Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  The babbo wrote that if Peter was unhappy in Paris, he might transfer next semester to a provincial university like Nancy or Montpellier. And he wondered why Peter had not investigated the special “first year courses” the Sorbonne gave to qualified foreigners; he had heard them well spoken of by the French department at Wellesley. Though he did not thank his father for discussing his private affairs with the stupid Wellesley women, for a while Peter accepted the reproach. He too wished he had applied for one of those courses, instead of joining the mob in French Civilization. Yet from what he gleaned, there was no cause for envy. What his father did not know was that those courses were mass-produced too and on a patronizing freshman level, as you could divine from the name if you thought about it; the lectures were just as moth-eaten, there was no class participation, no assignments were given, not even a reading-list, and the exam, when they finally sprang it, bore no relation to what the professor had been talking about. Every year most of the Americans flunked ignominiously, which was probably how the French had planned it—a national hecatomb.

  In retrospect, he concluded that the real ploy would have been to get permission to audit lectures by one of the star professors at the regular Sorbonne or the Hautes Etudes and then take an exam or write a paper for his tutor back home; that way, he could have imbibed some genuine French culture and mingled with French students, at least in the sense of being in the same room with them. But you had to be pretty “motivated”—his adviser’s jargon—to attempt that and, not being enrolled, you risked being cracked down on by your draft board just as much as though you were hanging around playing the pinball machine in cafés or looking at old movies at the cinémathèques.

  If he wanted to be sure of his student deferment, it was better to stick it out in French Civilization, going through the motions of studying for credit. That, at any rate, was the cynical advice they handed out at the Embassy; some guys in the class had asked. In short, stay in your slot. You might have to do your junior year over when you got home, but in the Affluent Society your parents would go on supporting you until you finally graduated and take you as a tax exemption. If they complained, you could point to the silver lining: you would be in the Class of ’67 instead of ’66, which would keep you out of the Army one more year. By that time, the war in Vietnam ought to be over.

  Like most people his age, he guessed, Peter had a profound wish not to be killed. He was no different from those other guys at the general’s Thanksgiving brawl. Though sorry for anybody who had to die in Vietnam, he faced with equanimity the idea that some unknown draftee—maybe even a Negro—should bite the dust instead of him.

  He could see in principle that student deferment was a bad form of discrimination, that Selective Service—page Darwin—showed middle-class society red in tooth and claw, but just the same he had his education to finish. Would a nut like his mother want him to volunteer or go to jail as a C.O. or what? She and Bob were opposed to the war, which was why they had finally voted for Johnson. Yet in their letters they had begun to say that he was reneging on his promises, not trying to achieve peace but plotting for a bigger war, now that the election was over. Give him time, Peter urged. At least wait for January, when he would deliver his message to Congress. He must have meant what he said about American boys not dying for Asian boys. Even the general, after all, was against landing troops, and as for bombing Hanoi, that was just the Air Force mentality.

  For his own part, despite his bibulous statements that afternoon, Peter was not sure exactly how he stood on the war. In reality he worried about what would happen to India, which used to be one of his favorite countries, if the Americans let the Communists take over Indochina. The best hope seemed to be some compromise, whereby the UN, maybe, could step in and supervise an armistice. That was what Roberta thought; when he had called her at the Institut Pasteur and asked her to dinner, she had invited him instead to a concert, and afterward they had had a coffee. She had a lot of faith in U Thant.

  He himself derived cheer from the reminder that if you stopped paying attention to these problems, they tended to get solved. Like Laos, which had had him sweating when he was sixteen, or the Berlin Wall. Even the Congo seemed to have simmered down, now that everybody was concentrating on Asia. It was the same as when you had a headache: you could make it go away by stimulating a pain in some other part of your body—your big toe or your crazy bone. He owed that prescription to his mother.

  But since she and Bob were so excruciated by the Vietnamese war, shouldn’t they be glad that Peter had his II-S deferment? They were glad selfishly, he assumed, but the fair Rosamund would never like being glad just selfishly. He could count himself lucky that she was not on his draft board; if she were, it might be the sacrifice of Isaac all over again, minus the ram. It would have been interesting to have Isaac’s point of view on that episode—something the Bible left out.

