Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Now the ground was cut from under him. This was perhaps the first time in his life that he was subscribing to something which he could not check against his own experience or psychology, which his own experience and psychology seemed, in fact, to contradict. There was no subjective correlative; he was no longer his own man. Yet once he had conceded the point, the evidence began rushing in at him. A hundred incidents that he had forgotten or ignored or discounted marshaled themselves before his eyes. He remembered the prominent names that had dropped off the committee’s letterhead, the queer, defamatory stories he had encountered everywhere about members of the committee, the books unaccountably rejected by publishers. What was more devastating, he saw now (a thing he had denied a month before) that the Stalinist campaign of intimidation had already had its effect on the Liberal’s policy.

  He read down the contributors’ column one day and found it a roster of new names—youngsters just out of college, professors from obscure universities, elderly, non-political writers who had been boasting for years that they did not “take sides” and who were now receiving their reward. It was hard to know exactly when they had come in, but suddenly they were all there. The whole complexion of the magazine had unobtrusively changed. It was not, precisely, that it had become Stalinist; rather, like some timid and adaptive bird, it was endeavoring to make itself as neutral-colored as possible and fade discreetly into the surrounding landscape. The whole process, he saw, had been a negative one. A few months earlier, Mr. Wendell had resigned—on account of his age, it was said officially. The paper had been made two pages shorter, there were more cartoons, more straight reportage. Shorter articles in larger type, not so much political and aesthetic theory. Articles had been limited to two thousand words apiece; the book-review section had been cut in half and a humorous column had been added. Nothing you could put your finger on, yet by these innocent measures the paper had effectively purged itself of Trotskyism, for the fact was that the Trotskyists, anarchists, and other dissidents did run to political and aesthetic theory, to articles more than two thousand words long, to book reviews of unpopular novelists and poets.

  That same afternoon, he observed for the first time the machinery of exclusion. He came into the literary editor’s office; it was her day for seeing book reviewers. A young anti-Stalinist reviewer was standing despondently in front of the shelves, which usually overflowed with books (for the literary editor was rather inefficient about getting things reviewed on time), but which were now unwontedly, desolately empty. Eight or nine popular novels with garish jackets leaned against each other in one corner. The young man had been asking for a new book—Jim did not catch the name. The literary editor shook her head; unfortunately the book had just gone out to a professor at Northwestern. He mentioned another title; that, too, had been assigned—to an instructor at Berkeley. He mumbled something about an article on Silone; the literary editor was not encouraging; she wondered whether you could do justice to Silone in fifteen hundred words; the paper was not printing many general articles; she could not promise anything.

  She got up from her desk and wandered toward the shelves, gesturing vaguely at the popular novels. “Do us a note of a hundred words on one of these—if you feel like it,” she said negligently. The young man shook his head and shambled out of the office; it was perfectly clear that he would not return. The literary editor murmured something pettish about the insularity of New York intellectuals, and Miss Sargent, who had been sitting all the while with averted head, looked up.

  “On Broadway they call that the brush-off,” she said.

  The literary editor affected not to hear.

  Miss Sargent continued, looking straight at Jim, speaking in a louder voice.

  “Have you heard? I’m being transferred to Labor and Industry. On account of the curtailment of the book-review section—which we all deplore—my duties are being assumed by a stenographer.”

  “Oh, Margaret,” said the literary editor, “you’re becoming perfectly impossible. I should think you’d be glad to be out of this. I know I would.”

  The girl did not answer, but kept on looking at Jim. It was impossible to misread her gaze, which held in it something challenging and at the same time something feminine and suppliant. He met her eyes for an instant, then shook his head hopelessly.

  “You girls,” he began, intending to say something humorous and pacific, but he could not finish his sentence. He shook his head again, and retreated from the office. As soon as he got into the corridor, however, the truncated conversation continued in his mind. That book reviewer, said a firm light soprano, that unfortunate boy, with his bad complexion, his blue mesh shirt open at the throat, was Stalin’s victim just as surely as the silicosis sufferers who had recently been displayed at a Congressional investigation were the victims of industrial capitalism. What the hell, his own voice answered, the young man was probably no great shakes as a writer (he looked like a punk); it was not a question of life and death; the kid was on the WPA and the Liberal’s check could do no more than buy him a few beers at the Jumble Shop. Ah yes, the first voice resumed, martyrs are usually unappetizing personally; that is why people treat them so badly; for every noble public man, like Trotsky, you must expect a thousand miserable little followers, but there is really more honor in defending them than in defending the great man, who can speak for himself. His own voice did not reply, and a visual illusion succeeded the auditory one. He saw the figure of the book reviewer splashed on a poster, like the undernourished child in the old Belgian relief stickers; underneath a caption thundered: WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

