David gave Waldo the General Post Office in El Paso, Texas, as his next address.2 For the moment he was flush. He had not only Clare’s car and parting gift of $2,800, but $2,000 “borrowed” from Waldo, having cultivated the latter’s friendship for the same reason he had Willoughby’s. Both men adored Clare, and he felt that if he encouraged their courtship, they would speak well of him to her, as well as grant him favors. In the process, he had come to regard them as confidantes, to be kept informed of his whereabouts, health, and state of mind.
Replying to David, Waldo sharply observed that although it was “natural and right” for brother and sister to be close, he should not think that Clare had any “legal, moral or implied financial obligation” to him. Whatever money she had given him in the past was out of affection. Rather than wait for “vague financing that may never come,” he should do something practical for himself.3
David preferred to be self-indulgent. En route to Texas, he checked into a two-bedroom cottage in Panama City, Florida. From there, he wrote another letter to Waldo that sounded like a farewell.
I am glad that I got away & yet am quite sad, for no one knows better than I do that life without responsibility, direction or purpose is futile. And so I rush madly across the country much in the same fashion as the common eel who departs his fresh water streams & unaccountably pursues a hegira to the bottomless Bermuda Bay.
When I say a prayer, and on occasion I do, it is with the hope that all peoples who believe in a Creator will not have prayed in vain. I am certain that as surely as Clare will meet her Ann, so it is inevitable the Jews will reach their promised land & the Jap, who so heroically and foolishly died in battle, will rejoin his ancestors. The nuances of faith are of human invention, be they divinely inspired is beyond my ken. A hundred years or a hundred hours from now possibly, I shall know the answer.
So in passing I say, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take, and likewise yours, Clare’s, Harry’s, black men, yellow men, and all men. Sincerely, David.4
By early 1948, he had reached Arizona and was still writing to Waldo, complaining that the Luces ostracized him because he “knew too much” about their marital problems. There had been a time when David had claimed that Clare was the only person who counted in his life, and that he would gladly die for her.5 But now he berated her as being devoid of feelings, “a cold hard intellect in a beautiful, womanly body.”6
Waldo detected incestuous leanings in David, a subject that he had touched on with Clare.
If the trouble with David is what you and I think it is, there is no more use in getting angry and repeatedly asking “Why does he do this, or why does he do that?” He does what the unnatural compulsion in him makes him do. The big question is “How can we rid him of his compulsion?”7
Little more was heard of David until August 12, when he wrote from a hotel in San Diego to tell Waldo he had “no intention currently or in futurity of asking for anything. Excepting, of course, your best wishes.”
Nineteen days later, he spoke by phone to Clare for the last time, about his life insurance premium. Evidently he had spent the last of the money she and Waldo had given him. On September 5, he rented a red-and-yellow Aeronca two-seater plane from Grand Central Airport and flew six miles south and two miles west of Santa Monica, before plummeting into the Pacific Ocean. A party of Sea Scouts saw the crash and later noticed aircraft cushions and pieces of propeller floating on the surface. The Coast Guard patrolled the area for two days and came upon no more wreckage, while the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office dragged the sea floor to a depth of 120 feet. Neither group found David’s body.8
The most poignant line in one obituary, and an appropriate epitaph for a man who had made so many futile attempts to get rich, was that at the time of his death, “Mr. Boothe lived in Ocean Park, Calif., where he was planning to set up his own business.”9
24
THE TWILIGHT OF GOD
Mysticism … is bound to be inviting to the person who is afraid of the deep emotions.
—DIANA TRILLING
David’s end left Clare with an acute sense of guilt.1 She knew that her brother’s soul had been “sick … unto death. And only great, great love and patience would have healed it.” Those she had shied from giving. “I did not love enough.”2
One of her recurring nightmares was that David wanted to murder her. Now she dreamed with extra vividness that she had gone to look for him, in a place that seemed like hell. Suddenly he was chasing her, trying to pull her “through a sea of black mud, mixed with gobs of blood.”3
Dorothy Farmer helped wrap up David’s affairs. Since his savings account had a balance of only $13.02, she sent an outstanding $100 doctor’s bill to Harry and asked Al Grover to find out if George Waldo wanted Clare to repay David’s $2,000 “loan,” adding that Mrs. Luce would not, however, settle gambling debts.4 After retrieving a suitcase of personal effects from Regina Foote, Dorothy discovered that David and the young woman had a mutual interest in aviation, and had planned to marry on Christmas Day. Miss Foote had last seen him just one hour before he took off on his fatal flight. He had left, she said, “terribly discouraged by financial troubles.”5
One of those had been Clare’s refusal to pay his small life insurance premium. This did not stop her from hurriedly settling the bill now and claiming to be David’s sole beneficiary, in case any of his girlfriends had expectations.6
That September, Clare read an article in Atlantic Monthly entitled “Man Against Darkness” by Walter T. Stace, a Princeton philosophy professor. The essay drew special attention in religious, academic, and other circles, because of its author’s pessimistic tone and admission that he had no religious belief.
