by Nigel Dennis
He was a vigorous and healthy man, Mr. Hull, capable of travelling great distances with much discomfort and little rest. Like all progressive Mid-Westerners, he abhorred a nationalistic provincialism which, while it might at odd moments produce here and there an eccentric gleam of culture, was totally amputated from the main trunk of universality. It was for that reason Max Divver chose the widest possible geographical dimensions for the exercise of his panoramic mind. He achieved what is perhaps the most difficult psychological conversion: a respect for the womb, without a desire to set it on a pedestal. It was this specific balancing of fundamentals, this sane, unneurotic relating of life’s larger and smaller dimensions and varying expressions, that characterized Max Divver as an editor, a writer, a husband and a father. And, I think, as a man, too. How many of us would have remembered, as he remembered, at the most critical juncture of his last days in Poland, that the Jews of Palestine stood in need of his aid? A donation to those men and women was found in Max Divver’s pocket.
I doubt if later generations, Mr. Hull, will set much store by his writings. I think they will decide, perhaps rightly, that Max Divver’s œuvre consisted in his life, not in his letters. And yet we should reflect on these writings as a part of the man—on his anonymous, but easily-recognizable editorials; his book-length studies (most of which first appeared in this magazine) of a decaying capitalism. Europe’s Bleak House, The Czech Experiment, The Facts of Fascism—the titles bluntly speak for themselves and their time. He himself shrugged them off as being valuable only as a means of passing on information that should be known to an audience wider than himself: “I have not put in any new ideas,” he said to a friend, of one of these books: “the facts were as much as I could grasp.” Having written of a subject and probed its underlying menace, he was not happy until he had again sacrificed himself to a new and equally sombre theme. No one had more respect than he for the wisdom of literature, or for the right of the writer to speak his mind. But no one was more convinced that the precious individualism of much contemporary writing was so much deadweight in the travail of society—in fact, he informed his wife in the early days of their marriage that, more than anything else in the world, he dreaded falling into what he called a “private language.” Today, you and I, Mr. Hull, know that this dread was totally unjustified; we may even marvel that he should have entertained it. No man could possibly have been less “private” in his life and language than Max Divver.
Above all, Mr. Hull, Divver was a serious man. This does not mean, as you might think, that he was incapable of being amused. He had as rich and ready sense of the enjoyable as any man I ever met—by which I mean that his humour was spontaneous and social, as well as individually subtle. He was an indefatigable worker, but no one was more ready to push aside accumulated papers and go out to talk, over a rye or a coffee. I find it hard to believe that when I enter a conference or friendly party I shall not see his husky figure—that face which could turn instantly, as the conversation turned, from dark, concentrated seriousness to glowing amusement. It is my regret that that second nature of Max’s, that gay quality without which he could not be understood as an individual, was relegated by him to the province of “private language,” and rarely showed itself in his published work.
“His death makes me feel guilty.” This remark was made to me by one of his colleagues. I believe that all who knew Max Divver understand and share that sense of guilt—that feeling that if we, in some way or other, had acted differently, he would still be alive; that there was no justification for his, rather than our, being deprived of life. At such a time, Mr. Hull, it is natural and not extraordinary for those who are left to back-track over the life of the one who is gone, to think of the many ways in which they could have made it fuller, to consider regretfully all that they failed to do for it, and to wish that they had paid it larger, more open tribute.
But of course such notions would make Max himself smile broadly, if he were here. I think he would argue vehemently that such nostalgia is no more than the private channel through which we all communicate our sense of failure as social beings. It would be like him to insist that his fate was the consequence of his own thoughts, his own faults, his own decisions—an attitude that he was far too intelligent and humane to apply to the worst criminal. I think that it is in that very paradox, that determination to take upon himself responsibilities that he would never have thought to impose upon others, that we find the motivating core of his individuality—and simultaneously recognize ourselves as individuals whose cores have somehow proved over-soft and non-creative.
But it is at this point, Mr. Hull, that Max would ask: Is that all? Have you no more to say? I mean that Max could never bear the thought that any failure was final, that a way of life was not always open to everyone. And I believe that he was right, and that the proof of his rightness lies in the organic oneness of his life and death. I think that, alive, Max Divver was basically a happy man, because private happiness was what he never demanded, because he spent a life-time rejecting the escapist way and facing the forces of his time. He was so doing when at last those forces proved too strong.
I have told you all these things, Mr. Hull, because I believe that your Department may, with your assistance, draw from them a moral as desirable for it as for us. Max Divver’s life and death help to rid you and me of cant, and to replant our respective acres with a more positive, democratic affirmation. I cannot tell what form this affirmation may take in your case, but I can be sure of what I and my liberal colleagues will strive to do. May I explain what this will be?
We have learnt from Max Divver that we have not been serious men, that the ideals we have so noisily proclaimed have not been activized by us into comparable deeds. We have learnt that from now on we must work far more earnestly, not turning aside with our former ease, never succumbing to private apathy, pressing on indefatigably until the principles for which Divver died have become the foundation on which to-morrow shall be built. In the comfortable disguises of tolerance and human sympathy, we have basked in languor and ridden along with back-sliding: we shall not do so any more. Where we were firm before, we shall now struggle to be inexorable; where we were casual, we shall be relentless. Those who differ from us will not find themselves greeted, as before, with easy-going, irresponsible phrases. We shall try to carry Max Divver’s way of life into every part of this continent, rural and urban; nor shall we neglect to support our sympathizers and allies in other nations of the world. Above all, we shall not let it be said that while serious men died to reconstruct society, we embraced the sibling neuroses of private language and personal preference.
This shall be our monument to the memory of our friend—a monument built not of dead stones but of the behaviour which made his life a glowing thing. We shall fall short of his brilliance, Mr. Hull, just as we fell short in the past: the life-of-the-self cannot be wiped out overnight, no matter how furiously we may strive to obliterate it. History will record the specific extent of our success or failure—and history will have her specific niche for Maxwell Prentice Divver. It may be no large niche, but it will be sizeable enough to contain social aspirations which far transcend the mere act of individual living. We have been tragically reminded, and we have no excuse to forget again, that there are periods and forces in history where Man’s social function, boldly followed, leads him into harmony not with life, but with death.
THE END
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
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© Nigel Dennis, 1949
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ISBN 978–0–571–32095–0