Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  Only a few newspapers could resist mentioning Divver’s escapade in their editorials. Only a few Catholic ones considered it disgraceful—“an example of the way in which friendly relations with a sister nation may be acutely damaged. International affairs is the province of the State Department, which is an organization established expressly to the end of furthering Christian amity while preserving American security. In its capacity, the State Department is answerable to Congress, and thus to the whole people. When an individual assumes to this high duty, he places himself not, as he may think, in opposition to foreign ‘autocracy,’ but in opposition to the democratic expression of his own people. A young man, old enough to know better but with his head filled with the fluff of street-corner radicalism, takes it into his mind to usurp his Government’s functions. With this end in view, he buys a ticket to a friendly nation, of whose regime he happens not to approve, and in the hypocritical disguise of unprejudiced reporter requests an interview with the chief of State. Granted this rare and generous privilege, he behaves in much the same way as his young predecessor behaved at Sarajevo. He gives the Communist salute, screams insults and incites violence. Then he returns to his own country presumably glorying in his cheap exploit. But Mr. Divver will have a rude awakening. He will find that the American people have nothing but contempt for hotheads who wilfully smear their national reputation in the name of freedom of the press.”

  But this was not the common feeling at all. Divver received letters containing proposals of marriage, and a number of proposals from lecture agents and progressive Protestant ministers, as well as letters of congratulation from screwballs who wanted Divver to invest money in a new device. Even conservative newspapers found it hard not to be proud of him: they only referred to the affair in a shortish editorial paragraph, and were careful to start by saying that this sort of thing attracted the wrong kind of attention and did no good; but they concluded by stressing Divver’s mid-Western origin, and remarking that there was in those parts a certain spirit to which all autocracy was abominable. Most astonishing to Divver was the reaction of his liberal editor. This impressive man greeting Divver with a broad smile, and suggested, with a worried chuckle, that Divver had already signed up with some syndicate to write about his experience for millions of dollars. When Divver said no, he was only interested in writing for this particular magazine, the editor seemed about to kiss him. To this editor, Divver did his best to relieve his worried conscience: he said frankly that he had not planned the business beforehand; that he had been in a horrible state of fright; that frankly he had lost his head and had had very little notion of what he was doing. When the editor merely smiled and pinched him affectionately on the upper arm, like the reporters, Divver was surprised but encouraged: he felt (even more strongly than he had sometimes felt while confessing to his wife) how rewarding and right it is to tell the truth. So he boldly stripped himself even barer, and said that really and truly he believed it had been thoroughly childish, and he was ashamed of himself; at which the editor pinched him so tenderly that it hurt. Divver then took the final step and said, with gruff misery, that he was sure some kind of cheap vanity, a need to make himself noticed at all costs, had been at the bottom of it all. The editor seemed too affected by this admission to speak or pinch. At last he said: “If you are going to rate honesty as highly for the rest of your life as you rate it now, I predict for you a remarkable career—plenty of pretty awful pain, yes, but remarkable. Now let’s forget all that and go for lunch and talk about your piece.” At these words, Divver’s last gnawing worries dropped away: he had been right after all, he knew now; his life had not been the horror he had imagined it was on the voyage home; his marriage had not been ruined by his own subconscious; his trip to Italy had been the way in which the Forces had subtly chosen to confirm him in his beliefs: above all, there was now no need to become a schoolteacher. A month later, his first article, “Notes on a Roman Vista,” appeared in Forward; it was made up mostly of the jottings Divver was able to recall out of his notebooks, and the incompleteness of some of the remarks was explained, in a footnote, as being due to the fact that Mr. Divver’s records had been confiscated by the Italian dictatorship, and he himself held incommunicado for many hours. This was the only reference to Divver’s spectacular behaviour; dignity was the chord struck, and in the notes on contributors it was stated simply that Mr. Divver was a young student of Italian matters. This reserve made a good impression on Divver’s contemporaries, and six months later Divver was made an assistant-editor. It was also taken for granted that he should have first refusal, as book-reviewer, of most books relating to Italian politics, economy, and art. He never abused this privilege, and in consequence became well-liked by his colleagues.

