The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  So that it was no problem at all for him to put his signature below Miss Sargent’s. Aside from everything else, there was a purely sporting question involved: you don’t accuse a man without giving him a chance to answer for himself. Of course Trotsky should be heard. He said as much to Miss Sargent and she smiled at him, and their Anglo-Saxon sense of fair play was warm for a moment between them—he could feel it in his stomach like a shot of whisky. All the shame of that other afternoon was gone suddenly, and he thought what a hell of a nice, straight, clear-eyed girl she was, after all.

  This sense of recognition, this spiritual handclasp, lasted only an instant, however, for as soon as she began to speak, her words tripped over each other, and he saw, with disappointment, that she was being intense about the matter. She said something about his “courage,” and he reddened and blinked his eyes and twisted his head from side to side, disavowing the virtue. Why, he thought impatiently, was it necessary for Marxists to talk in this high-flown way? There was no question of courage here; it was just a matter of common sense. And he anticipated no trouble. There was never any trouble if you handled these controversies in the right way, kept your head, took it easy, did not let the personal note intrude. It was unfortunate, he had been saying for years, that the radical movement had inherited Karl Marx’s cantankerous disposition together with his world-view. The “polemical” side of Marxism was its most serious handicap; here in America, especially, it went against the grain. He was not so simple as to subscribe to the mythology of the conference table (the class struggle was basic, inadjudicable), but surely on the left itself, there could be a little more friendliness, a little more co-operativeness, a little more give-and-take, live-and-let-live and let-sleeping-dogs-lie. And it was really so easy. Take his own case: he had friends of every shade of opinion, argued with them freely, pulled no punches, but never had a quarrel. There had been the time when he had been obliged to throw a classmate out of his apartment for telling an anti-Semitic story, but the guy had come back the next day, sober, and apologized, and they had shaken hands on it, and the incident was forgotten. It only went to show. Unfortunately, however, the bad side of Marxism was precisely what attracted warped personalities of the type of Miss Sargent, who had long lists of people she did not speak to, and who delighted in grievance committees, boycotts, and letters to the editor. So that the evil multiplied a thousandfold. It was like an hereditary insanity that is perpetuated not only through the genes but by a process of selection in which emotional instability tends to marry emotional instability and you end up with the Jukes family. Or you begin with Marx’s carbuncles and you end with the Moscow trials.

  “Take it easy,” he said to the girl, patting her shoulder in token of dismissal.

  “I’ll try,” she answered, lightly enough, but as she turned to go, she flung at him that same sad, desperate smile that she had given him on the subway just before—He closed the door hastily behind her. For an instant it was as if he, too, had heard the chord that announces the return of a major theme, a sound heavy with dread and expectation. It was all going to begin again, the same thing, disguised, augmented, in a different key, but irrefragably the same thing. His stomach executed a peculiar drop, and this sensation, also, he remembered. It was the feeling you have on a roller-coaster at Coney Island, when the car has just started and you are sitting in the front seat, and you know for sure (you have been wondering up to this moment) that you do not want to ride on it. After the first dip, you lose this certainty (you would unquestionably die if you kept it), you may even enjoy the ride or suggest a second trip, become an aficionado of roller-coasters, discriminate nicely between the Cyclone at Palisades Park and the Thunderbolt at Revere Beach. You are, after all, a human being, with a hundred tricks up your sleeve. But at the very beginning you knew.

  However, there seemed at first no cause for alarm. The whole affaire Trotsky, as somebody called it, was going off according to schedule. Miss Sargent would come to the office every morning in a fever of indignation: mysterious strangers telephoned her at midnight, she received anonymous letters and marked copies of the Daily Worker, a publisher went back on a verbal agreement he had made with her, people cut her on the street, an invitation to a summer writers’ conference had been withdrawn. Jim listened to these stories with a tolerant smile: this was the usual sectarian hysteria. No doubt some of these things had actually happened to her (he would not go so far as to say she had made them up), but certainly she exaggerated, colored, dramatized, interpreted, with very little regard for probability. Nothing of the sort was happening to him. He was on the best of terms with his Stalinist friends, who even kidded him a little about his association with Trotsky; several publishers were after him to do a book; and he got an offer to join the staff of a well-known news magazine. If anything, his open break with the Party had enhanced his value.

  Moreover, he was enjoying himself enormously. He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural, since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard. The Moscow trials seemed admirably suited to the medium, and at any cocktail party that season, Jim could be found in a corner, wrangling pleasantly over Piatakov and Romm, the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen and the landing field at Oslo.

