Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Nancy was limited, but she was good. And she expected things of Jim. This was what drew him. Unlike the people in the Liberal office, unlike the radicals of all groups that he had been hobnobbing with, Nancy did not want Jim on any old terms. Nancy was not exacting, and yet there was an unwritten, unspoken contract between them. If she, on her side, had renounced all dreams of fortune and large success, he, on his side, was renouncing the right to poverty, loneliness, and despair. She was not to goad him up the social ladder, but he must never, never let her down. It was understood that he should not be pressed to go against his convictions; it was also understood that she must not go hungry. When he thought about them in the abstract, it seemed to him, now and then, that these guarantees were mutually incompatible, that Clause B was in eternal obstinate contradiction to Clause A. In practice, however, you could, if you were sufficiently agile, manage to fulfill them both at once. The job on the Liberal kept his conscience clean and brought the bottle of Grade A to the door every morning. Many a discord, he thought, which cannot be resolved in theoretical terms, in real life can be turned into perfect harmony; and his own marriage demonstrated to him once again the superiority of pragmatism to all foreign brands of philosophy.

  Still, he had misgivings. Sometimes it appeared as if his relation with Nancy were not testing his convictions so much as his powers of compromise. Their wedding had been a case in point. Nancy’s parents had wanted a church wedding, and Jim had wanted City Hall. What they had had was a summer wedding on the lawn with a radical clergyman from New York officiating. It was the same way with their choice of friends. Park Avenue and Fourteenth Street were both ruled out. The result was that the people who came to their cocktail parties, at which Nancy served good hors d’oeuvres and rather poor cocktails, were presentable radicals and unpresentable conservatives—men in radio, men in advertising, lawyers with liberal ideas, publishers, magazine editors, writers of a certain status who lived in the country. Every social assertion Nancy and Jim made carried its own negation with it, like the Hegelian thesis. Thus it was always being said by Nancy that someone was a Communist but a terribly nice man, while Jim was remarking that somebody else worked for Young and Rubicam but was astonishingly liberal. Every guest was a sort of qualified statement, and the Barnetts’ parties, in consequence, were a little dowdy, a little timid, in a queer way (for they were held in Greenwich Village) a little suburban. For some reason, nobody ever came to the Barnetts’ house without his wife, unless she were in the hospital having a baby. They came systematically in pairs, and, once in the apartment, they would separate, as though by decree, and the men would talk, standing up, against the mantelpiece, while the women chattered on the sofa. The same people behaved quite differently at other parties; but here it was as if they were under a compulsion to act out, in a kind of ritualistic dance, the dualism of the Barnetts’ household, the dualism of their own natures.

  Jim recognized that his social life was dull, but he did not object to this. He worked hard during the day; he was alert and gregarious; he had a great many appointments and a great many duties. There were people who believed that he used Nancy as a sedative, to taper off his day, as some men take a boring book to bed with them, in order to put themselves to sleep. Yet this theory, which was popular in the Liberal office, was not at all true. Jim loved Nancy with an almost mystical devotion, for Nancy was the Average Intelligent Woman, the Mate. If there was narcissism in this love, there were gratitude and dependence, too, for Jim had a vague notion that Nancy had saved him from something, saved him from losing that precious gift of his, the common touch, kept him close to what he called the facts. Some businessmen say humorously of their wives, “She keeps my nose to the grindstone.” Of Nancy, Jim was fond of saying, “She keeps my feet on the ground.” The very fact that his domestic life was wholesome and characterless, like a child’s junket, was a source of satisfaction to him. He had a profound conviction that this was the way things ought to be, that this was life. In the socialist millennium, of course, everything would be different: love would be free and light as air. Actually, this aspect of the socialist millennium filled Jim with alarm; he hoped that in America they would not have to go so far as to break up the family; it would be enough if every man could have the rock-bottom, durable, practical things, the things Nancy cared about so very, very much.

  Moreover, the insipidity of his domestic life was, in a sense, its moral justification. Jim could think of the poor and the homeless now, and conscience no longer stabbed him, for he had purchased his immunity in the true American Way. Unable to renounce money, he had renounced the enjoyment of it. He had sold his birthright to gaiety for the mess of pottage on the dinner table and the right to hold his head up when he walked through the poorer districts in his good brown suit. Christ could forgive himself for being God only by becoming Man, just as a millionaire can excuse his riches by saying, “I was a poor boy once myself.” Jim, in a dim, half-holy way, felt that with his marriage he had taken up the cross of Everyman. He, too, was undergoing an ordeal, and the worried look he had always worn deepened and left its mark around his eyes, as if anxiety, hovering over him like a bird, had at last found its natural perch, its time-ordained foothold in bills and babies and dietary disturbances.

