Up to the last minute, the colonists found it impossible to believe that society was going to let them depart with so little molestation, as if to say, “Go in peace.” The realists suspected a trap, and the more intransigent members asked themselves what Monteverdi, the Founder, would have said if he could have seen that cavalcade of cars, well stocked with whisky, cans, and contraceptives, winding up the mountain of Nowhere with their papers in perfect order—doubtless, he would have smiled, but they could hardly smile for him, and the evocation of his fate cast, for those who had loved him, a shadow on the Utopian hillside, comparable to the shadow of Calvary upon the militant Church. Reviewing their actions, however, in the light of the ideas of the Founder, they could find no real cause for self-reproach. Throughout, in every decision, they had respected the idea of limit, which seemed to them in retrospect the very definition of his thought. Agreeing, in principle, that the machine was to be distrusted, they had nevertheless voted to use in their experiment the bicycle, the carpet-sweeper, and the sewing-machine, any machine, in fact, to which a man contributed his own proportionate share of exertion and which tired him like the plough or the hoe. The bath, the flush toilet, all forms of plumbing they tolerated, but they opposed, at least for the time being, the installation of an electric power-plant, proposing to cook by wood and read in the evenings by oil, and to avail themselves of an old icehouse they had found on the property they were buying to solve the very stubborn problem of refrigeration. To their traveling by automobile, Monteverdi could have raised no objection (the trip had to be made somehow), and accused of inconsistency by their enemies, they could argue that they looked upon the family car as Lenin in 1917 looked upon the sealed car offered him by the German State to reach insurrectionary Petersburg—as a vehicle to the future appropriated from the past, the negation of a negation.
Everything could be explained—the whisky, the contraceptives, the collection of summer fashions being imported by a lady purist—for it was a by-law of this unique Utopia that every member be allowed to bring whatever was necessary to his happiness: he defined himself freely by his choices and could not allege social conformity as an excuse for his personal passions. And out of those loaded automobiles began to come a variety of definitions of happiness: happiness as ornament, happiness as utility, happiness as oblivion, happiness as squalor, happiness in a small suitcase, happiness in giving (Joe Lockman’s Cadillac carried presents for every family), in a French casserole or a sterilizer, a kiddie-coop or a gold evening dress, Spanish shawls, books, pictures, batik hangings, porch furniture, blue jeans, garden tools, carpentry sets, a single tennis racket forever to go unpartnered, a Greek dictionary, Homer and Plato, Elizabethan songs; happiness even arrived, somewhat later, in a moving van carrying two grand pianos and a Chinese Chippendale sideboard.
To Susan Hapgood, a young novelist, walking on the central lawn with Will Taub, her literary adviser, the scene of the unpacking had all the charms of fiction. Loving only books and conversation, she had already disposed of her small effects in the quarter-cottage allotted to her, and was taking her second pleasure in the expansive company of Taub, who strolled up and down, hands behind his back, surveying the effects of his colleagues with undisguised wonder. A transparent air of proprietorship emanated from his whole person; to his fellow-colonists he suggested a summer hotel manager, with his large city feet clad in new white shoes which creaked even on the grass and betrayed his every movement, a hotel manager, however, in whom curiosity had mastered discretion and who, like an ingenuous bell-boy, could not refrain from comment on the objects, so foreign to his experience, so peculiar in shape and mysterious in utility, on which other persons had obviously placed value. Susan, running along beside him, was experiencing emotions of a different order. Her blue eyes widened and her small mouth emitted sharp cries of literary admiration as each article, when unpacked, added an inspired touch to the characterization of its owner, as though all these domestic details had been endowed with the faculty of surprising convincingly by an Author supremely clever. Who would have thought that the Latinist possessed a pair of boxing gloves? Or that Macdermott was inseparable from a snoreball? (Susan was a generous critic.)
“Why, it’s just like going to a fire,” she exclaimed in her plain, small-town voice, whose commonplace timbre delighted the ears of her Eastern friends and made them treat her with protective tenderness, like a fresh farm egg delivered to their kitchens. “You sit across the street and watch the family’s belongings carried out to the lawn by the fire department,” she added, perceiving Taub’s doubtful expression. “That must be marvelous,” he cried, as he rolled the possibilities of this appreciatively over the tongue of his fancy. Facts of any kind, oddities, lore, local history intoxicated the mind of this realist, whose own experience had been strangely narrow—a half-forgotten childhood in the Carpathian mountains, immigration, city streets, the Movement, Bohemian women, the anti-Movement, downtown bars, argument, discussion, subways, newsstands, the office. This was all he knew of the world; the rest was hearsay, upon which his materialist imagination was continually at play, building on straws of report vast structures of conjecture and speculation. He was a theorist faute de mieux, for what really interested him was information and the magical properties it contained for the armchair subjugation of experience. People’s ideas bored him, once he had placed them in his atlas; he was a politician even with thought, keeping an eye on the various developments in literature and the arts in the manner of a chief of State who has some subordinate read aloud to him the editorials in the opposition newspapers and cuts him off impatiently, after a few sentences, when the tendency of the article is clear to him.