  Recently he had decided that mercenary armies had made a lot of sense. He still believed in non-violence as a technique of persuasion, but there were some situations that persuasion did not cover. As the babbo said, what if Gandhi had been up against Hitler? Unless you were an all-out pacifist, you recognized that somebody had to bear arms, and why not somebody who had heard the call, like that poor nut Benjy? Instead of training every young kid to be a killer, it would be more moral, as well as more practical, to restrict the job to specialists. But ordinary twenty-year enlisted men, not just the officer caste, ought to be rewarded by society for the risks they ran, the way Iroquois Indians, who were sure-footed, got big money being high-construction workers—there were some of those Peaux-Rouges right here in France; he had read an article about them in L’Express. If he were in Johnson’s place, he would abolish the draft and finance military training for qualified recruits by taxing people like his parents who could afford it and had children between eighteen and twenty-seven. Anybody over a certain income level who wanted to keep his offspring out of the Army—and ballplayers and prize fighters and movie stars and Pop singers—would have to pay the price, so that the guys who volunteered to do the fighting would earn, say, what an automobile worker brought home on Friday night. What an instructor or a section man got would not be enough to make getting killed attractive.

  If he had the energy, he would send his plan to Johnson. He had another plan, along the same lines, to submit to socialist countries. That would be to give people who had degrading jobs like street-cleaners and sewer-workers or shoe-salesmen the highest rewards in the economy. In Paris, it was almost always Algerians, he noticed, that you saw sweeping the streets with those brooms made of twigs or laying sewer pipes. But there was no reason why the dirtiest jobs should be the worst paid. It ought to be the opposite. He was amazed that nobody but Peter Levi had thought of something so simple. And apart from the sheer equity of the arrangement, which was breath-taking in its neatness, like the Fool’s Mate, it had another good feature: the materialists would rush down into the sewers, where they belonged, and artists and scientists and scholars would not be corrupted by money, as they were under the present system, even if, like his parents, they failed to recognize it.

  He was hurt by the reception his idea got from his friend Bonfante, who as an old revolutionary (“Papa, c’est un révolutionnaire; il a combattu dans le maquis,” Irène explained proudly) ought to have been serious about it. Instead, Arturo, whom he found sweeping their apartment, was overcome with glee, laughing almost wolfishly as he wielded the dust-pan; his bald head was tied up in a red bandanna, and he wore a woman’s ruffled apron over his trousers, which made Peter feel like Little Red Riding Hood visiting her grandmother. When Arturo had finally moderated his amusement and made a pot of espresso, he explained that Peter was too young to understand the relation between money and power. When a new class enriched itself, as had happened with the bourgeoisie before the French Revolution, it proceeded to seize power. What Peter was proposing, without knowing it, was a dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the big joke.

>   “Your ditch-diggers and sewer-cleaners would be the new rulers. The old Roman proletariat. Not even Marx’s factory-workers.” “But why should they want power?” Peter said sulkily. “You mean they wouldn’t be satisfied just to have the Cadillacs and the weekend dachas and sturgeon dinners at three-star restaurants?” “If a Cadillac has no prestige, who wants it? When a worker is paid better than his boss, he will be the boss tomorrow. When the English king, Charles, lost his revenues, because of progressive inflation, he lost his head too.”

  Peter did not see that a dictatorship of humble sewer-cleaners would be any worse than a dictatorship of fat Party bosses. “They would not be the same sewer-cleaners,” Arturo pointed out. “The profession would become overcrowded, and the weak would be pushed out. They would be forced to become actors or ballet-dancers—professions without prestige.” He gave his high Italian laugh. “What is degrading is not the job, Peter, but the pay attached to it” A surgeon’s job was just as revolting as a plumber’s. Maybe more so. In the Middle Ages, a surgeon and a barber were one and the same person and rewarded accordingly. “But that proves my point!” cried Peter. “It shows that society can change its mind about the value of a person’s work. I guess sewer-cleaners are just as necessary as doctors.” “Soon it will all be done by machines,” Arturo promised. “When socialism achieves an advanced technology, no one will clean the sewers or sweep the streets.”