  Jim was quite sure that his marriage was “real.” It pinched him now and then, and that, to his mind, was the test. What disturbed him at times was the fact that it had been so extraordinarily easy to reconcile his political beliefs with his bread and butter. There ought to have been a great tug of war with Nancy at one end and Karl Marx at the other, but the job on the Liberal constituted a bridge between the opposing forces, a bridge which he strode across placidly every day, but which he nevertheless suspected of insubstantiality. There was something unnatural about a job that rewarded you quite handsomely for expressing your honest opinions; it was as if you were being paid to keep your virtue when you ought to be paid to lose it. More and more often it seemed to Jim that, if he was “facing facts” at home, in the office he was living in a queer fairy-tale country where everything was comfortable and nothing true. He might, however, have smothered this disquieting notion if he had not heard somebody else put it into words.

  It happened at tea in the library one afternoon, when Jim had been married only a short time. Jim did not ordinarily come in for tea, but there was a new girl in the office, an assistant to the literary editor, and at four o’clock, the managing editor had poked her head in at Jim’s door and said in a sprightly voice, “You must come and meet our gay divorcee.” Jim had no interest in divorcees, and it seemed to him that the managing editor was being a little corny, as he put it, about the facts of life; nevertheless, he obeyed. When he shambled into the library, the girl was sitting across the room in a wing chair, with a cup of tea in her lap. She was telling anecdotes about Reno in a rather breathless voice, as if she were afraid of being interrupted, though everyone in the room was listening to her in fascinated silence. There was something about the scene that Jim did not like, and he went over to the shelves and took down a book.

  He had seen the girl before—he knew this at once—somewhere, in a bright-red evening dress that looked too old for her. It must have been at a prom or a football dance at Yale. Suddenly he remembered the whole thing—he had noticed her and thought that she was good-looking and a little bit fast (she had worn long gold earrings), and he had cut in on her without being introduced, just to see what she would say. To his astonishment, she had talked to him about poetry; the mask of the enchantress had dropped from her face and she had seemed excited and happy. In the middle of it, the man she had come with had tapped him on the shoulder with a grumpy air, and danced off with her. Jim had watched her from the sidelines for a little while, admitting to himself that she was having too good a time, or rather, that she was having the wrong kind of good time: she was not floating from man to man as a proper belle should, but talking, laughing, posing, making part of the effort herself. He ought not to have cut i
n on her without asking her man or some other person to introduce him; yet she had created the sort of lawless atmosphere that provoked such behavior. He did not cut in on her again, and he had never been able to make up his mind whether he liked her or not.

  Here she was again, looking rather prettier and younger, almost virginal, he thought, in a black dress with a white organdy ruffle at the neck; and yet again she was somehow out of bounds, and here in the library as on the dance floor she was having too much of a success.

  “This is Miss Sargent,” the managing editor said, taking his arm and leading him up to the girl’s chair.

  Jim smiled vaguely.

  “I liked your last article,” she said, “the one about the smooth-paper magazines.”

  “Speaking of that,” said Labor and Industry, “do you know that Trotsky has been writing for Liberty?”

  “Writing against Russia,” put in the foreign-news man, who was sympathetic with the Communist party.

  The managing editor bit her lips. “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed plaintively, like a mother who has lost control of her children, “I wish he wouldn’t do that! It’s such a shame to divide our forces now, when we need unity so badly.”

  The cup rattled on the new girl’s saucer. When Jim looked down he could see that she had spilled her tea. There was a brown pool in the saucer, and her cup dripped as she picked it up again.

  “It was just an historical piece,” she said stiffly.

  Several of the women exchanged smiles. “She’s supposed to be a Trotskyist,” the advertising manager, who was good-looking, whispered to Jim.

  “Is that all?” said the foreign-news man. “It’s simply a funny coincidence, I suppose, that it appeared in the place where it could furnish the most ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet Union?”

  “You would have been delighted to run it in the Liberal, of course,” said the girl with an ironical smile.

  The managing editor cut in. “Well, no, we wouldn’t. We have published things by Trotsky, but I think he goes too far. Solidarity on the left is so important at this moment. We can’t afford self-criticism now.”

  “What do you think, Jim?” said Labor and Industry.

  Jim cocked his head and considered the question. “I don’t agree with Helen,” he said finally, nodding toward the managing editor. “Any movement that doesn’t dare hear the truth about itself hasn’t got much on the ball, in my opinion. But I would say that you have to be careful where you print that truth. You want it to be read by your friends, not by your enemies. I think we should have published Trotsky’s piece in the Liberal. On the other hand, I think Trotsky made a mistake in giving it to Liberty. He might just as well have given it to Hearst.”

  The girl drew a deep breath. She looked stubborn and angry. All at once, Jim was sure that he liked her, for she was going to fight back, he saw, and it took courage to do that on your first day in a new job. He wondered, inspecting her clothes and trying to price them, whether she needed the money.

  “It’s a delicate problem,” she began, speaking slowly, as if she were trying to control her feelings and, at the same time in that stilted way that the Trotskyists had, as if they all, like the Old Man, spoke English with an accent, “and it’s a problem that none of you, or I, have had to face, because none of us are serious about revolution. You talk,” she turned to Jim, “as if it were a matter between you and God, or you and your individual, puritan conscience. You people worry all the time about your integrity, like a debutante worrying about her virginity. Just how far can she go and still be a good girl? Trotsky doesn’t look at it that way. For Trotsky it’s a relation between himself and the masses. How can he get the truth to the masses, and how can he keep himself alive in order to do that? You say that it would have been all right if he had brought the piece out in the Liberal. It would have been all among friends, like a family scandal. But who are these friends? Do you imagine that the Liberal is read by the masses? On the contrary, Liberty is read by the masses, and the Liberal is read by a lot of self-appointed delegates for the masses whose principal contact with the working class is a colored maid.”