  *

  In the next twelve years of his career as a liberal journalist, Divver established himself in a role that suited his character and qualifications. He knew his limitations, and was careful not to do away with them. He was a wheelhorse, a reader of anthologies, the sort of dog who can always retrieve a shot bird even though he has very little nose for a live one. His name was displayed on the cover of Mrs. Morgan’s magazine when he had an article inside, but he would never have been called upon—as one of his friends, who shared Divver’s interest in science, had been—to supply explanatory psychological footnotes to The Brothers Karamazov. His views were not original, except in the field of military strategy and logistics. He knew how to plunge below the deceptive surface of things and sound the undercurrents. “Divver’s ability to grasp the intrinsic-plus quality of the given object,” wrote an admirer of one of his books, Europe’s Bleak House, “sets him apart from observers who are hypnotized by the ding an sich.”

  His experience with the students at college had taught him caution; the success of his trip to Italy gave him confidence to have faith in modesty. Divver was hard-working, and the fact of having travelled abroad helped him to lose much of his gaucheness; he was also perfectly ready to answer letters and do other dull work, and to come into the office to finish a job when the rest of the staff had left for a week-end’s gardening. In his work and among friends he never lost his first sense of relief at finding that there was a place for him in intellectual circles. He deferred in a very humble manner to the men who pointed the way, even though their opinions often confused him. In such matters there were certain rules, which Divver learned. It was not right, he found, to be critical of certain rather stupid authors simply because they were lacking in intelligence; one had to bear in mind that they were not artists but honest men. Similarly, it was not right to punish certain undisputedly brilliant authors simply because they were lacking in political propriety; one had to bear in mind that they too were honest, as artists, and on the wrong side probably only as a result of some psychological blunder, for which their environment or one of their parents or genes was to blame. However, there was a certain vocabulary of terms, a more limited edition of those Divver had so feared as a student, which needed to be learned carefully, because to apply them meant death to the victim. No matter how enlightened the liberal critic might be, no matter how deeply he believed in the helplessness of the isolated human being in a world ruled by Forces, still he must sometimes, for instance, charge a man with being “not serious.” When Divver first heard this terrible phrase, applied to a religious poet, a cold shudder ran down his back, and he knew instinctively that the man would never raise his head again. To be considered “not serious” was soon Divver’s principal fear, and he did all he could to ensure his safety. Some of the best and most honest minds in his circle seemed to be quite without this fear; they were very relaxed, easy sort of men who smoked pipes and laughed freely: Divver envied the way in which they could kid a serious subject along in the most nonchalant prose and still give the impression that they were deadly serious. Divver would have liked to have been able to write like them, to combine the crumbs of the cracker-barrel with the essence of the most advanced thought, to write simultaneously in the
languages of the common people and the refined, to express warm human sympathy without sacrificing intellectual integrity. Sometimes he tried to do so, but all that happened was that he felt he had nothing to say. So he was content to give his prose an air that was impeccably serious; he never cracked jokes, he was never flippant about important things; he just began at the beginning and went on to the end. In time his prose and his appearance became well-matched; when he was made a full editor he looked like a serious man. He held himself straight, and his well-built, husky figure was impressive; usually, he kept his thick eyebrows drawn firmly in a strong frown, and he looked straight ahead from under them as though he were permanently engaged in social analysis: he was. His big hands, which were covered with a coat of black hair, looked well against a blotter, or holding a white manuscript; a photograph of his second wife, Lily, stood in the far centre of the desk.

