Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  Do you remember that Navy wife we knew in Berkeley who kept asking you whether you didn’t want to share a big double-breasted turkey with her? She used to get them at the Commissary somewhere in the Bay Area. I remember you saying coldly that it sounded like a double-breasted suit. She was always after you to get on the gravy train with her and she was hurt when you always refused.

  The same way you would never buy anything at a discount house, though you liked Sears, Roebuck. I used to ask you what was the difference, and you said that buying at Sears, Roebuck was economical but buying at a discount house was greedy. But I think you liked Sears, Roebuck because it was traditional; your grandmother had “always” bought lawn-mowers and sprinklers there. Sears, Roebuck, to you, was the “old” America where people had lawns and wore mail-order underwear in the winter. If you’ll excuse me for saying so (I’ve been examining the roots of my thinking lately), you confuse the ethical and the aesthetic. Of course you may be right, in a sense. When Kant asks what would the world be like if everyone stole, that may be at bottom an aesthetic question. What would the world look like?

  I’d like to talk this over with somebody, but who? When I first studied the categorical imperative, I thought, like a lot of laymen, that it was the same as the Golden Rule. Don’t steal from your neighbor because you wouldn’t want him to steal from you. But the motive there is selfish. Sort of an imaginary deal or bargain: how would I feel if somebody stole my pocket-book? I’m projecting my petty self-interest outward. The categorical imperative is purer, like a theorem in geometry. Presented with the question Should I steal or Why shouldn’t I steal, Kant tells me to contemplate a world of thieves disinterestedly and accept it or reject it. If I reject it, that means that I don’t care for the over-all picture, regardless of where I might figure in it. But then, you might say, ethics boils down to a question of taste. Only, with Kant taste isn’t relative. He assumes that everybody, the thief included, would reject the picture of a world in which everybody stole. Because the picture is self-contradictory. He was trying, in fact, to take the taste out of ethics, to base ethics on a universal agreement that would spring from a common recognition of what is evident. The way philosophers have always been trying to take the taste out of aesthetics.

  Pragmatically, nearly everybody, at least in the Western world, agrees that the Parthenon is beautiful. It isn’t a question of taste, like Mannerism, for instance, which you can get to like, the way you do olives. Kant’s ethics, as I see it, is a beautiful structure, based on a law of harmony and inner consistency, that in its way resembles the Parthenon, while yours, Mother, if you’ll excuse me, is more like olives. Caviare to the general. Your ethics is based on style, which never has to give a consistent reason why it is the way it is. And if an outsider looks for the reason, it is likely to be historical: I mean that somebody like Louis XIV introduced a certain shape of armchair, which a select few can recognize. Purely contingent.

  You shudder at the thought of a double-breasted turkey because a single-breasted turkey is classical. Your style would be compromised if you joined the herd around the PX-trough. But you can’t persuade anyone else to abstain unless they love you and want to be like you. You saw that in Rocky Port. In your way, you are an exemplary person, but the common man can’t imitate you, although you think he ought to. It’s as if Mozart said to Salieri, “Why not be like me?”

  You are an accident, Mother, which for some reason you don’t want to recognize. Let’s say a happy accident. But you can’t legislate. That’s your great weakness, and you know it. You want your whim or prejudice to be a universal law. Maybe all artists are like that; they feel they are the end of some teleological chain. I’m coming to the conclusion that art is incompatible with democracy. If I want to be a democrat, it’s an awful handicap to be the son of an artist. I will have to reject you, if I can. Because—to put it bluntly—you are a snob. Without wanting to be one. You can’t help it.

  For instance, you don’t really want to vote for Johnson, because, you say, he is “common.” Doesn’t that show that your whole way of looking at things is permeated by archaic caste notions? If I argue that Harry Truman was common, you say no, he was ordinary—a fine distinction. I guess an ordinary person is a common person you approve of. Then you say you don’t like Johnson’s face; it’s crafty. Well, I just looked that word up in the dictionary. It comes from craft, the artisan’s skill at twisting his material. Which proves how we still despise the artisan, the guy who had to work with his hands.

