Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

I have intimated that this diversity and divergency of book, picture, and song indicated a certain universality of taste in Dan. It could be said that they also indicated a certain contradiction in him. A wise and observant visitor to Dan’s house might well suspect before meeting him that here was a man at variance with himself, a man, surely more vividly and intensely at variance with himself than the rest of us. That, primarily, was the truth. And that, primarily, is the reason for my trying to tell Dan’s story. (No man’s story is worth telling unless it is the story of a battle.) Yet, it must not be thought for an instant that if Dan’s conflict was more vivid it was therefore more base. His was not the conventional, almost smug conflict that most of us engage in—or, more properly, indulge in. His was a conflict of an heroic sort, and not any the less heroic because he was a physically exuberant and spiritually amiable man.

  While I was sitting in the living room—or perhaps I should say while I was experiencing the living room—a stocky, balding man in his shirt sleeves entered. Briggs introduced us. His name was Archer. He was a pharmacist by training but at present he was, I gathered, living in the house as Dan’s guest and writing a novel. He looked on me with the faintest of cool suspicions as if I were a possible threat to his privacy or privileges. He treated Briggs in very much the same manner.

  It was difficult for me to associate Archer with Dan or his household. He had a hard sort of objectivity to him, and I did not care for his thin, avaricious mouth and thick, insensitive hands. Such little hair as he had was badly in need of cutting, and his whole rather careless appearance seemed to me to indicate a disregard of others. I tried to engage him in conversation but he was indifferent almost to the point of incivility. Briggs, who obviously knew him, made no effort to be amiable. He had picked up a copy of Eric Gill’s autobiography and was sitting back, reading, having serenely given Archer and me to each other. Then into the coolness of the room Dan came.

  Dan was immediately all enthusiasm that Archer and I had met. He was sure, he said, that I would be very fond of Archer and that Archer would be very fond of me. We had a great deal in common, both of us being, he declared, “adventurers of the spirit.” Not knowing Dan then as well as I knew him later, I had an idea he was merely being the good host, trying perhaps to warm up to the coolness of the room. I certainly was no adventurer of the spirit, and, even if I had been, Dan had not known me long enough to have any good idea that I was. And if Archer were an adventurer of the spirit, I was ready there and then to eat my old felt hat. But Dan, as I learned when I knew him better, was in no way playing a part. He had the curious faculty—virtue, a spiritual person would call it, I suppose, of genuinely believing that all his friends and acquaintances would see one another as he saw them and fall in love with one another at once. As all human beings were all wonderful to Dan, who could think no evil, he was of the total conviction that they would all be wonderful to one another.

  Dan had a high opinion of Archer. “Justus is writing a book,” he informed me, “a great book, an important book, designed to incorporate in fiction form the fundamental Christian ethic, and especially to set forth for the world man’s dire and essential need of grace. His training as a pharmacist helps to give him a scientific perspective that I think is particularly useful for his task.” He turned to Archer. “Have I put it badly, Justus?”

  Archer neither agreed nor disagreed, looking up at Dan with that cool objectivity of his. It was a hard man indeed who could sit so calmly under such eloquent praise.

  “It is a book we desperately need these days,” Dan went on, “when man has about decided he can’t go it alone and doesn’t know where to turn for help.” Dan smiled down at Archer as a man might smile on a son he was proud of, although Archer was older than Dan. “And Justus’ greatness is not merely in his writing, I must say that for him. It is also in his living. Usually if you look to creative artists, sharers of the Divinity though they may be, for nobility of life, or even for ordinary goodness and generosity you will not find it. But Justus is as great in his personal life as he is in his work.”

  Beaming, Dan turned to Briggs and me. “Justus never speaks evil of any man. In the months I have known him I have never heard him belittle another’s character or defame another’s reputation. He has charity, true charity, without which, as the Apostle says, all heroism and sacrifice are as nothing.”

  Another man might have squirmed under this extraordinary, this really preposterous eulogy or, at least, have tried to smile it off. But not Archer. He took it all with that cool indifference I had already noted in him, the indifference that comes from a secure inner feeling of superiority.

