Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  As soon as she was gone, Jim felt light and happy again, and the other women in the office told him that he was “more like himself.” He threw himself into the job of getting out a special election supplement. This was the sort of work he was well suited to, for he took the election with intense seriousness, regarding his vote as a sum of money which was not to be invested lightly. Unlike the other members of the staff, who were hysterically predisposed in Roosevelt’s favor, Jim could look at the array of candidates with the impartial sobriety of the ideal consumer attempting to choose between different brands of soap. He was not deceived by labels, and he saw at once that Landon was not a tory, Lemke was not a fascist, Browder was not a communist, and Roosevelt was not a socialist. He was sent to interview each of the candidates, and he wrote a series of informal character sketches that astonished everyone with their perspicacity and good humor. In the end, he decided to vote for Roosevelt, though he had an uneasy feeling about Norman Thomas, whom Mr. Wendell, alone on the paper, was supporting. The war in Spain, however, seemed to clinch the matter; in times like these, a protest vote was a luxury, and that was enough to outlaw it in Jim’s eyes.

  He was never sure, afterwards, whether or not it was Miss Sargent’s letter that changed his mind. This was a reply to an election questionnaire the paper had sent out to its contributors; Jim came upon it one afternoon in August. She would vote, she wrote, for the Socialist-Labor candidate, whose name she could not remember—would someone in the office please find out for her? Jim stared at the familiar angular handwriting, and felt himself flush with anger. It must be a joke, he said to himself; it was something she had thought up to annoy the managing editor; in fact she could not even have thought it up for herself; her friend Leo must have egged her on to it. “What a damn silly thing to do!” he exclaimed out loud, and he was tempted to destroy the letter to save the girl’s face. Then suddenly a large sense of chivalry displaced his annoyance: he was determined to protect her from the consequences of her frivolity. He could announce that he was supporting the Socialist-Labor candidate himself, write an article on that tiny, fierce, incorruptible sect. Something might be done about De Leon and the American socialist movement. But almost immediately he realized that the idea was too outlandish; he could not bring himself to cut so fantastic a figure. Why, for God’s sake, couldn’t she vote for Thomas, he muttered, and then it came to him as a happy thought that he could vote for Thomas: in some indefinable way this would cover her, make a bridge between her and the rest of the staff.

  A fine exhilaration quickly took possession of him, and he perceived that he had wanted to vote for Thomas all along. The Roosevelt bandwagon had been far too comfortable—that fact alone should have been a warning to him. He could predict for himself a long talk with Nancy and a short wrangle with the managing editor, but already he could see the article that would appear in next week’s issue, “Why I Think I’ll Vote for Thomas,” by James Barnett. It would be an honest, dogged, tentative, puzzled article that would invite the reader into the author’s mind, apologize for the furniture, and beg him to make himself quite at home. In the end, the reader might not be persuaded, but he would be able to leave with the assurance that, however he voted, there would be no hard feelings. With each of Jim Barnett’s articles, that, somehow, became the main object. He was like a happy-go-lucky, well-mannered salesman who seems to the prospect delightfully different from other salesmen—as, indeed, he is, since in his eagerness to please he loses sight of his purpose and sells nothing but himself. The born political pamphleteer, like the born salesman, is usually a slightly obnoxious person. Inescapably, Jim had noticed that the two qualities often went together, but it did not appear to him in the light of a general law, but rather as an unhappy accident, a temporary disagreeable state of things which could, with patience, be remedied. And, for a long time, he considered himself the exception which disproved the rule. When it came to him at last that he was not exceptional but irrelevant, when he was, so to speak, ruled out as immaterial, having no bearing, incompetent in the legal sense, the shock was terrific.

  It was the Moscow trials that made him know, for the first time, that he did not really “belong.” Miss Sargent came into his office one day in the fall with a paper for him to sign. (She was back from the Coast and—mysteriously—no longer engaged to be married.) Clearly, the document in her hand was of deep significance for her, and as Jim read it over, his heart swelled with magnanimity, for he saw that he was going to be able to grant her the first request she had ever made of him, and grant it easily, largely, without a second thought, like a millionaire signing a check for a sister of Charity. The statement demanded a hearing for Leon Trotsky, who had been accused in the trials in Moscow of numberless crimes against the Soviet state. It demanded, also, what it called (rather pompously, he thought) the right of asylum for him. Jim had never believed for a moment that Trotsky was guilty of the charges, and this disbelief remained to the bitter end profound and unshakable. Other people wavered, were frightened or coaxed or bribed to resign from the Trotsky Committee; Trotskyites of long standing would wake sweating in the night to ask, “What if Stalin were right?” but Jim was serene and jocular through it all, and the strength of his skepticism came, not from a knowledge of the evidence, nor a sense of Trotsky’s integrity, nor an historical view of the Soviet Union, but simply from a deficiency of imagination. Jim did not believe that Trotsky could have plotted to murder Stalin, or to give the Ukraine to Hitler, because he could not imagine himself or anybody he knew behaving in such a melodramatic and improbable manner. People did not act like that; it was all like a bad spy picture that you hissed and booed and applauded (ironically) from the gallery of the Hype in New Haven. And indeed the whole Russian scene appeared to Jim at bottom to be the invention of a movie writer; his skepticism included not only the confessions of the defendants but the fact of the defendants’ existence. How could there be such people as Romm and Piatakov and the GPU agent, Holtzman? How indeed could there be such a dark and terrible organization as the GPU? It was all so very unlikely. And, in some strange way, Europe itself was unlikely. Jim always had the greatest difficulty in making himself see that Hitler was real, and one reason he had never subscribed to the Popular Front was that whenever he tried to conjure up the menace of fascism, somewhere deep down inside him a Yale undergraduate snickered.