  It isn’t just you. Our whole vocabulary is rotten with feudal distinctions. Look at villain or clown. Those were just words for peasants. Then think about “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” Do you know what rogue meant? A beggar. Being a prince, Hamlet couldn’t think of any worse things to call himself. And Hamlet is an ethical person. The vocabulary of ethics, once you start to think about it, is more foul and retrograde than any other kind of talk. We say an action is low or base or mean or boorish, which are all synonyms for vulgar, i.e., characteristic of the common people. As opposed to noble, gentle, kind, meaning aristocratic. And people who don’t use these terms—at least in their own minds—for the most part haven’t even entered the realm of the ethical. They don’t give a damn whether an action is noble or ignoble, princely or beggarly; they live for their gross desires. There’s no vocabulary for a democratic ethics; even words like free or frank, which you would think were sort of yeoman words, actually meant belonging to the ruling class. I suppose in Russia proletarian is still a term of praise, but the proletariat there—in theory—is the ruling class. Why can’t we find words to express a classless ideal? Do you remember, when I was about six, an old Russian Social Revolutionary came to see the babbo? He had just escaped from somewhere, maybe Siberia or a DP camp, and he said, “I would like to make a little money. In the most dignified and democratic way possible.” This made you both laugh a lot, and the babbo used to tell it as a story, but I couldn’t see what was funny about it. In fact, Mother, what was so funny? Unless you were just laughing at him for his ignorance of the ways of the capitalist world. I would like to meet that man now.

  It seems to me that if my generation is serious it will have to reform language. Get rid of its hoary increment of prejudice. Like those French Jacobins chopping off the heads of statues. Around Paris, they’ve been restored, I read in the guidebook, by Viollet-le-Duc. On Notre-Dame, for instance, you have to look twice to see that the kings of Judah on the façade are just plastic-surgery paste-ups. But outside of Paris, they say, you get the full effect—rows of headless bodies on the church fronts. I saw some the other day in the Louvre. A massacre. This gory gallery made more impression on me than practically anything I’ve seen. Apostles and saints reduced to stumps. Or bunches of drapery. I never grasped before what the French Revolution meant. An Italian—even a half-Italian and a half-Jew like me—can’t help feeling revolted by these hacked-up groups of defenseless stone. It goes against the grain. My balls ached in sympathy. For Mother Church, I guess, and her poor bleeding trunk. What a change to wander into the peaceful Italian rooms, where nobody had harmed a hair of that boy Baptist’s head! I love Donatello. Italians, unlike the French, are still a family. Maybe because they weren’t ever a nation. Or because they inherited the Roman pietas, which was reverence for ancestors. I will have to mull that over. But I felt it very strongly with this Italian yesterday—as if he were my long-lost uncle. And I gather he reciprocated. The funny thing is, he is a half-Jew too—a tall guy, slightly bald, looks like a patriarch. His name is Bonafante. But his mother, believe it or not, was a Levi. No connection, apparently. She came from Ancona.

  We talked about the Terror, and he advised me to read a book by Salvemini, on the conditions that led up to the French Revolution; he is going to lend it to me. I told him I thought the French had a faible for decapitation. After all, their patron saint is Saint Denis, who was beheaded, and you keep seeing statues of him carrying his head in his hands
like a jack-o’-lantern. An anticipation of the guillotine. Bonfante said the guillotine was just a rationalization of an old inefficient process. I said that applied to the gas chambers, and he had to admit I was right.

  But afterwards I thought that maybe those French mobs had been logical in wrecking the symbols of the old régime. Those decapitated statues shook my democratic complacency; whoever did that meant business. Only they didn’t go far enough. They should have chopped off the head of language while they were at it. That was the point, of course, of changing the names of the days and months and starting the calendar over. But they needed a bigger purge; no more ci-devant words. Only words that pointed to something like tree or house. Is that the idea behind English linguistic philosophy? I guess you wouldn’t know. Instead of devouring its own children, the Revolution should have killed off its own parents. They would have had to abolish all past literature and art, including the lumières. Grinning Voltaire and the Holy Virgin. Possibly music too—all those masses and madrigals and stately minuets. Smash the pianos and harpsichords, unstring the violins. Into the cannon foundry with the knightly trumpets.

