a small boy who says, “Aw, Ma, you’re taking too much trouble.” There was talk of moving the paper uptown, but Jim squelched this by insisting that the old-fashioned offices had a quaint integrity of their own, that the very editorial policy might be imperiled by a move to more glittering quarters. He perceived that the editors were ready to do anything he wanted—and he did not like it at all. It was true, he was anxious to put over his ideas, but he saw himself accomplishing this by argument, not by ingratiation. In his eyes, there was something ugly about the fact that these seasoned liberals should go to such lengths to please him. It was like having a girl give in too quickly; you felt that she did not take you, as an individual, seri
ously—she only wanted a man. At the back of his mind he was aware of a contempt for the Liberal’s editorial board, like the contempt he had felt for the easy makes, the town girls in New Haven; and it was a contempt that was restless and full of fear, since the idea that kept pushing itself in was, “They would have done it for any young guy. They have no political respect for me as a person.” This was one of the penalties of being the Average Man, that you were never sure whether people were not mixing you up with someone else. Sometimes you did not feel average so much as anonymous. Jim could never understand quite why it was, but whenever anyone talked about losing yourself in a cause, or in the Common Will, a thrill of horror would go through him, and he would recall the lost feeling; the tangled-up feeling, he got in a certain recurrent dream he had, where he could not find out who he was.

  In the editorial staff of the Liberal, Jim sensed a great aching unspecific need for somebody, anybody, to think by and live by, as a mother lives by her son. Only the old man, with his long black coat and pompous manners and his eyeglasses on a black ribbon, seemed to be exempt from this necessity, and it was only with him in his private office that Jim felt truly comfortable. The others wanted to be bullied or taken by storm; the old man merely wanted to talk. He was interested in what Jim had to say, while the others, Jim felt, did not so much listen to his remarks as eavesdrop on them, waiting for him to express a preference they could gratify, or a decision they could concur with. It was like walking down Fifth Avenue with your mother or your girl during the Christmas shopping season: you did not dare pause for an instant before a tennis racket, an English sweater, or a toilet case in a store window; if you showed the faintest flicker of interest she would buy the thing for you, whether you wanted it or not. With the old man, however, Jim felt safe. He could say whatever came into his head and know that it would not appear, in a slightly garbled form, in one of the lead paragraphs on the following Wednesday. The two of them would sit in the old man’s room, facing each other on a pair of squeaky swivel chairs, and discuss the AAA, the court-packing plan, the Kirov assassination and the execution of the hundred White Guards.

  On all of these subjects the old man held opinions that were in the eyes of most of his staff and many of his readers an indication of failing powers. Mr. Wendell was uncompromisingly against what he called, in a public-auditorium voice, this new spirit of bureaucracy, this specter that was haunting the world under the name of progressivism or communism. He believed in socialism, but he held out for an economy of abundance, for a free judiciary, and trial by jury. He stood for inviolable human rights rather than plans or programs; and no plan, he declared, was worth a nickel that would sacrifice these rights at the first hint of trouble. Years later, Jim decided that time had, in each of these instances, proved the old man right. At the moment, he was not so sure. He did not quite agree with his friends who considered Mr. Wendell a tiresome old fuddyduddy. Still, he thought that you could probably trust Mr. Roosevelt and Comrade Stalin to abrogate liberty only just so much as was absolutely necessary—and always in the right direction, that is, to abrogate your opponent’s liberty rather than your own. When he told the old man that he was making a fetish of civil liberties, that the liberties were for the people and not the people for the liberties, Mr. Wendell replied that Jim was making a fetish out of socialism. Jim had to smile a little ruefully, conceding the point.