Susan, now, would have been glad to turn away; her conscience was already punishing her for the sin of inordinate curiosity; she felt she had seen too much. But Taub found himself utterly captivated by the spectacle of his fellow-colonists’ worldly goods spread out on the grass for his inspection. He would have liked to finger them candidly, like some child with a naturalistic bent who sees no harm in the impulse, which his elders are always correcting. “Come away,” Susan kept repeating. “Let’s go help Cynthia unpack.” She began to tug at his arm, and Taub reluctantly yielded, as the others started glancing their way. Wariness returned to him; he buttoned his face hastily as if correcting a negligence in his dress. Concealment was second nature to him (though he had nothing to hide): he liked confidences, closed rooms, low voices; his eyelids were normally drooped and his gaze darted out between them, following events narrowly, like a watcher behind shutters. He felt annoyed now with Susan for the demonstrativeness of her manners, but this did not really darken the mood of almost sententious satisfaction he felt in the afternoon’s doings. He had found out many things he had not known before; further possibilities still opened; there was much to be learned. A part of his antipathy toward the colony had sprung simply from the fear of boredom—Macdermott and a pack of schoolteachers and religious types, what had they got to say to him that he had not heard before? He could read it all in Macdermott’s magazines, in a series called New Roads, without paying rent on a cottage and being put to work on the land. He had forgotten the perennial fascination exercised over him by behavior. The tree of life, he said to himself, quoting Hegel, is greener than the tree of thought. (His eye caught the girl student sitting cross-legged in front of her cottage and ingested her long legs; Susan watched them move bulgingly down the tract of his appreciation, like a snake’s dinner, to join the Jacksons’ English bicycles and the breasts of the minister’s wife.)
It is not only, Taub reflected as they passed on and his mood grew more and more serene, that life is more fertile than the brain: we applaud Nature when she repeats herself, while we do not forgive this in a speaker. The capacity of personality to run true to form, of a plant to reproduce its characteristics, is a source of joy to the intelligence. If Macdermott tells me that violence is wrong, I wait for him to say something new, but if every carton in his second-han
d car repeats the label, Economy Size, I am obviously delighted. Here Taub frowned and abandoned the line of thought, for the Scotch joke had reminded him of the fact that he was Jewish, a painful subject with him, the source of much unhappiness, unguessed at by his friends, who did not know that they wounded his pride every time they mentioned the word Jew, or described some instance of anti-Semitism, which cut him to the heart. A kind of helplessness came over him when he became conscious of his Jewishness, a thing about himself which he was powerless to alter and which seemed to reduce him therefore to a curious dependency on the given. He was not a defiant Jew or even a rebellious one. At such moments, he felt himself to be a mere mass of protoplasmic jelly, deposited by the genes of his parents, which could only quiver feebly in response to a stimulus that society sent through him like an electric current. He began suddenly, as he always did on these occasions, to long for his wife, a Gentile woman who alone understood what he suffered on this score, and who had never, during all their years together, alluded to it unsolicited. For this tact he felt a gratitude toward her that was mingled with surprise and reverence. She held a unique place in his heart, though he consulted her convenience seldom, was brusque and out-of-sorts with her when she tried to think about social problems. A reserved girl who designed clothes, she spoke very little at parties, and many rivals had been encouraged to hope by her silence and apparent coldness. What they did not perceive was that Taub trusted her without reserve; he had put his Jewishness into her Gentile hands and she had never used it against him. This trust meant more to him, a political man, than all the allurements of her competitors. He could rely on her absolutely, in the manner of those antique sovereigns who kept at their right hand a Gaul, a Greek, or an Egyptian, some scion of the traditional enemy, a slave, often, or a hostage, whose allegiance they felt the more sure of because it transcended the bounds of custom and thereby partook of the improbable—generally, in their histories, the stranger has let pass an opportunity to kill the tyrant, and the tyrant has been stirred, in the very depths of his self-love, by the gratuitousness of this fealty. The romance of Cyrus and Xenophon, of Caesar and Diviciacus the Haeduan, of the Doge of Venice and Othello, were recapitulated in the Taub marriage, which naturally was childless. All Taub’s paternal feelings (and he was at bottom a fatherly man) spent themselves on the fact of his foyer, which was sanctified for him, like a child. He marveled clumsily over table-settings and sofas, as a father does over the feats of a baby, and felt toward his furnishings even that doubt and apprehension experienced by the head of the household toward the nursery routines of the infant (did his wife really know what she was doing?—it had not been that way in his childhood).
Something of this watchful benevolence, now, he transferred to the whole colony. Standing alone on the peak (he had dropped Susan at her cottage several minutes before) listening to the evening sounds, the cries of the children being fed, the wood being chopped for the stoves, he laughed aloud to himself in sheer victorious contentment. His mind explored sensuously the realm of possibility that lay outstretched at his feet: across the valley, a herd was grazing on a knoll; smoke came from the chimney of a farmhouse; fences, the barking of a dog, a ploughed field cut neatly into sections gave a sense of the human scale, reduced by distance to miniature, like a toy agricultural set; while far off, through the cleft of the valley, ranges and ranges of mountains, bare, grand, and purple, topped one another just distinguishably and disappeared finally into the horizon, carrying the vision outward into apocalyptic space. All this Taub’s eye appropriated; his soul enlarged to its measure, as he stood outlined against the sky, Balboa claiming for his orthodoxy the whole mode of the pacific—he felt like Utopia’s discoverer and an impresario to Nature.