  Naturally, this might have been offensive to me if I had been alive then—after all, I hate to lop off the head of a dandelion. But if it had been done in 1789, possibly I’d be able to think clearly today. I feel awfully confused now, as though my mind were a pool that looked transparent till I started stirring up its muddy depths with a stick. This could be the effect of being away from home and becoming a “rootless cosmopolitan.” I’ve never felt before like a foreign particle. And since I haven’t anybody congenial to talk to, I am talking to myself. Tonight is the first chance I’ve had to sforgarmi, to get rid of that bottled-up feeling. Don’t show this letter to anyone. Please.

  You know, you and the babbo always said I was an egalitarian. That used to embarrass me, but it’s true. I’ve got this bug about equality. And now I’m in the place where the whole thing started, where you see Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité frowning at you in gold letters from the faces of public buildings. They even have it on the fronts of churches, sometimes stenciled and sometimes cut right into the stone. As though some kid had gone wild with a rubber stamp that it got for its birthday. The handwriting on the wall, only it’s printed in big Roman letters. This must go back to the Revolution, when the churches were turned into powder-magazines or temples of Reason or Glory. Funny that in all these years nobody erased it; I wonder if the Germans tried during the Occupation. Out, damned spot. You would think the guidebooks would have a word to say about this revolutionary slogan, which hits every tourist in the eye, but they pass it over in silence, just as if it was one of those obscene graffiti you see in the Métro. OAS or A BAS LES JUIFS.

  I’ve decided that may be why the Parisians are so sullen and why they drink. They thought of equality first. My theory is that equality is a sort of poison; once it got into the human bloodstream, nobody could eliminate it. It just stayed there, corroding us. I mean, it might have been better if nobody had ever thought of it in the first place. But they did, and once they did, it should have been thought through. Which never happened.

  When you consider that mankind lived for centuries without this idea’s ever seriously entering anybody’s mind! It never occurred to Socrates or Plato or any of the old philosophers. The idea of everybody’s being equal, not just Athenians or free men. You could say it occurred to slaves and people like the Ciompi in Florence; naturally it would. But it didn’t get into the thinking of the people on top, the reasoners and legislators. Not till the eighteenth century. Yet you couldn’t say that Socrates or Pericles was stupid or a blind supporter of an oligarchy. The idea of equality was like that play about the man who came to dinner. It was “entertained,” and then we were in the soup. Pardon the unintentional pun.

  Equality, of course, is that specter Marx was talking about, the specter of communism, which is still stalking around, haunting the globe, without ever having been embodied anywhere. It’s still two-thirds of a ghost. At home, in spite of the Constitution, we don’t have real political equality, and the Russians don’t have real economic equality—far from it. One would lead to the other, logically, or so people suspect: that’s why the white Southerners are afraid to give the Negro the vote; the next thing he would be asking for would be a decent job. And if the Russian workers got consumer goods, they would soon be asking for the vote.

  I have made a discovery, Mother! Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable. In the eighteenth century, when the idea began traveling around Europe, it was shipped off to the New World, where there was more room. But pretty soon, as the East got crowded, equality became sort of smelly and was sent out West, in a covered wagon, to the wide-open spaces, so that back home people could forget about it for a while. In your generation, Roosevelt made a few gestures in the direction of equality, until World War II came along and took priority. In my generation, the idea has drifted South and joined the civil-rights movement, where it’s stirring up trouble. So a new move is indicated, on the principle of “Keep moving, buddy.” Maybe into space, if there isn’t another world war. Space will be the new frontier, full of homesteaders: opportunity beckons, enlist in space. But the problem will arise there too; the colonists on Mars or the moon will want equal rights with the world or a universal one-hour week or something. Then there may be another migration, into the Milky Way. But finally humanity will have to face the specter, unless it decides to commit suicide instead, which it might. We may agree to blow ourselves up, like a man who knows he’s suffering from an incurable disease.

