The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  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, seriously—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 Conne
cticut 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.

  Nancy was limited, but she was good. And she expected things of Jim. This was what drew him. Unlike the people in the Liberal office, unlike the radicals of all groups that he had been hobnobbing with, Nancy did not want Jim on any old terms. Nancy was not exacting, and yet there was an unwritten, unspoken contract between them. If she, on her side, had renounced all dreams of fortune and large success, he, on his side, was renouncing the right to poverty, loneliness, and despair. She was not to goad him up the social ladder, but he must never, never let her down. It was understood that he should not be pressed to go against his convictions; it was also understood that she must not go hungry. When he thought about them in the abstract, it seemed to him, now and then, that these guarantees were mutually incompatible, that Clause B was in eternal obstinate contradiction to Clause A. In practice, however, you could, if you were sufficiently agile, manage to fulfill them both at once. The job on the Liberal kept his conscience clean and brought the bottle of Grade A to the door every morning. Many a discord, he thought, which cannot be resolved in theoretical terms, in real life can be turned into perfect harmony; and his own marriage demonstrated to him once again the superiority of pragmatism to all foreign brands of philosophy.

  Still, he had misgivings. Sometimes it appeared as if his relation with Nancy were not testing his convictions so much as his powers of compromise. Their wedding had been a case in point. Nancy’s parents had wanted a church wedding, and Jim had wanted City Hall. What they had had was a summer wedding on the lawn with a radical clergyman from New York officiating. It was the same way with their choice of friends. Park Avenue and Fourteenth Street were both ruled out. The result was that the people who came to their cocktail parties, at which Nancy served good hors d’oeuvres and rather poor cocktails, were presentable radicals and unpresentable conservatives—men in radio, men in advertising, lawyers with liberal ideas, publishers, magazine editors, writers of a certain status who lived in the country. Every social assertion Nancy and Jim made carried its own negation with it, like the Hegelian thesis. Thus it was always being said by Nancy that someone was a Communist but a terribly nice man, while Jim was remarking that somebody else worked for Young and Rubicam but was astonishingly liberal. Every guest was a sort of qualified statement, and the Barnetts’ parties, in consequence, were a little dowdy, a little timid, in a queer way (for they were held in Greenwich Village) a little suburban. For some reason, nobody ever came to the Barnetts’ house without his wife, unless she were in the hospital having a baby. They came systematically in pairs, and, once in the apartment, they would separate, as though by decree, and the men would talk, standing up, against the mantelpiece, while the women chattered on the sofa. The same people behaved quite differently at other parties; but here it was as if they were under a compulsion to act out, in a kind of ritualistic dance, the dualism of the Barnetts’ household, the dualism of their own natures.

  Jim recognized that his social life was dull, but he did not object to this. He worked hard during the day; he was alert and gregarious; he had a great many appointments and a great many duties. There were people who believed that he used Nancy as a sedative, to taper off his day, as some men take a boring book to bed with them, in order to put themselves to sleep. Yet this theory, which was popular in the Liberal office, was not at all true. Jim loved Nancy with an almost mystical devotion, for Nancy was the Average Intelligent Woman, the Mate. If there was narcissism in this love, there were gratitude and dependence, too, for Jim had a vague notion that Nancy had saved him from something, saved him from losing that precious gift of his, the common touch, kept him close to what he called the facts. Some businessmen say humorously of their wives, “She keeps my nose to the grindstone.” Of Nancy, Jim was fond of saying, “She keeps my feet on the ground.” The very fact that his domestic life was wholesome and characterless, like a child’s junket, was a source of satisfaction to him. He had a profound conviction that this was the way things ought to be, that this was life. In the socialist millennium, of course, everything would be different: love would be free and light as air. Actually, this aspect of the socialist millennium filled Jim with alarm; he hoped that in America they would not have to go so far as to break up the family; it would be enough if
every man could have the rock-bottom, durable, practical things, the things Nancy cared about so very, very much.

  Moreover, the insipidity of his domestic life was, in a sense, its moral justification. Jim could think of the poor and the homeless now, and conscience no longer stabbed him, for he had purchased his immunity in the true American Way. Unable to renounce money, he had renounced the enjoyment of it. He had sold his birthright to gaiety for the mess of pottage on the dinner table and the right to hold his head up when he walked through the poorer districts in his good brown suit. Christ could forgive himself for being God only by becoming Man, just as a millionaire can excuse his riches by saying, “I was a poor boy once myself.” Jim, in a dim, half-holy way, felt that with his marriage he had taken up the cross of Everyman. He, too, was undergoing an ordeal, and the worried look he had always worn deepened and left its mark around his eyes, as if anxiety, hovering over him like a bird, had at last found its natural perch, its time-ordained foothold in bills and babies and dietary disturbances.

  Jim was quite sure that his marriage was “real.” It pinched him now and then, and that, to his mind, was the test. What disturbed him at times was the fact that it had been so extraordinarily easy to reconcile his political beliefs with his bread and butter. There ought to have been a great tug of war with Nancy at one end and Karl Marx at the other, but the job on the Liberal constituted a bridge between the opposing forces, a bridge which he strode across placidly every day, but which he nevertheless suspected of insubstantiality. There was something unnatural about a job that rewarded you quite handsomely for expressing your honest opinions; it was as if you were being paid to keep your virtue when you ought to be paid to lose it. More and more often it seemed to Jim that, if he was “facing facts” at home, in the office he was living in a queer fairy-tale country where everything was comfortable and nothing true. He might, however, have smothered this disquieting notion if he had not heard somebody else put it into words.