  One day a new argument occurred to him, one he had heard the Communists advance. After all, he said, there has to be a limit to everything. Nobody can be allowed to practice freedom at the expense of everybody else. The government, for instance, has to protect itself against sedition and against the betrayal of state secrets in wartime. He looked up at the old man expectantly, wondering what he could answer. “Doesn’t it?” he asked earnestly, when Mr. Wendell remained silent. “I don’t believe in war,” the old man answered calmly, and Jim blushed. He did not believe in war, either; at least he said he didn’t, not in imperialist war anyway; but the words he had just spoken seemed to show that he did, that he believed in it more than anything else, more than free speech, more than the right to agitate against the government. He was so deeply chagrined by this discovery that the thread of the debate slipped from his hands, and it did not occur to him until he lay in bed that night that the old man had not answered the question but only parried it, and in such a way as to assert his moral superiority, to remind Jim of his long and heroic career as a fighter for peace. Jim laughed to himself, and turned over, contentedly. Of course there had to be certain restrictions on liberty; anybody but an anarchist would admit that. Of course there would have to be policemen, even in a classless society. “I’m too much of a realist,” Jim said to himself proudly, “to imagine that anywhere, at any time, a state could be run on the honor system.” Yet there was a problem. People said that you must never forget that the Soviet Union was moving toward greater democracy all the time; you had to look at a thing like this Kirov business historically: if you remembered the Czarist repression and the hated Okhrana, you would see that the execution of a few White Guards was a step forward—there were merely a hundred or so of them after all. But that, Jim thought, was like patting a mass killer on the head because this time he had only committed one little murder. “No!” he heard himself say, loudly and defiantly into the darkness. It was wrong to condone an affair like these executions. So far the old man was right. But there must be some middle ground. You ought to hate the sin and love the sinner. That was very difficult in practice, but everything was difficult. At least, he congratulated himself, he had faced the problem, even if he had not solved it. He settled himself comfortably on the horns of the dilemma and fell asleep.

  When he married Nancy Hodges, he invited everybody on the Liberal to the wedding. Some of the older women looked a little dowdy and were inclined to be skittish about the champagne, but Mr. Wendell made a distinguished appearance, and, in any case, Nancy’s parents, good, well-to-do Connecticut people, were not precisely streamlined themselves. The women, on their side, were faintly disappointed in Nancy. She was pretty, everyone conceded that; she had a straight, short nose and blond hair and sweet, direct, blue eyes. Yet somehow, they thought, she was not very exciting. She looked too much like her mother, which was a very bad thing in a girl. If Jim had to marry, they felt, it should have been somebody like an actress or a fast society girl or a painter or a burning-eyed revolutionary, somebody out of the ordinary. For Jim to have chosen such a humdrum little person as Nancy was, it seemed to them, a reflection on themselves. Around the office he had been so very careful: a cheerful word and a joke for everybody, but never a lunch or a dinner alone with a female member of the staff. They had not permitted themselves to feel resentment because they knew from the phone operator that there was a girl in the picture; and they had, one and all, persuaded themselves that she must be infinitely more beautiful and glamorous than they were. In this way, their own charms were not called into question. If a man prefers, say, Greta Garbo to you, it does not mean that you are not perfectly all right in your own style, not perfectly adequate to any of the usual requirements. The sight of Nancy in her wedding dress dispelled these comforting illusions. Every moderately young woman on the Liberal looked at Nancy and was affronted. “Why not me?” they all thought, as they clasped her small, plump hand, and murmured an appropriate formula.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to be one of those Dos Passos situations,” the literary editor said to the managing editor on the way back on the train. “You know. She won’t let him see his friends or do or think anything that her father wouldn’t approve of. She’ll make him buy a house in the country, and they’ll live exactly like all the neighbors. She looks sweet, but like all those women she probably has a will of her own.”

  Jim, however, had been alert enough to consider these possibilities for himself. Nancy was conventional in many ways, but she was not ambitious or priggish or socially insecure. Nancy believed that you ought to have children and that they ought
to have good doctors and good schools and plenty of fresh air and wholesome food. She believed that it was nice to go dancing on Saturday nights, and that it was nice to take a vacation trip once a year. She wanted to have big comfortable chairs in their apartment, and a big comfortable colored maid who came in by the day, and the first thing she bought was the very best Beautyrest mattresses for them to sleep on, and the very best box springs for their twin beds. Later, they got a good radio and phonograph combination, and they collected the choicest classical records they could find. Nancy was, from the beginning, careful with Jim’s money and she put most of it into things that did not show, like the box springs, or a good plain rug, or life insurance. She subscribed to Consumer’s Union, and to the hospitalization plan. She bought her clothes at Best’s or Lord and Taylor’s, and if she had fifteen dollars to spare from her household budget, she would put it into a new electric mixer for her maid rather than into an after-dinner coffee service for herself.

  On the other hand, Nancy gave money to beggars in the street. She was tender-hearted, and she had majored in sociology in college. She knew that conditions under capitalism were horrifying, and she would always sign a check for a worthy cause. Her father showed a tendency to snort over Jim’s activities; but Nancy handled this difficult situation perfectly: she took Jim’s side but she did not argue; she merely patted her father on the cheek and told him he was an old fogy. “Do you mean to tell me you believe in this communistic talk of his?” the old man would ask. “I don’t believe in all of it,” she would answer with dignity, “but I believe in Jim.” The phrasing was a little trite, but the sentiment was unimpeachable, for Nancy’s father, like everyone else, believed in Jim, too. He could not help it.