Since the world is not ruled by a spiritual being, but rather by blind forces, there cannot be any ideals, moral or otherwise, in the universe outside us. Our ideals, therefore, must proceed only from our own minds; they are our own inventions. Thus the world that surrounds us is an immense spiritual emptiness. Nature is nothing but matter in motion … governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws.… The life of man is meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may … still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science … but his life is hollow at the center.7
This paragraph in particular affected Clare, as she continued to wrestle with David’s similar nihilism. Since her conversion, she had aspired to the heights of spiritual ecstasy, usually attained only by the most devout monks, nuns, and saints. She was so thrown by Stace’s bleakness that she found herself harboring the same suicidal thoughts as during her dark night of the soul at the Waldorf exactly three years before. To dispel them, she set to work on a rebuttal, hoping Atlantic Monthly would publish it.
But she underestimated the breadth and depth of reading needed to counter such a scholarly piece. Among the books and articles she selected were Arnold Toynbee’s Civilization on Trial, Robert C. Hartnett’s “The Religion of the Founding Fathers,” Adrienne Koch’s Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, the prose works of Heinrich Heine, F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West, Lenin’s Collected Works, Fulton J. Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West, as well as The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital of Marx and Engels. She even perused Josef Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, not to mention Lincoln Barnett’s “God and the American People,” William J. McDonald’s “The Religion of Communism,” and an 1846 encyclical of Pope Pius IX.8
Months went by before she had amassed enough material to begin her essay. The writing took many more weeks, and the result was a lucid examination of what she saw as the struggle shaking the modern world, between the “Godfearing power of Democracy and the God-hating power of Communism.” After dividing her sixteen-thousand-word manuscript into four sections, she realized she had something too long for an article and too short for a book. She called it The Twilight of God, and when it was published the following year as one of Regnery’s Human Affairs Pa
mphlets, she could take pride in having produced an impressive polemic.9
Section I, “Is the United States a Christian Nation?,” began provocatively. “That Communism hates God is a matter of official record. But that Democracy—American Democracy—fears God is a matter not easily proved.” Citing Toynbee, Clare supported his view that Western civilization had been “living on spiritual capital,” in that society clung “to Christian practice without possessing Christian belief—and practice unsupported by belief is a wasting asset.” She pointed out that of all the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, only Jefferson had claimed to be a deist, believing in the teachings of a mortal Jesus, but not in revelations from the Son of God. If Jefferson lived now, he might fear for the fate of the nation upon learning that an educator as prominent as Stace trumpeted atheism and asserted the worthlessness, futility, hollowness, and amorality of human existence.
More worrisome, to her mind, was that others in academe were passing on fewer and fewer Christian precepts to future leaders. The effect of this spiritual neglect showed in the breakup of one in three American families by divorce, the uncharitable reluctance of the country to take in more displaced persons from war-ravaged Europe and Asia, and the abuse of nature by overconsumption of raw materials. This led Clare to conclude that the Christian spirit in the United States was withering, and to question if it was dead in the USSR, “as we so commonly suppose.”
Her second section, “Is the Soviet Union Irreligious?,” granted that the Communist concept of man was that he is an animal without a soul, and that religion, as Marx said, was merely an opium that bourgeois capitalist institutions had used to stupefy and exploit the working class. Lenin, in consequence, had declared atheism an integral part of his cultural revolution.
Clare suggested that the Soviet Union’s postwar socialistic creed was, paradoxically, “more religious in spirit” than that of the United States. This was due not to any supernatural aspect of Communism, but to its ability to inspire the kind of devotion, fidelity, and fanaticism once found in adherents of traditional faiths. While Marxist tenets might appeal to the poor and disenfranchised on a materialistic level, she thought that, “strangely enough, its deepest appeal is often to the talented, the rich and the famous, and is experienced by them as an emotion, or a mystique.” They were drawn to it by idealistic appetites or spiritual needs that craved satisfaction. Most of all, and most dangerous, it appealed to intellectuals.
In using the words religion and religious in connection with Communism and its followers, Clare was imputing a supernatural character not to Communism, but to the religious a priori that Communism taps in man, inspiring a devotion, fidelity, rigidity, fanaticism, and apostolicity generally associated with religionists.
She noted that Reinhold Niebuhr had called Communism a Christian heresy. She thought it “a political perversion of the Golden Rule, that primary law of natural theology which has manifested itself in every great religion.” Would America’s failure to find Christian solutions to global economic and political problems lead distraught people to accept Communist solutions? If man did turn to an alternative set of beliefs, in crisis or not, he must be a “religious incurable,” looking for salvation not through the Cross but through the Hammer and Sickle, with Lenin the Messiah of the new religion, Marx and Engels its prophets, Das Kapital its Bible, and the likes of Trotsky its heretics.
In fact, Clare went on, Marx had invented nothing new. He carried atheistic materialism to its logical conclusion, making a faith out of man’s lack of it. What alarmed Christians was not just that Communists wanted a more equable share of material goods. After all, early followers of Jesus had voluntarily shared lives and goods, as those in convents and monasteries still did. She said that the Soviet system disturbed the faithful because it saw man purely as an animal with no soul or spirit. Like a pig, he was born to “root, and rut, and rot,” with no hope of existence beyond.
