All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  It was the kind of tirade I sometimes threw at her head just for the pleasure of arguing with her. This time I thought I meant it, but I said it like a vehement joke because I was still upset. Marian, a chameleon of moods, looked at me seriously with her great tilted eyes and, said, “All right, maybe so. But if we’re still talking about Jim, at least give him credit for good will. He isn’t going to push any button. He hates violence. And don’t you agree with him it’s terrible what the human race has sometimes organized itself for?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. We’ve learned how to do it for technology and war, not for much else. What does he want to do, resign? It’s just about the way it’s always been. I can’t see anything different about the modem race except its technology. Whether that creates a record-breaking loneliness of soul I wouldn’t know.”

  “And you don’t think it can be improved.”

  “The technology? It’s improving all the time.”

  “Come on, Joe Allston. The race.”

  The brown light was warm on her skin. It seemed to me that when the joking tone and the verbal sparring didn’t tempt us into being merely provocative with one another, she was the one person in the world to whom I could say something I deeply felt. So I said, “You want to know what I think about the race?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be a mouthful.”

  “I’m braced.”

  “All right,” I said. “I think the race will multiply, for it is unfortunately very fertile. Since marriage is one of the conventions the Pecks are busy breaking down, more and more children will be illegitimate or deprived of the dubious advantages,of what we used to call a home. Because of that and other strains, more and more adults will be hoodlums, criminals, and the effectively dispossessed, and from these both our demagogues and our novelists will increasingly take their morals and their attitudes and their lingo. First we help create these underworlds, and then out of guilt and sympathy we imitate them.”

  “Oh, but wait a minute!”

  “No,” I said. “You said you were braced. We imitate it out of pity, and we create it out of pity. Any civilization that achieves anything has losers—one of the reasons it achieves is that it has clear ways of telling its losers from its heroes. We have given up heroes—they go in for achievement. So we have more and more surviving losers, whom we imitate because we can’t be ruthless enough to put them down. Are you still listening?”

  “Not very quietly.”

  “I know. You’re pitiful. So am I. But I try to be pitiful and still keep my head clear. The law, including the moral law, is never either just or merciful. It’s just necessary. So the residual believers in order and stability and law and achievement will go on rigidifying the imperfect discipline of their society against the subversion of the criminal artists and the criminal saints. Are you attending?”

  She nodded, an attentive, serious, half-smiling pupil. “Which are you?”

  “Neither. I’ve resigned. I’ve really done what Peck used to think he was doing. But let me wind this up. We’ll go on synthesizing new proteins and carbohydrates for the feeding of our growing billions. We will get very ingenious, but never fully successful, in disposing of the wastes we multiply. Well invent new weapons and new defenses against them, and new forms of political threat and blackmail—or no, those are already well enough developed, in that area there’s nothing new under the sun. Then one day we will succeed in doing what we’ve been headed for ever since the first halfman in Leakey’s Gulch picked up a stick or a rock. Somebody will push the button, or one of our improvements will backfire, and our technical tinkering will finally destroy all life, and ourselves with it.”

  She was shaking her head, her smile widening. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Hear me out. Everything’s blasted, not so much as a virus left. There is a gap of geological time—geological? Astronomical, cosmic—and then patient old Mother Nature will start over, assuming we’ve left any nitrogen and other elements around, rolling her Sisyphus stone upward from the atom to the molecule to the polymer to the cell, and from the single cell to colonies of cells, and from colonies to forms with specialized organs, and through millions of experimental forms until she stumbles on something that will work for the Higher Tinkering-in our case it was a brain and an opposable thumb, but something else might work as well. Then consciousness comes into the world again, and tools, inventions, languages, arts, symbolic systems, and history begins, and nations form, and science begins to add one law to another, and the conscious creature handles his environment always more roughly, and over-crowds it too drastically, and things get competitive and hostile, and somebody pushes the button, and boom goes the stone to the bottom of the hill again. That’s what I think about the human race.”

  She was looking at me steadily, unsmiling. Stretched on the lounge, still thin, five months pregnant (this would have been at the end of June), she looked as if she had swallowed a grapefruit. If she had not had that small perfect head, and those facial bones, and the great tilted eyes of such a sudden blue, she might have seemed almost grotesque, like one of those medieval Eves with a beautiful simpering face and a pot belly. Her hand lay on her abdomen now, as if protectively.

  “You surprise me,” she said.

  “You never heard me deliver a sermon before.”

  “No, seriously. Because we’re not so far apart as you seem to think, only you’re gloomy about what you think, and (I’m not, and you think consciousness comes into the picture a lot later than I do. I think it may be there even in the atom, because the atom is the first sign we can detect of order. Isn’t it funny, I agree with you even about that. Order is the basis of everything. John and I sort of believe Teilhard de Chardin that all evolution is only a perfecting of consciousness. Do you?”

  “I haven’t read him.”