  I, weathering Dan’s enthusiasm, asked Archer as casually as I could what he had written in the past. Before Archer could reply, Dan interposed, explaining that the book Archer was writing was his first book but it was not therefore to be considered in any way the work of a novice. It was, to use Dan’s words, a distillate of Archer’s years of thought, aspiration, and experience, a first but a final expression. I then, casually as before, asked Dan how much of Archer’s manuscript he had read. Dan, I could see, felt my question to be out of order. He had seen nothing of the manuscript. He would not invade Justus’ privacy, he said. It was for Justus to assign the day and the hour when the manuscript would be ready for the world.

  I could not help looking at Archer with a bit of cynical amusement. Dan was being ridiculous, and Archer knew it and I knew it. I would have bet on the spot there was no manuscript, or not much of a one, at any rate.

  Archer made no comment. He appeared to accept Dan’s lofty words as if they might well be his due. His attitude was particularly remarkable in view of the fact that, as I learned later, he was practically a stranger to Dan. He was a brother and dependent of an editor who published Dan’s stories. Some months before, the editor, hoping to get Archer, a failure as a pharmacist, off his back, encouraged him to write crime stories for a living and sent him to Dan for schooling. Dan, imagining in Archer a talent too good to be wasted on crime fiction, encouraged him to try his wings in higher altitudes. Archer fell right in with the idea. He moved in with Dan and had been living in the Newton house since then.

  One did not have to be a psychiatrist or a seasoned man of the world to see why it was Archer had never spoken evil of any man. In his self-regard, in his sweet plain selfishness, if you wish, he had never bothered to indulge himself deeply in opinions of anyone else. He was never enough interested in another man, in anyone outside of himself, to have much feeling about him, good or bad.

  Meanwhile, into the room, almost unnoticed, had come a little, gray man in a faded gray suit. He stood in the background looking up at Dan with gentle, admiring eyes. The moment Dan became aware of the little man, he turned to introduce him to me.

  The little man’s name was Stacey, and it came out he had lived with Dan for years. Dan’s introduction of Stacey was almost as grandiloquent as his introduction of Archer.

  Stacey was, it seemed, a wizard of finance. (I could not help noticing Stacey’s poor, worn clothes.) Did I know, Dan asked me, that it was Tim (his first name) who alone had ruined Luber, the Match King?—Luber, the multimillionaire who for years (largely through fraud as it turned out) controlled the world’s safety-match industry?

  This, as I studied the little gray man, was hard for me to believe. Then Dan told the story.

  One night, Tim, a janitor at an in-town apartment house, inspired by what Dan would have you believe was a scientific spirit, had counted the matches in a new box and found an error of four matches. Instead of there being a hundred matches in the box, as was declared on the cover, there were only ninety-six. Tim, indignantly suspecting fraud, had written a vigorous protest to the officials of the match company in Europe. Wheels within wheels began to turn. The match company decided to overhaul at enormous expense the machinery at its many factories. The error of four matches was eliminated and with it a 4 per cent unethical profit, and thus Luber, the multimillionaire Match King w
as slowly destroyed. The destruction was (according to Dan, of course) a triumph of Tim’s courage and genius. It was a long and fantastic tale, too long and a little too fantastic to be given in detail here.

  Dan, when he had finished, smiled from his tall height proudly down at the little man and the little man smiled back up at Dan. There was a wonderfully warm youthfulness in their smiles. Here were men who could be called friends.

  Briggs seemed to enjoy the sight as much as I did. But Archer looked on with his aloof indifference as if these two human beings were too obvious, too childish, for his superior intelligence.

  I studied little Tim and saw, for all his gentleness, a shining ego smiling out on us. The former obscure, timid, little janitor now stood before me a wizard of finance, a man of heroic cast. Did Dan create a fiction—or magnify a small fact—to give this new stature to Tim, to give him the happiness I saw in his eyes? It was the enigma about Dan I was never quite able to penetrate.