  Arturo always invoked technology as the great solvent when they debated about the future. Europeans were idealistic about machines because they had not had to live with them. The Bonfantes were too impecunious to have a car or television or a washing-machine; they boiled their laundry on the stove. Arturo wrote a financial column for some provincial newspapers, which Peter guessed did not pay too well. He knew all about the stock market and interest rates, but he did not even have a bank account. Elena kept what money they had in postal savings—the next thing to a stocking. Their apartment was in an old decrepit building, over a printing shop, and the presses often shook it, rattling the pictures on the walls. Everything in it was old-fashioned: their Model-T Frigidaire, which also rattled and made midget ice cubes, like a toy; their claw-footed bathtub, which they had bought at a Démolitions; their ancient modern art; Arturo’s pre-war electric shaver; their gramophone and scratched monaural-78 records. Gas pipes for the old gas lighting fixtures had never been removed when electricity was installed and they crawled about the walls like lianas in a forest. Elena’s mother, who had lived with them till she died, had covered every surface with Russian shawls, cushions, throws, and heavy draperies; they had pretty silver, some of it broken, that had come with her from Russia too, like the record of Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov, to which Peter was much attached. Her parents were Social Revolutionaries and had to leave Russia with their few unworldly possessions when the Bolsheviks took over.

  The most modern implement they possessed was an old vacuum cleaner, which Peter now noticed lying in a corner. He wondered why Arturo had been using the broom. There was a strange amount of dust in the room. Elena was at her job at the Mazarin Library, and the femme de ménage was sick. The vacuum was en panne, Arturo thought: every time he had used it lately, it had seemed to lack power. “Maybe I can fix it,” said Peter, picking up the threadbare hose. He had often vacuumed for his mother in the dear dead days in Rocky Port, and Arturo, though fanatically tidy, was not much good with tools. Peter flipped the switch, and a cloud of dust and grit arose. In fact, the machine was blowing accumulated dust out of the bag into the apartment. “Why, you’ve been working it backward!” he exclaimed. “O la la!” said Arturo, crestfallen. Elena and the children had been right when they claimed that each time papa cleaned the place, it seemed to get dirtier. …

  The manifest irony of this little contretemps put Peter in a better mood. Adjusting the suction, he ran the vacuum vigorously over the floors and rugs while Arturo meekly followed him with a feather duster, cupping his ear with his left hand to hear over the hum of the aspirateur as Peter held forth, from his wider experience, on the contemporary technological crisis. Maybe it would be a good thing, Peter shouted, if machines took over the more malodorous functions of society, such as getting rid of the garbage. That was already a fait accompli in large sections of America; he described the Disposall gadget his stepmother had on the Cape, which had practically eliminated those grisly trips to the dump. Of course you still had the cans and empty bottles to cope with, but eventually humanity might find some means of dealing with tin cans and old automobiles, besides making sculptures out of them. One solution might be to stop eating out of cans and driving automobiles, but that was too much to hope for in the present state of enlightenment. In any case, he was willing to admit that the Disposall made a real contribution to human happiness, although at the moment of installation in the Wellfleet kitchen he had argued with his stepmother that she would do better to keep a pig.

  But each new invention, as far as he was concerned, ought to be viewed with suspicion until it could prove its innocence. In his ideal world-state, a patent office, staffed by moral philosophers, would replace the censors, scrutinizing applications for new processes and gadgets and deciding whether their ultimate effects would be good, bad, or neutral. Merely neutral would be kept pending for a period of years, on probation. Under a system like that, detergents, for instance, could never have reached the market.

  Arturo rubbed his eyes. “Détergents? Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” Typically, he did not even know what they were. Peter flew out to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of washing solution. “Ça!” “Mais c’est du savon!” “ ‘Soap’!” exclaimed Peter with a pitying laugh. “You’re using detergents every day to wash the dishes without even realizing it. Probably your femme de ménage buys them. Over here, you’re not aware that detergents are fouling up the rivers and poisoning the fish. In America at least we’re aware of it. This horrible sludgy foam piles up in lakes and streams, killing all the wild life; it doesn’t dissolve the way soap does. Pretty soon all the waterways and the ocean will be choked unless we can stop it.” Arturo raised a shoulder. “Là, tu exagères un peu, mon ami. Quand même!” The ocean, he felt, would last out his time. “ ‘Après moi le déluge,’ ” observed Peter. “Qu’est-ce que j’y peux faire, moi?” Arturo protested. The capitalists were to blame for manufacturing the stuff. “But you don’t have to buy it,” said Peter. “You could tell your femme de ménage. All she has to do is read the fine print on the bottle. My mother and stepmother use only Ivory now or old-style soap powders. You can’t wait for a revolution to stop the manufacturers. You have to educate the consumer. The trouble is, detergents are taking over. In a little while, it may be hard to find regular soap in a store. I heard the other day that the PX doesn’t carry Ivory Flakes any more.”