  So that it was no problem at all for him to put his signature below Miss Sargent’s. Aside from everything else, there was a purely sporting question involved: you don’t accuse a man without giving him a chance to answer for himself. Of course Trotsky should be heard. He said as much to Miss Sargent and she smiled at him, and their Anglo-Saxon sense of fair play was warm for a moment between them—he could feel it in his stomach like a shot of whisky. All the shame of that other afternoon was gone suddenly, and he thought what a hell of a nice, straight, clear-eyed girl she was, after all.

  This sense of recognition, this spiritual handclasp, lasted only an instant, however, for as soon as she began to speak, her words tripped over each other, and he saw, with disappointment, that she was being intense about the matter. She said something about his “courage,” and he reddened and blinked his eyes and twisted his head from side to side, disavowing the virtue. Why, he thought impatiently, was it necessary for Marxists to talk in this high-flown way? There was no question of courage here; it was just a matter of common sense. And he anticipated no trouble. There was never any trouble if you handled these controversies in the right way, kept your head, took it easy, did not let the personal note intrude. It was unfortunate, he had been saying for years, that the radical movement had inherited Karl Marx’s cantankerous disposition together with his world-view. The “polemical” side of Marxism was its most serious handicap; here in America, especially, it went against the grain. He was not so simple as to subscribe to the mythology of the conference table (the class struggle was basic, inadjudicable), but surely on the left itself, there could be a little more friend
liness, a little more co-operativeness, a little more give-and-take, live-and-let-live and let-sleeping-dogs-lie. And it was really so easy. Take his own case: he had friends of every shade of opinion, argued with them freely, pulled no punches, but never had a quarrel. There had been the time when he had been obliged to throw a classmate out of his apartment for telling an anti-Semitic story, but the guy had come back the next day, sober, and apologized, and they had shaken hands on it, and the incident was forgotten. It only went to show. Unfortunately, however, the bad side of Marxism was precisely what attracted warped personalities of the type of Miss Sargent, who had long lists of people she did not speak to, and who delighted in grievance committees, boycotts, and letters to the editor. So that the evil multiplied a thousandfold. It was like an hereditary insanity that is perpetuated not only through the genes but by a process of selection in which emotional instability tends to marry emotional instability and you end up with the Jukes family. Or you begin with Marx’s carbuncles and you end with the Moscow trials.

  “Take it easy,” he said to the girl, patting her shoulder in token of dismissal.

  “I’ll try,” she answered, lightly enough, but as she turned to go, she flung at him that same sad, desperate smile that she had given him on the subway just before— He closed the door hastily behind her. For an instant it was as if he, too, had heard the chord that announces the return of a major theme, a sound heavy with dread and expectation. It was all going to begin again, the same thing, disguised, augmented, in a different key, but irrefragably the same thing. His stomach executed a peculiar drop, and this sensation, also, he remembered. It was the feeling you have on a roller-coaster at Coney Island, when the car has just started and you are sitting in the front seat, and you know for sure (you have been wondering up to this moment) that you do not want to ride on it. After the first dip, you lose this certainty (you would unquestionably die if you kept it), you may even enjoy the ride or suggest a second trip, become an aficionado of roller-coasters, discriminate nicely between the Cyclone at Palisades Park and the Thunderbolt at Revere Beach. You are, after all, a human being, with a hundred tricks up your sleeve. But at the very beginning you knew.

  However, there seemed at first no cause for alarm. The whole affaire Trotsky, as somebody called it, was going off according to schedule. Miss Sargent would come to the office every morning in a fever of indignation: mysterious strangers telephoned her at midnight, she received anonymous letters and marked copies of the Daily Worker, a publisher went back on a verbal agreement he had made with her, people cut her on the street, an invitation to a summer writers’ conference had been withdrawn. Jim listened to these stories with a tolerant smile: this was the usual sectarian hysteria. No doubt some of these things had actually happened to her (he would not go so far as to say she had made them up), but certainly she exaggerated, colored, dramatized, interpreted, with very little regard for probability. Nothing of the sort was happening to him. He was on the best of terms with his Stalinist friends, who even kidded him a little about his association with Trotsky; several publishers were after him to do a book; and he got an offer to join the staff of a well-known news magazine. If anything, his open break with the Party had enhanced his value.

  Moreover, he was enjoying himself enormously. He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural, since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard. The Moscow trials seemed admirably suited to the medium, and at any cocktail party that season, Jim could be found in a corner, wrangling pleasantly over Piatakov and Romm, the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen and the landing field at Oslo.