  However, here, as in the other arts, there were certain conventions to be observed: statistics were virtually de rigueur, but rhetoric was unseemly; heat was allowed, but not rancor. Jim himself obeyed all the rules with a natural, unconscious decorum, and in his own circle he felt perfectly secure in advocating Trotsky’s cause. It was at the Trotsky committee meetings that he had misgivings. An ill-assorted group of nervous people would sit in a bare classroom in the New School or lounge on studio couches in somebody’s apartment, listening to Schachtman, a little dark lawyer, demolish the evidence against the Old Man in Mexico. Schachtman’s reasoning Jim took no exception to (though it was, perhaps, almost too close); what bothered him was the tone of these gatherings. It seemed to him that every committee member wore an expression of injury, of self-justification, a funny, feminine, “put-upon” look, just as if they were all, individually, on trial. They nodded with emphasis at every telling point, with an air of being able to corroborate it from their own experience; ironical smiles of vindication kept flitting from face to face. And not only, Jim thought, did they behave like accused persons; they also behaved like guilty persons; the very anxiety of their demeanor would have convicted them before any jury. Watching them all, Jim would wish that he was the only guy in the world who took Trotsky’s side, and he would feel a strong sympathy with Leibowitz, who, at Decatur during the Scottsboro case, was supposed to have told the Communists to get the hell out of town. Sometimes, even, listening to Novack read aloud a fiery letter from the Old Man, he would wish that Trotsky himself could be eliminated, or at least held incommunicado, till the investigation was over. The Old Man did not understand Americans.

  And after the meeting had broken up, over coffee or highballs, the committee members would exchange anecdotes of persecution, of broken contracts, broken love affairs, isolation, slander, and betrayal. Jim listened with an astonished, impatient incredulity, and he and Nancy used to laugh late at night in their living room over the tales he brought home of Trotskyist suggestibility. They laughed kindly and softly—so as not to wake the baby—over their Ritz crackers and snappy cheese, and Nancy, full-bosomed, a little matronly already in her flowered house coat, seemed to Jim, by contrast with the people he had just left, a kind of American Athena, a true presiding deity of common sense.

  Yet occasionally, when he was alone, when an engagement had fallen through and he was left unoccupied, when Nancy was late getting home in the afternoon, he wondered. What if all these stories were true? What if even some o
f them were true? How did it happen that he was exempt from this campaign of terror? He had not compromised; he had spoken his mind. Did the others, the Stalinists, hope that he would “come around”? Or did they believe that terroristic methods would not work with him? This thought was pleasing and he would hold it at arm’s length for a moment, contemplating it, in a kind of Boy Scout daydream of torture and manly defiance, of Indians and the Inquisition, and the boy with his finger in the dike. But humor inevitably challenged this view; the dream dissolved; he was left puzzled. Sometimes, a sort of mild panic would follow. He would be overwhelmed by a sense of trespassing on the Trotsky case. It was as if he had come to dinner at the wrong address and the people were very polite and behaved as if he were expected; out of good breeding they would not allow him to explain his mistake, nor would they set him on his way to the right house. Or it was as if he were an extra who had got onto the stage in the wrong scene: the actors went on acting as if he were not there, and nobody furnished him with a pretext for an exit.

  Before long, he began to notice in himself a desire to compete, to have some hair-raising experience of his own and vie in martyrdom with the other members. He was ashamed of this wish; at the same time, it confirmed his skepticism. Here, he felt, was the key to the whole business; nobody wanted to be left out of a thing like this; it was the phenomenon that had been noted again and again at spiritualistic séances: people unconsciously began to co-operate with the medium and with each other, so that no one should seem to be deficient in psychic powers.

  This shrewd explanation might have satisfied him—if it had not been for John Dewey…. The adherence of the dean of American philosophy, which ought to have reassured Jim, worried him profoundly. It never failed to violate Jim’s sense of fitness to see this old man, the very apotheosis of the cracker-barrel spirit, deep in conversation with Schachtman or Stolberg, nodding his white head from time to time in acquiescence to some extravagant statement, smiling, agreeing, accepting, supporting. It was like finding your father in bed with a woman. And the most painful thing about it was that the old man should be so at home here, so much more at home than Jim could ever be. He takes to it like a duck to water, committee members would say, proudly and affectionately to each other, and Jim could not deny that this was so. Dewey truly appeared to have no reservations; you could not call that mild irony a reservation, for it was a mere habit, like his Yankee drawl, that was so ingrained, so natural, that it seemed to have no specific relation to the outside world, but only to his own, interior life. Whenever Jim heard that dry voice swell out at a mass meeting in anger and eloquence, he squirmed in his seat, not knowing whether to feel embarrassed for Dewey or for himself. The very kinship he felt with the old man served to deepen and define his own sense of alienation, as in a family the very resemblance that exists between the members serves to make more salient the individual differences. It was impossible, moreover, to doubt Dewey’s judgment, and when Jim saw that Dewey believed the stories of persecution (he had indeed been a little bit persecuted—“annoyed,” Dewey put it, himself), Jim, unwillingly, began to believe too.