  Outside of foreign affairs, Divver’s interest was still in science. He liked plastics, the cushioning of automobiles according to some new device, germ-theories, heredity, the nature of genius, cotton-pickers; in his home an electric clock was linked synchronously to the radio in such a way that it automatically switched on Divver’s favourite news-commentators. But these were only a small aspect of Divver’s interest in science; they were not the science which elevated him into the sense of high excitement that was the nearest he could come to poetry; they were not the science that so fascinated him by reason of being so unpredictable and personal. Divver’s chosen science was the highest form of self-punishment through guesswork; an art that turned a general hypothesis into a personal shame. He had no scientific interest at all in such tangible things as the human brain and hand, but he was deeply concerned with the motives which impelled the hand; and with the psyche which, he believed, was actually divisible into a number of semi-detached, communicating residences, so that it resembled the chart that had been used in grade school to teach him the geography of a section of the United States coastline. This chart had portrayed various land-levels, in various shadings, starting submarinely, rising almost to sea level here and there, and emerging, like anti-climaxes, as the hills and valleys of his native land. This world, as a whole, Divver referred to, as one might to a favourite dog, as “my ego.” Other people’s egos, he might feel were beyond praise or blame because they were victims of the Forces, but he fed, watched, praised and blamed his own ego with absorption, and rightly took for granted that all his friends had something like it on the end of a chain—as though there were at least two of each of them on display, and more, invisible, underneath. Often, he would talk as though psyches were little houses out of which figures popped to tell the weather: “Last night Jake’s masculine ego came out,” he would say, of a quarrel, and: “Her ego is built on oral optimism”—envisaging the emergence of detached, irresponsible lips. He had learned that the tendencies of perverts and maniacs are present in the best of people; but instead of concluding from this that it would be abnormal to be totally lacking in such tendencies, he believed that there was no real difference between having a trace of an abnormality and being in the throes of it—in fact, the only difference was that to have it badly was likely to be more honest than to have it slightly. By the time he was thirty he had learned to speak quite naturally of a feeling of hesitation as “schizophrenia,” of resentment as “paranoia,” or “a bit of paranoia,” and he knew that personal opinions were usually “resistance” to honest. He also knew that it was wicked and wilful to forget a face or a ’phone-number; that if he said “dog” when he meant to say “God,” he must chuckle, and quietly knock on Freud; that the greater the innocence, the greater the viciousness; that it is honest to rape an old woman but perverse to help her over a stile.

  In other walks of life science had much the same special meaning for Divver—science was what you feared to admit, not what you could prove to be true. Divver took for granted that conduct is always suspect, and fantasy always scientific; that the greater the contrast between doing and dreaming, the greater the personal dishonesty, but that not to dream was most dishonest of all.

  Divver would have denied how much misery he derived from science; he believed that education had been his salvation; there was no knowing, he often thought, what frightful mistakes he might have made in his career without science to guide him. For one thing, science had given him a vocabulary of symbols, metaphors and similes that gave point to every line he wrote. Old-fashioned writers made-do with hackneyed warnings in the form of striking clocks, gathering stormclouds, jugular veins, termites, copperheads, wormwood, gall, Frankenstein, Leviathan, Juggernaut, bastions and dykes. But Divver’s imagery, which he applied without distinction to persons, or nations, or corporations, made his articles look like an up-to-date laboratory manned by all types of psychotic workmen. Sometimes he used his imagery so freely in the body of an article, that when the time came to sum up, his final conclusions sounded lame: “Congress may consider either or both of these imperatives. But it cannot merely twiddle its thumbs”; “One morning Senor Branco will awake to find that the train has gone.”