  As I listened to the story, I had for a while the feeling I had had at Luigi’s when Dan lunched there with Briggs and me—the feeling of being in the presence of a great unreality. But now, the story over, Dan, standing there before me in the living room, surrounded by his extraordinary assortment of books and pictures, towering tall and huge in his two hundred and thirty pounds, seemed to be more real, more superabundantly real to me than almost any man I had ever met. He made me think of Thoreau’s words: “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

  When Dan looked directly at you, as he was looking at me when he came to the end of Tim’s story, with that glowing candor of his, it was hard not to turn away. Dan always faced you with a shining challenge—a hope or, perhaps more accurately, an expectation that you would join him in the vitality of his good feelings and the lively innocence of his spirit.

  A grim, heavy man with large, lumpy hands and a scarred, bulbous face appeared at the door. This was Barney, a guest and good friend of Dan’s, of whom I was to see much, later. Barney grunted several times, and Dan, interpreting the grunts for me, announced that dinner was ready.

  Chapter 7

  I had dinner many times after that at Dan’s house and became in some ways almost as much of a parasite as the others, but that particular evening I remember most vividly, not merely because of the impact of first impressions of Dan at home but because I was to get during the evening a feeling which grew on subsequent visits, that Dan for all his exuberance was not quite so lighthearted as he first appeared to be. Briggs’s picture of him and the impression I got of him at Luigi’s were, it seemed as I learned to know him better, far from complete.

  Henry and Barney served dinner in almost no time at all, the service being in the all-on-one-plate mode, and sat down with the rest of us. The function was democratic and informal. There was no tablecloth on the long mission table, and the two long benches that lined the table were occupied without precedence or formality. The two heavy chairs at the ends of the long table were the only special accommodations of any sort. These were always occupied by Dan and Henry. Should some new or particularly obtuse guest sit in one or the other chair, Barney would bluntly thumb him out.

  Dinner began with grace by Dan, quickly followed by a toast. Dan lifted his glass and gave the toast: “Temperance is a small virtue,’ as St. Thomas says, ‘charity a great one.’”

  Dan took a draught of his wine and the others, with the exception of Archer, joined him. Archer was wary with his wine. All bent themselves to their loaded plates. I was amused at the vigor with which Briggs tackled his wine and red meat. He had come a long way indeed.

  Dan talked constantly at the table, sometimes maintaining a single serious theme, sometimes tossing earthy anecdotes and jokes around the table, but always interspersing whatever he was saying, or was being said, with toasts. One toast he seemed to like particularly was: “To Poverty!—for economic security is ruin!” Another he delivered in a quiet, almost reverent voice, “To everybody in the whole wide world—just so some poor Joe won’t be offended!”

  His talk, cued by his toast from St. Thomas of Aquinas, was at first dedicated to the Angelic Doctor, to whom he was deeply devoted. He liked, quite understandably, the idea that it was possible to be fat like the Angelic Doctor and still be a saint. He liked, quite understandably also, the Angelic Doctor’s insistence that sins of the flesh, such as drunkenness, are to be considered inferior to sins of the spirit, such as avarice and pride. When his first great book was finished (the one he had not yet begun) he was going, Dan said, to write a pulpit handbook for preachers with suggestions for themes, and with model speeches, to help them prepare and deliver sermons on such subjects as hypocrisy (such as fawning on the rich, especially on those rich who have been honored for their money) or miserliness (as miserliness with the housekeeper, say) sermons as fulminous and direful as those delivered on Murphy’s inebriety or Mamie’s indiscretions. The sins of the spirit are hard to dramatize, Dan maintained, hard to make concrete, and practically impossible to make lurid. And, as a further problem, those addicted to sins of the spirit, and especially to the sins of pride and greed, have a defensive crust of smugness which is hard to penetrate. He was already, he said, begging the saint to help him in his difficult task.