  Now the ground was cut from under him. This was perhaps the first time in his life that he was subscribing to something which he could not check against his own experience or psychology, which his own experience and psychology seemed, in fact, to contradict. There was no subjective correlative; he was no longer his own man. Yet once he had conceded the point, the evidence began rushing in at him. A hundred incidents that he had forgotten or ignored or discounted marshaled themselves before his eyes. He remembered the prominent names that had dropped off the committee’s letterhead, the queer, defamatory stories he had encountered everywhere about members of the committee, the books unaccountably rejected by publishers. “What was more devastating, he saw now (a thing he had denied a month before) that the Stalinist campaign of intimidation had already had its effect on the Liberal’s policy.

  He read down the contributors’ column one day and found it a roster of new names—youngsters just out of college, professors from obscure universities, elderly, non-political writers who had been boasting for years that they did not “take sides” and who were now receiving their reward. It was hard to know exactly when they had come in, but suddenly they were all there. The whole complexion of the magazine had unobtrusively changed. It was not, precisely, that it had become Stalinist; rather, like some timid and adaptive bird, it was endeavoring to make itself as neutral-colored as possible and fade discreetly into the surrounding landscape. The whole process, he saw, had been a negative one. A few months earlier, Mr. Wendell had resigned—on account of his age, it was said officially. The paper had been made two pages shorter, there were more cartoons, more straight reportage. Shorter articles in larger type, not so much political and aesthetic theory. Articles had been limited to two thousand words apiece; the book-review section had been cut in half and a humorous column had been added. Nothing you could put your finger on, yet by these innocent measures the paper had effectively purged itself of Trotskyism, for the fact was that the Trotskyists, anarchists, and other dissidents did run to political and aesthetic theory, to articles more than two thousand words long, to book reviews of unpopular novelists and poets.

  That same afternoon, he observed for the first time the machinery of exclusion. He came into the literary editor’s office; it was her day for seeing book reviewers. A young anti-Stalinist reviewer was standing despondently in front of the shelves, which usually overflowed with books (for the literary editor was rather inefficient about getting things reviewed on time), but which were now unwontedly, desolately empty. Eight or nine popular novels with garish jackets leaned against each other in one corner. The young man had been asking for a new book—Jim did not catch the name. The literary editor shook her head; unfortunately the book had just gone out to a professor at Northwestern. He mentioned another title; that, too, had been assigned—to an instructor at Berkeley. He mumbled something about an article on Silone; the literary editor was not encouraging; she wondered whether you could do justice to Silone in fifteen hundred words; the paper was not printing many general articles; she could not promise anything.

  She got up from her desk and wandered toward the shelves, gesturing vaguely at the popular novels. “Do us a note of a hundred words on one of these—if you feel like it,” she said negligently. The young man shook his head and shambled out of the office; it was perfectly clear that he would not return. The literary editor murmured something pettish about the insularity of New York intellectuals, and Miss Sargent, who had been sitting all the while with averted head, looked up.

  “On Broadway they call that the brush-off,” she said.

  The literary editor affected not to hear.

  Miss Sargent continued, looking straight at Jim, speaking in a louder voice.

  “Have you heard? I’m being transferred to Labor and Industry. On account of the curtailment of the book-review section—which we all deplore—my duties are being assumed by a stenographer.”

  “Oh, Margaret,” said the literary editor, “you’re becoming perfectly impossible. I should think you’d be glad to be out of this. I know I would.”

  The girl did not answer, but kept on looking at Jim. It was impossible to misread her gaze, which held in it something challenging and at the same time something feminine and suppliant. He met her eyes for an instant, then shook his head hopelessly.

  “You girls,” he began, intending to say something humorous and pacific, but he could not finish his sentence. He shook his head again, and retreated from the office. As soon as he got into the corridor, however, the truncated conversation continued in his mind. That book reviewer, said a firm light soprano, that unfortunate boy, with his bad complexion, his blue mesh shirt open at the throat, was Stalin’s victim just as surely as the silicosis sufferers who had recently been displayed at a Congressional investigation were the victims of industrial capitalism. What the hell, his own voice answered, the young man was p
robably no great shakes as a writer (he looked like a punk); it was not a question of life and death; the kid was on the WPA and the Liberal’s check could do no more than buy him a few beers at the Jumble Shop. Ah yes, the first voice resumed, martyrs are usually unappetizing personally; that is why people treat them so badly; for every noble public man, like Trotsky, you must expect a thousand miserable little followers, but there is really more honor in defending them than in defending the great man, who can speak for himself. His own voice did not reply, and a visual illusion succeeded the auditory one. He saw the figure of the book reviewer splashed on a poster, like the undernourished child in the old Belgian relief stickers; underneath a caption thundered: WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?