Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  So in Winnetka Tom found himself introduced to the Goodmans. They were ardent supporters, so it seemed. The wife, a left-over Liberal of the Harold Laski school, whose mother had been a Henry George single-taxer, and whose father had protested the Tom Mooney dynamite case while he lived in Massachusetts, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case after he moved to Illinois, had rung doobells for Roosevelt in ’36, hadn’t been asked back, and now thought that Tom would be a tactful way of trying again. She took after her parents, and had never quite forgiven Mussolini for pouring castor oil down the throat of Lauro de Bosis, though she was not quite sure who Lauro de Bosis was and had never been in Italy at all. The husband was a simpler case. Thin, aggrieved, and whey-faced, he seemed to have no facial expressions more revealing than a sneer. It was clear his had been a painful birth and that he knew it. Tom always suspected people like that of having lint in their navels. You could tell from the way they were so determined not to squirm.

  They didn’t give him a chance to ask about the local political set-up. What they wanted to know was where he stood on China.

  Unaware that he had been standing on China, he looked down at the rug and moved aside.

  Leaving Winnetka

  The president of the local Republican Women’s Club fell off the train, just as it was starting. Tom pulled the emergency cord and they got her back aboard. Hectic days. She was, after all, a voter.

  These days he was denouncing Roosevelt as a war-monger, which made him just as bad as anybody else, he guessed, but once he got in, it would be different. “Your boys are already almost on the transports,” he told his audience.

  Goaded into hitting back, Roosevelt rubbed it in. He hung the Republican record in Congress, isolationist, short-sighted, and vicious, round Tom’s neck and left it there.

  After that, it didn’t do Tom much good to tell the New York Tribune Forum that “once we have submitted to the domination of our economic life by an all-powerful central government, individual liberty is gone”.

  On the Train

  Of course there are responsible and intelligent people in the country, but they are not voters, they are not the people who listen at railroad sidings or go to free beefsteak dinners. That’s why the Founding Fathers wished to limit the popular vote as much as possible. But the machinery was there, it was easy to seize, for one’s own purposes, and the Irish immigrant politicians knew that. So the world of Hamilton, Jefferson, Hay, Marshall, Monroe, Madison, and Adams became soon enough the world of Mayor Kelly, Boss Hague, Mr. Crump of Memphis, after whom the famous blues was named, and Prendergast, immortal names, if only for a day, and yet they sank the probity of the vote for good.

  In this lurid light, even Tom’s hero, Wilson, didn’t look so good. Humes says that “great works are the work of even greater men”. But in Wilson’s case that was not true. Wilson was a small man with a great idea. The idea pulled and hauled him, but it did not haul him into the right shape to be an efficient bogy to the Prendergasts of this world.

  Besides, there was a smack of the Messiah about Wilson which, admire him though he did, Tom had learned too much to have much use for. Wilson was America come to save the world, and so all he produced was an allegory. Not for nothing does the Palace of the League of Nations at Geneva contain those ridiculous Sert murals, and not for nothing is it called a Palace. Tom’s message was a different one. There were between eighty-four and ninety countries in the world, and they would have to learn to live together or sink separately. Since they would not learn to live together, therefore they would sink, until one of them grew strong enough to haul the others up, drain the water out of their ears, arrange the limbs, weigh them down with a political headstone, and call them provinces.

  It was October 24th. Ten more days until the election.

  On October 24th, Hitler made a visit to France, which he had always wanted to see, though the art was decadent and he never drank wine. Every German always wants to see France, though he could not perhaps say why.

  It was amazing the shutters of how many windows were closed. Whereas in Germany we like light, we like air. Also we like kinder. They are cheaper to produce than matériel, and excellent for the army. A country whose birth-rate has fallen cannot be expected to amount to much.

  Nor had it.

  On the Train

  By that time, even Tom felt a little worn. It had always been his habit, when tired out, to climb aboard the nearest three-cushion sofa, like a bear into a tree, with an adequate supply of books, pillows, newspapers, horn-rimmed glasses, Camels, and water, to hibernate for a while. This evening, as the train connected two towns, he no longer knew what towns, he had a collection of magazines, Time, Newsweek, Life, House Beautiful, McCall’s, Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, and other journals of informed opinion, no matter whose. Theoretically he was resting. Actually, in his new, bitter mood, he was making a list of his favourite words, mostly from the advertisements, words either no longer used in ordinary speech, or else used with a changed meaning, changed, that is, along with everything else, mostly by undue advertising.

  For instance:

  Chaste: Either no handles, or no bows.

  Prudence: The mood in which one bought life insurance and real estate.

  Dignity: Family monuments in Vermont marble; silver-plated tableware.

  Serene: “A serene little blue dress.”

  Well-conducted: Used only of music.

  Handsome: Never used of women, though Edna was a handsome woman.

  Austere: Reducing diets only.

  Clean: Never used of morals, only of bathrooms or kitchens.

  Honesty: The best policy, but watch the small print.

  Upright: Pianos only, and those old-fashioned.

  Stoicism: Never mentioned, but understood to be dental.