  Arturo appeared bewildered. The significance of Ivory was lost on him. “You know about chemical fertilizers,” Peter firmly continued, “and what they’re doing to the soil.” “J’en ai entendu parler,” Arturo replied. “Mais je ne suis pas exactement au courant.” He laughed apologetically. There it was. Bonfante had no idea of what technology was actually doing, except in the field of weaponry, where, being anti-American, he was fairly well briefed. He knew about second-strike capability, but he and Elena had never tasted frozen food probably; he had never heard of a TV dinner, never seen a car graveyard, never walked on a tree-shaded street where he was the only pedestrian, not counting dogs. …

  You could not convey to him the tragedy of a nice little village like Rocky Port, where “exploitation” was not the point at issue. If you mentioned that the laundress there had two TV sets, he thought you were trying to prove something favorable about the American way of life. Whenever Peter started describing the changes that had overtaken his old home in the space of only four years, he rapidly lost his audience. It happened again this afternoon. “Listen, Arturo. It’s important.” Arturo listened, blinking his eyes, which, strangely for an Italian, were a brig
ht blue—the eyes of an old brigand. He was making an effort to comprehend, but gradually his eyes glazed over. He only brightened when Peter made reference to bomb shelters. He nodded. “Ils se préparent pour la troisième guerre mondiale.”

  All at once, Peter was overcome by a tremendous feeling of love. He was talking, he realized, to a totally innocent person, like some uncorrupted Papuan of the eighteenth century discovered by Captain Cook. A “good European” so far removed in time from Disposalls, Mixmasters, thermostatically heated swimming pools, frozen-food lockers, thruways, U-Hauls that even if you drew him diagrams he would never get the picture. And like some untutored savage presented with the white man’s firewater, he responded with approval to the mention of instant tapioca (“Très bonne idée”) and sliced bread. That there were no passenger trains any more in a large part of the U.S., that you could not buy a whole fresh fish on the seashore or a button in a mercerie, he simply did not believe: “Tu plaisantes.”

  Arturo had his column to mail, and they walked together to the post office on the rue Danton. They discussed postal service. “A New York, ça fonctionne très bien, à ce qu’on dit.” Peter laughed; his friend’s information was characteristically out-of-date. “It used to be good, I guess. Now, there’s only one delivery a day uptown, where my mother lives.” “Incroyable!” muttered Arturo. “Ici il y en a trois.” He walked along in silence, shaking his head.

  For the first time today Peter had really made him wonder. It turned out that he knew a lot about the history of mail. For instance, in the War of 1870, the French had used pigeons to carry letters on microfilm and, more fantastic, they organized a regular service of postal balloons, which the Germans tried to shoot down with telescopic-sighted Krupp guns—only netting five balloons, while more than three million letters got through. “So they invented air mail!” exclaimed Peter. “As far back as that!” “Bien sûr.” Efficient and uniform free public mail delivery had been one of the great progressive achievements of bourgeois democracy; hence the stress in all the capitalist countries on the reliability and swiftness of the post. “ ‘Not rain nor snow nor sleet …’ ” quoted Peter. “It says that on the post office in New York.” The fact that there was only one mail a day now in the center of world capitalism satisfied Arturo that the system was coming apart. “Down in Wall Street, I think they have two,” put in Peter. “And in the middle of town, where the big banks and offices are. But a lot of people, even my mother, use messenger service if it’s something important.” Arturo nodded. “C’est très significatif, ce que tu dis là.” The U.S., like an old man in his dotage, was reverting to infancy, i.e., to private messengers to carry the post. The public sector was breaking down. According to Arturo, that would account too for the disappearance of trains—another productive achievement of bourgeois democracy in its phase of expansion. “Trains aren’t nationalized in the U.S.,” objected Peter, who was nevertheless struck by his friend’s reasoning. He would be glad to be convinced that capitalism was kicking the bucket in its headquarters, the United States, so long as it was a natural death.