  There was nothing extraordinary about Dan’s love of the Angelic Doctor. He loved all saints and all sinners, so far as I could gather. He would speak of Judas and the Bad Thief with the same humility with which he spoke of St. Ignatius or St. Augustine. But the peculiar thing about his devotion to the great Schoolman was that he was more reverent of his hymns, prayers, and sermons than he was of his philosophy, or, perhaps I should say, of the followers of his philosophy. That night, out of his prodigious memory, he delivered passages and, particularly, the last paragraphs from the Angelic Doctor’s sermon on “The Body of Our Lord,” reciting them with a fervor and eloquence which would not, I am sure, have displeased the saint.

  As Dan spoke the final words of the sermon, “So, approach, child of faith, the Supper of the Lord, the table of plenitude and holiness, that at last you may attain to the wedding feast of the Lamb; there we shall be inebriated with the plenty of the house of God; then we shall see the King of Glory and the Lord of Hosts in His beauty, and shall taste bread in the kingdom of our Father; and our host shall be our Lord Jesus Christ, whose power and empire are without end forever, Amen.” As he spoke these final words, he was, in his heart, I felt sure, far from his home in Newton and the commonplace small group of us before him. He was at Orvieto, seven hundred years before, standing before Pope Urban IV and the College of Cardinals, delivering those impassioned words that left the Pontiff and the hierarchs in tears.

  But Dan, for all his devotion to the Angelic Doctor could not endure what he called “the cult of Thomism.”

  “It’s got so,” Dan said, “that many modern schoolmen can hardly see the New Testament for the Summa. Everything has to be rationalized, everything has to be explained, while anybody of any sense knows that the most beautiful things cannot be rationalized and the best things cannot be explained.

  “Friar Thomas, for almost seven hundred years, served his Master well, and never better than at the end of the past century when the Dogmatic Evolutionists with their hobgoblins were frightening cowardly Christians out of their wits and he came forward again, robust and lucid, to demonstrate to a materialistic world that Christian philosophy also had a scientific method and a basis in experience.

  “But today the picture is changed. In physics, in the physics that produced the atom bomb, Chance is more honored than the schoolmen’s beloved Causality, and the Law of Averages may well become the first law on the books. In psychiatry, in the psychiatry that tries to adjust man with a soul to a world without one, Brother Ass and Immortal Soul are more involved than ever. Casuistry, once scorned, becomes one of the first of sciences, moving into the physical world, spreading its teaching into the realm of medicine and beyond, warning that cau
ses as well as responsibilities are not so easily fixed as was once believed. (After three hundred years the derided Jesuits have the last laugh on Pascal!)

  “However, all this is neither here nor there. For about a hundred years the frightened apologists sought foolishly to reconcile religion with science. They never did, thank heaven, and the wheel has revolved, and now the scientists are trying to reconcile science with religion. Now, fearful of the darkness of the destruction of all things, fearful, if you wish, of the consummation of the world, they grope for light. There is more than a time lapse between Huxley and Pierre Du Nouy.

  “I, for one, am not interested in what St. Thomas can say on the nature of matter in relation to the hydrogen bomb. I’m interested in what he cannot say on the mystery of grace! With Tertullian, I beg the Lord to give me more incredibilities to believe. The Summa is a supreme intellectual achievement but, if no one minds, I’ll take the gospel of St. John!”

  Dan looked around at us with a big grin. “Looks like I’ve taken to the pulpit myself.”

  Briggs who (under Doris’ iron hand) was studying to be a Catholic, spoke up and said, so far as he was concerned, he was for reason. It was the reasonableness of Dan’s faith that impressed him, he declared. I, too, disagreed with Dan. I was for rationality. Brave belief, abetted by intuition and the drift of probabilities, might, I said, be all right for the credulous but in the ordinary, realistic world, ordinary, realistic men needed clear arguments and definite proofs if they were to be convinced of the truth. “It is this truth—the logically demonstrated truth—that makes men free,” I said.

  “It’s living the truth that makes men free, I’d say,” Dan smiled. “Man is, I’m afraid, a rational animal more often in definition than in act. You remember, I’m sure, what Cardinal Newman said, ‘To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. Impressions lead to actions and reasonings lead from it. Knowledge of premises, and inference upon them—this is not to live.’”