  Impertinence: An undemocratic term. Since nobody understood what it was, there was no point in pointing it out.

  Grief: Come to, only. A kitchen accident.

  Nobility: A technical term used in the antique business. “An armoire of great nobility.”

  Integrity: Applied to fabric designs. “A stylized leaf pattern of cunning integrity.”

  Hauteur: Not used since Don Alfonso was chased out of Spain the last time. Vaguely reminiscent of Theda Bara and Vilma Banky, two old-fashioned movie stars.

  Simplicity: “A yoked sleeve of artful simplicity.” Also applied to the loser in any sales deal. “Mr. Cunningham, a man of great simplicity, was deceived into…” What the extremely rich are said to live with the utmost of.

  Order: Never used as an abstract noun, only as a request for goods.

  Character: “You seldom find a piece of Georgian stump work of this character.” Antiques again. Apart from that, the term was out of date. You didn’t have character any more, and if you had, you were one. The thing to have was personality. Personality didn’t require character, and not having any, was a lot easier to take: a desirable quality. Personalities made money.

  Standing: Only men over fifty-five have it, usually in a community. If they do have it, what they are standing on is called a bank.

  Sincere: Ties and the Pattersons, alas.

  Benign: Obsolete.

  Bony: No longer a term of moral praise.

  Solitude: A picturesque adjective used in travel posters to describe overcrowded places, such as the more popular National Parks. Nature’s, not ours. Every-man no longer needs it. Seems, indeed, scared stiff of it. A portable radio is a good defence against it.

  Majestic: A boat that sank, years ago.

  Balderdash: He hadn’t heard the word since about 1903, when he was nine, which was odd, because though you might not hear the word, you sure as hell heard a lot of balderdash these days. You were even forced to dish out some of it yourself.

  Noble: A few critics still applied it to the more popular pieces by Bach. Otherwise obsolete. “A noble cantilena.”

  Absolute: Only as an adjective. Never worshipped.

&n
bsp; Indifference: A psychiatric symptom, merely.

  Worldly: Used only in cosmetic ads, and there rarely. It wasn’t a popular look, these days.

  Withdrawal: Only as a symptom, though armies sometimes underwent it.

  Calm: What a housewife needs a moment of, in the midst of the season’s gadgets, which alone will give it to her. Nothing else.

  Insouciance: Not used since 1918, perhaps with cause.

  Demure: “A demure little Cape Cod House.” Why did they all have these wee adjectives in front of them? Though elephantiasis was not unknown as an adjunct, either.

  Patrician: Obsolete, except to describe Virginia plantation houses owned by New Yorkers, and only the woodwork detail of those.

  Traditional: Similar usage, but of cheaper houses. Place servings, or their design, which usually wasn’t. Furniture by McCobb. “The heirlooms of the future are what you buy today.” On the whole, it seemed unlikely.

  Awe: Used only in compounds, such as awe-inspiring, the compounds used only within the confines of Glacier Park.

  Agrarian: A dirty word. Jefferson was an agrarian. Jefferson was also amiable, affable, self-contained, austere, and tough as nails.

  And

  Order again: Oh, hell, what in God’s name had happened to order?

  He decided not to play that game any more, and picked up Lord David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne instead, though it was difficult to believe that Melbourne had ever been young, though no longer, as he thought about it, difficult to see what had aged him.

  Not for the first time on this trip, Tom wondered where he was, but almost for the first time, had no desire to go and see.

  Over the Radio

  While Tom was compiling his list, the Lewis speech came out. That was October 25th. It was a typical Lewis speech, chiefly devoted to lambasting Roosevelt, though he called Tom a gallant American and not an aristocrat at all. But the speech boomeranged. Lewis controlled the mine-workers, but the other union leaders hated him. He had become a dangerous joke. They wanted to do him in. And that meant doing Tom in.

  “After tonight”, said Green of the AFL, “I can do nothing to help your boy.”

  Nor could he.

  “I told you we only had to wait for him to blunder,” said the President happily. “I told you so.”

  A Speech from the Platform of the Pioneer

  It never occurred to him, but he was deeply moving. The Pattersons failed there. No matter what he was persuaded to say, the sincerity, the honesty, and the integrity shone through. He did things Americans had forgotten and no longer dared to do. Very simple things, but indicative of a lost freedom. For one thing, instead of sidling through the world, city style, he used his whole body, throwing it around as though there was still all the space in the world to move in. He wore a vest, like any business man, but he wasn’t happy unless he had one foot up on the edge of the bandstand, unless he could fling his arms wide, bow his head, jerk it up, laugh, run his hand through his hair, shove his hands in his pockets, lie down or sit with his feet up on the nearest chair. He had no respect for furniture. In a world of things he still lived in a world of people. To him a piece of furniture was something to sit on, not a status symbol. He came into the room like a talent scout, and when he saw somebody promising, his eyes lit up, and he headed for the nearest piece of conversational furnishing, desk, table, sofa, or chair, it was all the same to him. He never carried a watch. His life was too well-timed to need that portable metronome. Instead he’d squint at the sky, consult his stomach, and decide it was two-fifteen. He got a lot of criticism for that, for those are the habits of an autocrat, who knows perfectly well who he is, doesn’t have to time himself like a three-minute egg, lives in harmony with the world, and needs no props, being quite content to stand on his own. Thousands and millions were caught up into that emancipated procession. But they were not enough. For every man who wants a place where he can stand by himself, there are a thousand who are happier in a back seat, so that they can be told when to applaud or jeer, but mostly so that if the going gets rough, they can get out early.