  “And if consciousness is being gradually perfected, then the area of choice is being gradually enlarged, isn’t it? That’s why, if I believe in order, I have to believe in search too, even if it seems as silly as Jim Peck’s. The alternative’s petrifaction, isn’t it? Everything would just stop. So we have to risk disorder to keep the order of the universe expanding and consciousness growing. Doesn’t it thrill you to think that, an inch at a time, we may be creeping toward wider and wider consciousness, until eventually man may just sort of emerge out of the tunnel and be in the full open?”

  “That’s what some of these modem kids think they’re doing with drugs.”

  “No,” Marian said. “I mean, I know they do, but I don’t believe that. It couldn’t be that easy. It has to be earned, to mean anything. It goes very very slowly, but we can’t destroy the process any more than we can stay embedded in the sort of consciousness we have now, which we seem to have inherited from neolithic hunters. I think we’ll perfect ourselves, finally, not destroy ourselves.”

  “If it depended on people like you,” I said, “we would for sure.”

  “No, be serious.”

  “I was never more so.”

  “All right, if I could drop you a curtsy without getting up, I would. I’m the kind that will save the world and justify mankind. But I gather you think there are too few of me.”

  “There’s only one of you.”

  Her head tipped back against the cushion, and she filled the grove with her laughter. “You’re such a courtly old Gloomy Gus. How can you be so courtly and so gloomy about the world at the same time? Or how can you blame Peck for feeling alienated and hunting for panaceas?”

  I was glad enough to be back on Peck. Whenever we verged on biology and reproduction I got uncomfortably aware of Marian’s pregnancy, and of the mutilations under her checked boy’s shirt. She struck me as at once too devotedly bent upon that baby and too systematically cheerful.

  “I guess it’s his stupid confidence that puts me off him most,” I said. “I hate people with confidence—it’s, the surest sign of defective brains. Peck doesn’t know any better than to b
elieve he can improve things.”

  “If he’s foolish you ought to feel sorry for him,” Marian said. “Don’t you feel sorry for me? Because I’m at least as hopeful of something better as he is.”

  “His kind of optimism I’ve seen before,” I said. “Yours is something new, I’ll have to think about it. At least it isn’t just a rationalization for enjoying your kicks. The trouble with Peck, he doesn’t realize that the world he lives in is holding itself together in desperation, with sticking plaster and patching cement and Band-Aids, and needs the support of every member. He thinks he lives in a society of bigots, hostiles, fuddy-duddies, and squares who conspire to limit his freedom and his fun. I wish there was such a conspiracy, I’d be its Brutus.”

  “That’s just what I was saying. You declare war on him, you won’t give him time to work things out.”

  “I didn’t declare any war. He declared a revolution, he and all the others like him. That ruthless and healthy society I was just talking about would tell them to shape up or take the consequences. Our society is afraid of them. But I see no reason to open the palace doors so they can loot the wine cellars and turn the art gallery into a latrine. Youth is barbarian, you can’t let it run you or it will run you down.”

  “Ah,” she said, “but sometimes out of all its. anarchy and groping it comes up with the idea that saves us.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You’re speaking of a kind of youth I’ve never seen.”

  She watched me with her head tilted, as if trying to make up her mind whether or not I was as conservative as I sounded. She began to smile. “But you still let Jim Peck live in your tree.”

  “Yes, curse it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because you keep suggesting that I’d be a flint-hearted monster not to—you and Ruth both. But also because I’m the sort of half-wit who won’t take his own side in an argument for fear of sounding illiberal.”

  We sat laughing at each other, the brief minute or two of seriousness dissolved and gone. I was always totally happy in her company, even when we argued and even when our subject was something as frivolous as Peck. Even when her directness forced me close to things I had no intention of talking about, though I might hint them to get her sympathy.

  “I have one further question,” I said. “How can you stand to talk to him, now that summer’s come on?”

  She squinted her eyes and wrinkled her nose in the mischievous-child smile. “Ah-outside he’s all right. He does a lot of exercise, after all, and he doesn’t have all the facilities for bathing.”

  “On the contrary, he’s got a plastic pipe hooked to my water line.”

  “Maybe he isn’t aware.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You can’t believe that. He’s just deliberately and calculatedly dirty. I was reading a book the other day that said something about the lairs of all carnivorous and omnivorous beasts being unseemly. One step in the progress you believe in has been to make human lairs a little less unseemly. But here’s old Peck, vegetarian as he is, doing his best to unravel that little knot of progress, and his lair is as unseemly as he can make it. I think he’s dedicated to the purpose of smelling worse than his daddy’s stockyards. It’s a mystery to me how those girls of his hang on, and why.”

  “He’s quite good-looking,” Marian said, “and he’s got a marvelous voice.”

  “I suppose. Nevertheless, I have trouble believing my eyes about his love life. The mind boggles.”

  “I wonder if he really has a love life? Somehow he doesn’t seem quite the type.”

  “Take my word for it. He seeks relief—I hope in vain —in the erotic and the irrational, on his way to shedding his loneliness of soul and promoting communication between man and man, or man and woman. And the hard way, the hard way, against all probability. Next time you see him tell him I’ve got a new motto for his ashram.”