This Te Deum swelling in Taub’s heart reverberated throughout the colony. The membership was tranquilly a-hum in the abandoned summer resort, a three-story hotel with cottages done in the Swiss chalet style which had failed many years before, during the First World War, been half renovated in the late thirties and left to stand as it was, when gas-rationing and the shortage of food condemned it for summer-vacationing and the seashore replaced the mountains as the American playground. Beds, chairs, lamps, washstands, screens, of the era of the resort’s short popularity, remained in their places; flour and meal and sugarbins, iron and granite-ware pots, flame-toasters and waffle-irons stood ready to hand in the big kitchen; rusted irons in the laundry challenged the more adventurous women to clean them and heat them on the stove. It was as if the hotel and its furnishings had been arrested at the magical moment of the average birth-date of the colonists nearly forty years before, and arrested also, conveniently, at the stage of mechanization to which the colonists wished to return. A whole system of life stood waiting to be resumed, a point which had persuaded the realists to submit to the purists’ ideology, particularly since the drafting of labor and the scarcity of materials, owing to the oncoming war, put large-scale modernization in any case out of the question. And the realists too, of both tendencies, were not insensitive to the charm of the fresh start, so aptly symbolized in the old hotel and its appliances, which took them back to the age of their innocence, to the dawn of memory, and the archaic figures of Father and Mother. Here, for the moment, it seemed to all of them that it was possible to begin over again from the beginning and correct the small error that was responsible for the vast confusion, like the single mistake made at any early stage in a mathematical calculation which accounts for a difference of billions in the final answer.
It was not, as their enemies alleged, that the colonists desired to turn the clock back once and for all; it pleased them, rather, to set it at the moment of their entrance onto the human scene, clean it, and start it going again. They might have set it earlier or later—the Catholic scholar, for example, would have preferred, at least in theory, to go back before Copernicus, and the long-legged girl student imagined that the first Roosevelt Administration had been the high point of human achievement. To some, the errors to be rectified were largely of a personal nature: Ed Jackson, drinking from the spring, stepping deep into wild forget-me-nots, recovered a lost sensation, the pure, keen thirst of his boyhood, and knew that reform was still possible if water could give him such a kick. To others, it was not so much their own sins, but the burden of social error that seemed to drop from their shoulders—Versailles, Spain, Munich, Yalta, the failure of the socialist movement, all these massive objective factors with which they had had to contend in a struggle increasingly hopeless, the dead weight of decisions taken in the world capitals which had the power of changing their lives without being changed by them, decisions which rested not on the popular will but on the resignation of a public which, despite the ballot-box, looked upon wars and social catastrophes as the medieval peasant looked upon cholera and earthquake, as manifestations of fatality, afflictions from the Beyond. Here, at any rate, the premises of action were the colonists’ own; here the mistakes of Kautsky, Lenin, Wilson, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Attlee, Truman, Dewey, not to mention the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, were not, so to speak, dealt out to them as the cards they were forced to play with, or else get out of the game. They shuffled their own deck, and even the realists, who saw the doom of the venture in some practical joker they called “human nature,” expected this joker to assert itself in the behavior of the colonists themselves and not somewhere outside them, in the inscrutable order of things.
The recovery, if only in token, of a world small and self-contained, had, that first night, an exhilarating effect, and the presence of very obvious difficulties of a practical sort only enlivened the membership to meet and answer the challenge. The committee in charge of housing had been prepared for a great many complaints; it received nothing but praise. To many of the members, the discovery that they could do without their comforts came as a delightful surprise, as though the material objects which had been subtracted from their bodies were added, by way of compensation, to their moral girth. For a majo
rity, material life in the real world had been easy, relatively speaking, and mental life hard; the reversal of this relation gave birth to a sense of resourcefulness long missing from their spirits. The limits of their mental capacities they knew all too well. They had yet to find the limits of their physical powers, but the disclosure that he could trim a wick, say, was an almost overwhelming experience for a man who had felt sick with fear whenever the electric company wrote him that the power would be turned off if the bill were not paid by the fifteenth. Independent action became, for the first time that night, something more than a phrase; the most impetuous spirits went racing ahead in their talk to a moment when the colony would produce not only its own eggs, milk, butter, cheese, hams, vegetables, and bacon, but furniture, shoes, and clothing. The idea that for certain things—oil, paper, medicines—they would always be beholden to society nearly brought tears to their eyes, as it collided sharply with their fancy, though they had faced it calmly enough back there in the city, where any improvement in their condition seemed almost too much to ask for. A complete break with the present was already being envisioned in some quarters before the first egg had been laid, and one purist, going for milk, was arguing with another the propriety of their action, since according to the by-laws a herd should have been delivered on the day of their arrival—a firm line must be taken or they would soon be buying store-bread at the filling-station down below.
The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink) Page 4