  The campaign was almost over now. So were some other things. On the 27th Mussolini had invaded Greece. Ultimately he perhaps meant no harm, but he had been outfoxed. Yet whether he meant harm or not, he had certainly done some, and that his son Bruno had admired the flowers produced by bombs bursting on Abyssinia, and that the son of an Italian chargé d’affaires in Ethiopia had most enjoyed to hunt down the natives from his motor-cycle, with a machine-gun mounted between the handlebars, did him no good in the world press.

  Of course there were Americans who derived a similar joy from strafing harmless Venezuelan Indians from the air, as a pastime, when life got dull, on the week-ends, working for an oil company, and the same men would get the same kick out of banging away at Austrian civilians during the war to come. There are always such men everywhere. But we were a democracy. That made all the difference.

  And besides, there was still the memory of Haile Selassie, addressing that ghostly, echoing, set of ciphers at the League of Nations, that dead turbine of a building, futile, with his dignity, his cloak, his small still voice, and his genealogy.

  The power has failed. The lights go out. We grope in the dark.

  Iowa

  Tom saw there the rich, black earth, the rolling hills, the corn shocks like a vision by Samuel Palmer, and what had Samuel Palmer to say about his visions?

  Methinks the ling’ring, dying ray

  Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,

  And lights the soul up more than day …

  For thou, dear God, hast forméd all;

  Thou deckest every little flower,

  Thou girdest every planet ball,

  And mark’st when sparrows fall.

  Not very good, but then poetry was not Palmer’s forte. The fall of a sparrow perhaps was.

  The Mohawk Valley

  One of our magical valleys. It has history in it. It has the Mohawks, an offshoot of those cruel people, the Iroquois, given to over-eating, bravery, barbarism, who put missionaries to the torch, let them burn slowly, loved their children, shaved their heads, wore a crest resembling the helmet of a Greek warrior, and chopped off their little finger bones as a sign of grief.

  Let us not think of the Mohawks. Let us not think of the works of Fennimore Cooper, either, in whose novels they slip through the forest leaves with greased thighs. Cooper lived at Cooperstown, where baseball was supposedly invented. Remember instead that.

  Tom moved down that valley in a screen of motor-cycle sirens, those booted and thigh-striped furies, with their insect goggles, who are assigned to us, but do not greatly care what happens to us, once we are delivered and their work is done. Part of one of America’s sub-cultures, the bhakti of the machine. Now they wedged him deeper and more painfully into a slit of night.

  Headed for New York

  Somebody had handed him a copy of the National Geographic. His father had subscribed to it. It was a magazine you were used to, but never subscribed to, unless you had a sad far-away look in your eyes or an interest in birds. He had thumbed through it years ago, at the hospital, waiting for Philip to be born.

  There was an article in this issue by and (the man was not a megalomaniac exactly, but he had to write about something) about Admiral Byrd. In his teens Philip had been much taken with a book for children of that age, called A Boy Scout with Byrd, so Tom had registered the name and kept up the interest, long after Philip had forgotten it.

  Antarctica. The Last Frontier.

  No doubt it was. The Byrd family were a curious lot. They had a private tradition of public responsibility, and they all looked like ostriches which had just suavely swallowed their own eggs. Plantation owners. Land. Goodness only knew what these days. The illustrious progenitor, the Governor, had kept a diary, dull but quirky and full of thinly veiled surprises. Virginia bred. It was probably nice to come from Virginia, during the eighteenth century. The Senator was an isolationist. But
his uncle, his brother, his cousin, Tom wasn’t sure which, the Admiral, had gone off to Antarctica instead. In both cases the motive was probably the same. The personality that wants to be alone, wants vastness, wants solitude, wants to be judged, since it knows it is good, wants to be patted on the head, undergo the ordeal Christian underwent. Before the Civil War, Southerners had been people of the book, not like the Arabs, of the Koran, but of the Waverley novels, the Bible, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. They came by such impulses honourably. So Admiral Byrd was a man of integrity, like his relative, the Senator, but one who would rather fight a glacier than contend with the infinite small grindings of the Senate. The Senate grinds exceedingly fine, but there is paydirt in that dust. Log-rolling: the backbone of democracy.

  Still, here was Antarctica. Looking at it, on the printed page, he found he had some understanding and sympathy for the Admiral, turkey profile fine drawn or not. It was so clear. The younger sons went off, in the eighteenth century, to the frontier, to find solitude, respect, and perhaps to found a family besides. Now, it was Antarctica.

  Moving, very moving, if only you understood. You could hear the meaning of the ice storms, when they purr. The meaning of silence, when it purrs.