  However, here, as in the other arts, there were certain conventions to be observed: statistics were virtually de rigueur, but rhetoric was unseemly; heat was allowed, but not rancor. Jim himself obeyed all the rules with a natural, unconscious decorum, and in his own circle he felt perfectly secure in advocating Trotsky’s cause. It was at the Trotsky committee meetings that he had misgivings. An ill-assorted group of nervous people would sit in a bare classroom in the New School or lounge on studio couches in somebody’s apartment, listening to Schachtman, a little dark lawyer, demolish the evidence against the Old Man in Mexico. Schachtman’s reasoning Jim took no exception to (though it was, perhaps, almost too close); what bothered him was the tone of these gatherings. It seemed to him that every committee member wore an expression of injury, of self-justification, a funny, feminine, “put-upon” look, just as if they were all, individually, on trial. They nodded with emphasis at every telling point, with an air of being able to corroborate it from their own experience; ironical smiles of vindication kept flitting from face to face. And not only, Jim thought, did they behave like accused persons; they also behaved like guilty persons; the very anxiety of their demeanor would have convicted them before any jury. Watching them all, Jim would wish that he was the only guy in the world who took Trotsky’s side, and he would feel a strong sympathy with Leibowitz, who, at Decatur during the Scottsboro case, was supposed to have told the Communists to get the hell out of town. Sometimes, even, listening to Novack read aloud a fiery letter from the Old Man, he would wish that Trotsky himself could be eliminated, or at least held incommunicado, till the investigation was over. The Old Man did not understand Americans.

  And after the meeting had broken up, over coffee or highballs, the committee members would exchange anecdotes of persecution, of broken contracts, broken love affairs, isolation, slander, and betrayal. Jim listened with an astonished, impatient incredulity, and he and Nancy used to laugh late at night in their living room over the tales he brought home of Trotskyist suggestibility. They laughed kindly and softly—so as not to wake the baby—over their Ritz crackers and snappy cheese, and Nancy, full-bosomed, a little matronly already in her flowered house coat, seemed to Jim, by contrast with the people he had just left, a kind of American Athena, a true presiding deity of common sense.

  Yet occasionally, when he was alone, when an engagement had fallen through and he was left unoccupied, when Nancy was late getting home in the afternoon, he wondered. What if all these stories were true? What if even some of them were true? How did it happen that he was exempt from this campaign of terror? He had not compromised; he had spoken his mind. Did the others, the Stalinists, hope that he would “come around”? Or did they believe that terroristic methods would not work with him? This thought was pleasing and he would hold it at arm’s length for a moment, contemplating it, in a kind of Boy Scout daydream of torture and manly defiance, of Indians and the Inquisition, and the boy with his finger in the dike. But humor inevitably challenged this view; the dream dissolved; he was left puzzled. Sometimes, a sort of mild panic would follow. He would be overwhelmed by a sense of trespassing on the Trotsky case. It was as if he had come to dinner at the wrong address and the people were very polite and behaved as if he were expected; out of good breeding they would not allow him to explain his mistake, nor would they set him on his way to the right house. Or it was as if he were an extra who had got onto the stage in the wrong scene: the actors went on acting as if he were not there, and nobody furnished him with a pretext for an exit.

  Before long, he began to notice in himself a desire to compete, to have some hair-raising experience of his own and vie in martyrdom with the other members. He was ashamed of this wish; at the same time, it confirmed his skepticism. Here, he felt, was the key to the whole business; nobody wanted to be left out of a thing like this; it was the phenomenon that had been noted again and again at spiritualistic séances: people unconsciously began to co-operate with the medium and with each other, so that no one should seem to be deficient in psychic powers.

  This shrewd explanation might have satisfied him—if it had not been for John Dewey. . . . The adher
ence of the dean of American philosophy, which ought to have reassured Jim, worried him profoundly. It never failed to violate Jim’s sense of fitness to see this old man, the very apotheosis of the cracker-barrel spirit, deep in conversation with Schachtman or Stolberg, nodding his white head from time to time in acquiescence to some extravagant statement, smiling, agreeing, accepting, supporting. It was like finding your father in bed with a woman. And the most painful thing about it was that the old man should be so at home here, so much more at home than Jim could ever be. He takes to it like a duck to water, committee members would say, proudly and affectionately to each other, and Jim could not deny that this was so. Dewey truly appeared to have no reservations; you could not call that mild irony a reservation, for it was a mere habit, like his Yankee drawl, that was so ingrained, so natural, that it seemed to have no specific relation to the outside world, but only to his own, interior life. Whenever Jim heard that dry voice swell out at a mass meeting in anger and eloquence, he squirmed in his seat, not knowing whether to feel embarrassed for Dewey or for himself. The very kinship he felt with the old man served to deepen and define his own sense of alienation, as in a family the very resemblance that exists between the members serves to make more salient the individual differences. It was impossible, moreover, to doubt Dewey’s judgment, and when Jim saw that Dewey believed the stories of persecution (he had indeed been a little bit persecuted—“annoyed,” Dewey put it, himself), Jim, unwillingly, began to believe too.