Heine, a German Jew and friend of Marx, had anticipated her bleak assessment a century before. He saw the spread of Communist ideology as the arrival of “wild gloomy times,” heralding the smell of “Russian leather, blood, godlessness and many whippings.” Acknowledging the subhuman aspect of that fear, Clare saw a more insidious threat in socialism’s donning of some of the emotional trappings of religion. Could this new “faith” be the transforming power that some sought in order to unify East and West? Was it the only alternative form of worship for America and the world?
In her third section, “Christianity or Totalitarianism?,” she tackled the position of atheists who were not Communists, in particular the eminent British scientist Sir Julian Huxley. He did not deny the metaphysical impulse in man, but he believed that science, logic, and psychology had brought human beings to a stage where God was no longer “a useful hypothesis.” Huxley put the Almighty in the same category as pagan gods, angels, demons, “and other small spiritual fry”—a human product, arising from ignorance and the neurosis of helplessness.
Clare said that while Marx offered mankind what he believed to be a superior creed, Huxley and Stace wanted no belief at all. The latter thought moral self-control would not save man from doing evil. In the future, only educators, and doctors and psychiatrists with their pills and injections, might do what Christ and the prophets had failed to do. The professors claimed that men without faith could live decent lives. Clare countered that they could do so only “in an atmosphere where other men do believe.” Atheists were parasites on the Christian tradition, and it was of interest “to see them try to live their ‘decent’ lives in the godless environment of a Nazi or Communist America!”
In her fourth and final section, “Must We Have a ‘Holy War’ with Russia?,” she argued that all major conflicts tended to take on the character of a crusade. World War I’s shibboleth had been “Make the World Safe for Democracy.”
A real crusading title for the second World War was never found. The press and the people continued to call the conflict “World War II,” although nobody liked that. It contained the dreadful suggestion that we were engaged in what was to be a series of world conflicts.…
The very fact that in World War II the USSR fought on our side rather than on the German side (which ideologically was so much closer to the Soviet position) did help in a measure to keep us from indulging in too much self-satisfied and self-commendatory praise of the utter purity of our own political and religious motives. There would be little, except the grace of God, to prevent us from wallowing in hypocrisy once we found ourselves fighting against the sons of Marx and Lenin. For this reason, if for no other, we should regard the impulse to wage a “holy war” with Russia as a great temptation to the growth of an un-Christian spirit in the nation.10
She noted that an awareness of the fundamental conflict between the Soviet Union’s material and the West’s spiritual interpretation of the nature of man had caused Stalin to write in Problems of Leninism, “It is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states—ultimately one or the other must conquer.”
At the end of The Twilight of God, Clare speculated how Soviet expansionism might be contained. The atom bomb gave America protection for the time being. Washington had already asked the world to accept joint stewardship of its nuclear arsenal and was helping diffuse Marxist-Leninist propaganda by reconstructing Europe with Marshall Plan funds. But in order to resist being conquered by the “dynamic false faith of Communism,” she warned, “we must resolutely refuse to yield the liberties of those we have promised to safeguard. We must keep sufficient military strength to discourage any sudden use of force to which Russia might be impelled by what [the Kremlin] considered tempting evidence of our physical or moral weakness. To defend the truth and to save their souls, Christians must be just as ready to combat the world as to renounce it.”11
25
COME TO THE STABLE
The practice of an art demands one’s whole self.
—DELACROIX
For the first time in eight years, Clare did not campaign for herself or anyone else in the fall of 1948. While recognizing that Thomas Dewey had been a highly competent, racket-busting Governor of New York State, she disliked him. She was especially offended when one of his aides told her she was not welcome on the stump. They were running a “peace and national unity campaign,” he said, and she was “too aggressive and controversial.”1
Dewey was so confident of success that he took a week off the trail in the final month before voting. Meanwhile President Truman traveled thirty-one thousand miles around the country in a bulletproof train, giving 350 speeches. Luckily for him, the season brought such a huge harvest of corn and wheat that people felt prosperous and turned out in great numbers to shout, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Nevertheless, polls continued to show the GOP ticket way ahead. Clare’s political instinct told her otherwise, and she accepted a friend’s thousand-dollar bet that Truman would win.2
After the polls closed on Tuesday, November 2, the Luces walked through Times Square and saw a running caption display on the New York Times Building: TRUMAN COMES OUT OF BRIDGEPORT WITH A LARGE PLURALITY. Clare said, “Dewey’s had it, because you can go back through all history, and whichever party came out of that town ahead won the national election.” Harry looked annoyed. She went to bed at midnight, and he stayed up waiting for results that he hoped would prove her wrong. At 3:00 A.M., she returned to the sitting room and found him close to the radio, just as news came that Truman had won the electoral college vote. After breakfast, it was announced that the President had had a popular margin of two million. Clare joked that she “shed no bitter tears,” because she had won lots of money betting on the victor.3
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