  Although Divver believed in the omnipotence of Forces, he was equally faithful to the hope that somewhere, in a town he had never heard of, in a street he had never walked, in a top room he had never entered, he would find a great man who had succeeded in denying them. It was a source of shame to him that if he was let down really painfully by objects of his admiration, he became incapable of judging them in the calm scientific terms applicable to neurotics, and invariably fell back on irrational obscenities. He was a pugnacious man, and at such times he sometimes picked a fist-fight with someone, and felt a good deal better for it: it had always been a great help to him, though he never said so, to find that his most intellectual, anti-war friends looked on physical violence as a virtuous form of expression, the only natural and respectable outlet left, since sex had turned out to be chiefly a rational exercise of the super-ego. But when Divver’s disillusion was serious, not even fighting could help him, and he would miserably pick over his failures with previous heroes—the brave Negro trade-unionist whose fare to New York he had paid, and who turned out to be a wicked snob; the refugee with terrible stories to tell, who simply ended up as a bore; the talented girl whom Divver dreamed of making the first woman-President of the United States, or his third wife, or both, and who turned out to be just another masculine type. In these moments, he would have a horrifying fear that anybody who was capable of becoming his friend was bound to be a contemptible character, that he was doomed to despise anyone who liked him. He would also recall the sins of his youth: the fact that he had considered Jews a low type of persons; that the faces of tyrants had always impressed him; that the man in the street was just a mob. When he was depressed, he feared that he still believed these things, and that he would be discovered. He would dream of a group of simple but advanced people sitting around a plain table in a hut: one of them would say: “I’m afraid Max Divver cannot be counted as a serious man”—and Divver would wake up feeling that it must be true. Occasionally he was able to cheer himself up with a remark that put him back on a sound footing by giving him a strong classification: “I guess I’m nothing but a manic-depressive,” he would say to himself, and feel greatly relieved. At other times, he simply couldn’t think of a single scientific word that really seemed to be related to the brutal, commonplace course of everyday life. Sometimes his self-contempt was so strong that he needed a visit to Europe to bring back his self-confidence.

  He was helped by such visits because to find a hero one must first define evil, and Divver believed that evil in its basic form was exclusively European. He knew that it was wicked to think like this, and in his editorials he was harsh with people who did: such a point of view, he said, was chauvinistic and immature. Nonetheless, Divver could imagine real evil trickling into America only as a harbour official imagines the tricky entry of an undesirable alien. But unfortunately he also felt sometimes that by hogging all the evil, like old m
asters, Europeans made their lives unfairly exciting. When he met the officials of foreign chancelleries, and when he looked at the careers of expatriate artists and ambassadors, he sometimes was very disappointed by the drabness of his native land. And here, too, was one of the most absorbing puzzles of his life: when Americans went abroad they were simple, straightforward people; when they stayed abroad they became cynical climbers. A man who had spoken contemptuously of knee-breeches in New York harbour, was soon photographed smiling at the Pope, or lounging in a punt on the Thames with the daughters of a titled brewer. A man who had painted tall corn since puberty was found in the studio of a Parisian abstractionist. A new Secretary of State, who had never even stirred from home and had harried his predecessor with demands for a “genuinely American” foreign policy, soon began arranging trade-treaties with the most contemptible foreign elements. This sort of apostasy struck Divver with special shame—because it reminded him of himself. He, too, was unable to resist the colour and brilliance of the European opera, any more than he could resist the glamour of a full-blown psychosis. Whole chapters of his books were given over to the richest details of ornate banquets, Foreign Office interiors, interviews with peers, cardinals, pro-consuls, academicians, visits to country houses, symbolical weather conditions. But Divver always made clear that these glamorous accounts were included simply as an overture to honest indignation of the kind that had caused his work to be known as “fearless” and “cuts to the bone.” “As I sat sipping Turkish coffee in this luxurious home,” he would write, “I thought of how many centuries of exploitation had gone into its making. I thought of the man I had seen barely an hour earlier, pushing his junk cart toward an East End market, one in whom I had detected a natural, open vitality and generosity of feeling which was certainly not visible in those who now surrounded me. I also thought of Garibaldi, and of Lincoln, in whose faces, when I recalled them at this moment, I recognized that self-same mark of … etc., etc.” In his books there were also pages devoted to the life of the underprivileged; but these were usually more sketchy, because such common people were the ground on which Divver planted his feet in order to see what went on above his head, and he had no wish to break up with analysis what he found so stable as a mass. He also found it easier to enter palaces than cottages, and so his writing about cottagers was based mainly on hand-outs from trustworthy sources, short trips through depressed areas, remarks overheard in bars and buses, and humane conclusions evoked by the sight of a farmhand covered with manure.