  If the race would try equality once, then we might find out that it worked. Let everybody keep hands off and give it a fair chance. Which the French Revolution never had. Or the Russian. Not even dear old Castro. And if we found out that it didn’t work, OK. We would stop being haunted by it.

  Let me give you a little parable. In olden time a man who lived in a big house and wore a fur cloak felt superior to a ragged man who lived in a hovel. And the reason was simple: a tautology. He felt superior because he lived in a big house and wore a fur cloak. That was all there was to it. If he was charitable, like Good King Wenceslas (your favorite Bohemian), he could take a few sticks to the peasant in his hovel at Christmas-time. But Good King Wenceslas was a saint, and besides it was Christmas. And, being a saint, he didn’t doubt the justice that had put him in his palace and the other in his forest-hut. That was where God had assigned them, for some unfathomable reason, and the difference in their degree made the poor man grateful for the king’s goodness. Inequality was natural on this earth, though there might be some surprises in Heaven.

  Today, though, King Wenceslas would feel guilty because he lived in a palace. It would prey on his mind. If he was a reactionary, he would think he had to justify his accommodations by showing that he had the right to them, that he was superior, either by birth or by get-up-and-go to the peasant down the road. He could argue that there was no use turning his palace over to the peasant, who would only wreck it, keep the coal in the bathtub, etc. In short, he would have to find some social doctrine or “law” that entitled him to be where he was. Appeal to some imaginary tribunal that would award him the palace.

  If King Wenceslas today was a liberal, with the peasants solidly behind him, he might become president, like Kennedy, and his wife could make the White House more palatial and have artists, like you, Mother, to perform. As long as he was on the peasants’ side, he could feel OK, relatively, about retaining the palace and furs. And the more royal and dynastic he was, the more, probably, he would argue that Society needs Symbols, etc. A liberal King Wenceslas, strangely enough, seems to sleep better than his reactionary uncle.

  But nobody today really feels comfortable inside his own skin. The poor feel guilty for being poor, and the rich feel guilty for being rich. The poor are afraid that it’s not an accident that they are poor but that there is something ghastl
y wrong with them, while the rich are afraid that it is an accident that they’re rich. The over-developed countries feel guilty toward the under-developed countries, and the under-developed countries feel ashamed of standing in line for a handout. You can measure the change in King Wenceslas’ thinking by the fact that a hundred years ago a country was proud of being rich. I guess no country was ever proud of being poor. Unless a masochistic country like Poland or Ireland?

  Last winter, while I was working for civil rights, I worried about being a guilty white liberal. Today I’m not so much bothered by that. I have it in a better perspective. Aside from the fact of not being able to help being white, I have come to the conclusion that working for civil rights is a good thing in itself, even if I do it to bribe my conscience. A lot of the churches and abbeys in France wouldn’t have been built if kings and nobles hadn’t been trying to purge themselves of blood-guilt. Hospitals too. I send part of my allowance to civil-rights causes, which lets me stay on the sidelines or in the cheering section. If a person feels guilty, it’s better to pay a recompense. Be your own redeemer. Take our friend the admiral. If he sent a few guilt-dollars to the NAACP or the Urban League or the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he would be a lot easier in his mind. He acts so defiant because he’s secretly ashamed of his/our treatment of the Negro. He knows he’s wrong. It strikes me that our whole country is secretly ashamed, for being rich and white, and this may make us dangerous.

  Possibly I ought to feel ashamed myself, because I’m not giving my whole time to civil rights, though I claim to believe in it. But I don’t look for excuses for being here studying in Paris. That’s a decision I’ve made, a conscious act of my will, and I notice that I don’t repine much over anything I’ve done consciously—you have to accept the choices of your will in a sporting spirit. Cosa fatta capo ha, as the babbo says.