  “The trade-union people read the Liberal,” said the managing editor, her square, plump face flushing indignantly.

  “Who? Dubinsky? Sidney Hillman?” She pronounced the names contemptuously. “I don’t doubt it. The point is, though, that you—” she turned again to Jim—“you admit that Trotsky is telling the truth, but you think that nobody is good enough to hear it except a select little circle of intellectuals and Liberal readers. What snobbism! Naturally,” she went on, “you have to be careful about how you write the article. You have to write it so that anybody who reads it with the minimum of attention will see that what you are saying to them about the Soviet Union is quite a different thing from what the editors of Liberty have been saying to them. You know, you might not think so, but it’s quite as possible for a revolutionist to make use of Hearst as it is for Hearst to make use of a revolutionist. Lenin went through Germany in a sealed train: the Germans thought they were using him, but he knew he was using the Germans. This Liberty business is the same thing on a smaller scale. The reactionaries have furnished Trotsky with a vehicle by which he can reach the masses. What would you have him do? Hold up his hands like a girl, and say, ‘Oh no! Think of my reputation! I can’t accept presents from strange gentlemen!’ ” Jim laughed out loud, and one or two of the older men snickered. “Besides,” she continued, dropping her voice a little, “there’s the problem of survival. The liberal magazines haven’t shown any desire to stake Trotsky to an orgy of free speech; his organization is poor; would you like it better if he starved?”

  She had finished, and she let her breath out in a tired exhalation, as if she had reached the top of a long flight of stairs. Nobody answered her, and after a moment she picked up her tea cup and began to drink with an air of intense concentration. This ostrich maneuver was classically unsuccessful, for everyone in the room continued to watch her, knowing, just as Jim did, that the tea must be stone-cold. At last, one of the older men spoke.

  “Well,” he said, with a sort of emaciated heartiness, “Trotsky must be a better man than I gave him credit for, to have such a pretty advocate.” The remark dropped like a stone into the pool of silence, setting up echoes of itself, little ripples of sound that spread and spread and finally died away.

  Jim stopped her on her way out of the office.

  “Ride down in the elevator with me,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he began as they stood waiting for the car, “you were absolutely right this afternoon. But you won’t last long here.”

  “I know it,” she said wryly, getting into the elevator. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Is it true,” he asked, “that you’re a Trotskyite?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “I’m not even political,” she said.

  “But why—?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I do admire Trotsky. He’s the most romantic man in modern times. And you all sounded so smug.” She paused to think. They were standing on the street in the autumn twilight now. “Working on a magazine like the Liberal does make you smug. You keep patting yourself on the back because you’re not working for Hearst. It’s like a lot of kept women feeling virtuous because they’re not streetwalkers. Oh yes, you’re being true to your ideals; and the kept women are being true to Daddy. But what if Daddy went broke, or the ideals ceased to pay a hundred and a quarter a week? What then? You don’t know and you’d rather not think about it. So when something like Trotsky’s writing for Liberty comes up, it makes you nervous, because it reminds you of the whole problem, and you are all awfully quick to say that never, under any circumstances, would you do that.”

  “Yes,” Jim said, “I see what you mean. But aren’t you being a little romantic? Aren’t you trying to say that we all ought to starve for our convictions?”

  Miss Sargent smiled.

  “I won’t say that,
because if I said it, then I ought to go and do it, and I don’t want to. But I do think, somehow, that it ought to be a little bit harder than it is for you Liberal editors. It generally is, for people who are really independent. Society makes them scramble in one way or another. The thing is, Mr. Wendell did scramble, not financially, because he inherited money, but morally and probably socially, a long time ago. And you people are living off the moral income of that fight, just as you are living off his money income.”

  “What about you?” said Jim.

  “Oh, me, too,” said the girl. “But as you say, I won’t last long. Neither will you, I hope. The Liberal is all right as a stopgap, or as a job to support you while you’re writing a book; but the Liberal is not a way of life. If you begin to think that, you’re finished.”

  “What about Mr. Wendell?” said Jim. “It’s a way of life for him.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wendell! Mr. Wendell is a crusader. Of course, it’s a way of life for him. An honorable one. But the Liberal puts him in the red every year, while it puts you and me in the black. That’s one reason he’s managed to be serious for seventy years—every word costs him something. The good things in life are not free.”

  “Public opinion is against you there,” said Jim.

  “Maybe. Well, I must go.” She hesitated a moment. “How does the old man feel about the paper?”

  “Worried.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Like a self-made man who’s tried to give his children all the advantages he didn’t have. And then they turn out badly, and he can’t understand it. You prove my point for me. Well, good-bye.”

  He walked to the subway with her, and all the way home he thought about the conversation. He was very much excited and disturbed. At home he told Nancy what had happened.