  “What?”

  “Be Yourself. Evil Is a Bath and a Haircut. Good Is B.O. Plenty and Pussy Galore.”

  It set her giggling again. “Maybe I should have John suggest a man’s deodorant.”

  “Deodorant?” I said. “Hell, he probably uses Accent. Let’s change the subject. When’s John coming home?”

  “Pretty soon, a couple of weeks probably.”

  “Then he won’t make the LoPrestis’ Fourth of July party.”

  “I doubt it. He should stay till he gets everything he went for. Then he’ll be home the rest of the summer.”

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll pick you up for the party. But we’ll be glad when he gets back. You shouldn’t be left alone so much, especially with old Comus and his crew next door.”

  That really did make her laugh. “Oh Lord,” she said, “what a limitless imagination! I may be scared of a hundred things, but not of James McParten Peck.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I’m also glad to see you lying down here, for a change. You do too much. How’s the baby coming?”

  She patted her abdomen. “Coming right along.”

  “When’s B-day?”

  “End of October.”

  “I’ll mark it on the calendar.”

  We remained smiling at one another, run-down, a little awkward. When I stood up Marian put her legs carefully over the side of the lounge and hoisted herself upright. She batted her brilliant eyes and smoothed the podded front of her denim skirt. Plaintively she said, “Never have a baby, Joe. You can’t imagine what a chore viviparous reproduction is.”

  “Don’t kid me,” I said. “You want this baby very much.”

  “Yes,” she said happily, squinting at me in the sun-spattered shade. “Very very much!”

  6

  Friday night, July 3

  Dear Marian,

  Maybe I will send you this letter, maybe I won’t. But the more I think about our talk the other day, the more I feel inclined to write it. You thought I was pretty rough on Peck, and I have the impression you think I am suffering from some unhealed trauma about my son, Curtis, and am taking it out on Peck. It isn’t impossible, I suppose—few things are. But as I told you, I have been through all this before. Since Curt died I have been over it ten thousand times. If I could convince myself I was to blame, do you think I wouldn’t accept the guilt along with the grief? Do you think I would deliberately repeat history with this Peck boy, who reminds me so much of Curt? I can find plenty of things to blame in my temperament and my actions, but I can’t find the specific things that caused Curt. I can’t find adequate causes for somebody like Peck, I weigh his beliefs against mine and I can’t conclude that I am wrong. I have to believe, in fact, that it is my moral duty—which I’m not exactly performing—to resist him.

  It would embarrass me to say to your face some of the things I expect to write down here. I was never one for the couch, I don’t unburden readily. If my conscience visits me in the night I assume it wants to be alone with me. To repeat our dialogues seems to me too often a sort of self-justification. But I will try to repeat them to you with as little of that as I can manage.

  One of my difficulties in Curt’s case was that every time I acted according to my principles I was instantly at war with him. Every time I swallowed my principles, or let Ruth persuade me to be indulgent, I felt ashamed. So far as I can tell, I have not changed since Curt died, which doesn’t mean I don’t still have bad times over his memory and am not full of regrets. But my trouble is not the prick of conscience. It’s guilt, I suppose, but a guilt that I can’t justify. If I had it to do over again, I can’t see how I would have done it differently.

  I am probably the last one to say what Curt really was, since I never understood what he thought he was trying to be, and was never sure he was trying to be anything. Maybe he was trying not to be anything.

  He was crosswise in the channel of his life for thirty-seven years—he was born crosswise. I am not modem man at all, but he was modem youth to the seventh power. He never got over being modem youth. He was crypto-communist youth during the late thirties, pacifist-int
ernationalist youth in the forties, and overage beat youth in the fifties, and nothing very seriously, and nothing for keeps. As I look back at him, I see that he wasn’t much of anything, he was simply against. I have read his life, and arranged for its publication, two dozen times: rebel in uniform, nonconformist who runs in packs and sings in close harmony with his age group. He was willful child, sullen boy, prep-school delinquent, army reject, postwar lush. Whose fault? It is usual for distressed parents to accept the blame our psychologists are eager to hand them, and I think Ruth and I would accept it if our judgment told us we must. Sometimes we did accept it, against our better judgment, and tried to cope with him by dealing with ourselves. But appeasement never worked, and no matter how many ways I tried to persuade him of my concern and my affection, I never found his guard down, and my patience was never long enough to outbox him. Put that down as one thing I accept blame for: impatience. Maybe you can make an explanation from it. I can’t. It explains a little, but by no means all.

  Many of our friends probably explained him with that glib formula about sons with high-powered fathers, doing me the honor of thinking me more high-powered than I am. It could have been the other way around. He may have felt some secret shame that I was only a nursemaid of writers and not a writer myself. The apartment was always full of them, he grew up among celebrities, and he could have made comparisons. But that should have led him to treat me with contempt or condescension, perhaps with pity. Not with hatred.