  That was the first time. Soon it became a regular thing with Jim to talk to Miss Sargent in his mind. The moment the lights were out at night, the cool, light voice would begin its indictment, and his own voice, grumbling, expostulating, denying, would take up the defense. And in the daytime, Jim would find himself thinking up arguments, saving them, telling himself, “I must be sure to mention this,” just as if it were a real conversation he was going home to. He remembered enough of his psychology courses to know that he was not having hallucinations. Though the voice sounded perfectly natural, he did not hear it with his physical ear, but only with his mind. Moreover, the conversations were, in some sense, voluntary; that is, he did not like them, he did not want to have them, yet they did not precisely impose themselves on him, for it was he, unwillingly, of his own free will, who was making them up.

  Nevertheless, he was alarmed. It was screwy, he told himself, to spend your time talking to someone who was not there. At the very least, it showed that the person had a hold on you—a disagreeable, unnerving idea. In Jim’s world, nobody had a “hold” on anybody else. Yet the fact was (and he had to face it) he was not in the driver’s seat any more. For almost as long as he could remember there had been two selves, a critical principled self, and an easy-going, follow-the-crowd, self-indulgent, adaptable self. These two characters had debated comfortably in bed, had “taken stock,” defined their differences, maintained an equilibrium. But it was as if, during the Moscow trials, the critical principled self had thrown up the sponge; it had abdicated, and a girl’s voice had intruded to take over its function. At some point in those recent months, Jim had ceased to be his own severest critic, but criticism, far from being stilled, had grown more obdurate. When we pass from “I ought to do this” to “You think I ought to do this,” it seems to us at first that we have weakened the imperative; actually, by externalizing it, we have made it unanswerable, for it is only ourselves that we can come to terms with. And where Jim had once had to meet specific objections from his better nature, he was now confronted with what he imagined to be a general, undiscriminating hostility, a spirit of criticism embodied in the girl that was capricious, feminine, and absolutely inscrutable, so that he went about feeling continually guilty without knowing just what it was he had done. It haunted him that if he could anticipate every objection, he would be safe, but there was no telling what this strange gir
l might find fault with, and the very limitation of his knowledge of her made the number of possible objections limitless.

  He longed to act, he told himself, yet the vague enormity of his situation furnished an apparently permanent excuse for inaction. He believed that he was waiting for an issue big enough to take a stand on, but now all issues seemed flimsy, incapable of supporting his increasing weight. In a curious way, his ego had become both shrunken and enlarged; his sense of inadequacy had made him self-important. He began to talk a good deal about “petty” squabbles, tempests in teapots, molehills and mountains. If he were to resign from the Liberal, he said to himself, he would have to do so in his own way, for his own reasons. To resign on behalf of some Eighth Street intellectual would be to accept that intellectual as his ally, to step off the high ground of the Liberal into the noisome marsh of sectarian politics. And, above all, Jim feared that terrible quicksand, which would surely, he thought, swallow him up alive, if he so much as set a foot over the edge. Here was the paradox: though his immunity from the Stalinist attacks was the immediate cause of his sense of shame (to be spared, ostentatiously, in a general massacre is a distinction reserved for spies, old men, children, and imbeciles), Jim nevertheless found it temperamentally impossible to venture directly into the melee. What he sought was some formula by which he could demonstrate his political seriousness without embroiling himself in any way—a formula which would, in fact, perpetuate his anomalous situation. It was an irony that Jim did not perceive. He only knew that he must postpone action (for the moment, at least), while he yearned at the same time to be acted upon.

  If the managing editor would only fire him, for example, he would be free, and nothing he did afterwards could be held against him. He might get a job in an advertising agency, or on one of the news magazines; he would be quit at last of leftist politics, and no one could blame him. “Jim Barnett lost his job over that Trotsky business,” they would say. “The poor guy is working for Newsreel now.” The picture of himself as a victim of circumstances, an object of public sympathy, did not displease him; in fact what his heart cried for was some such outcome for his dilemma, an outcome in which his own helplessness should be underlined.

  The managing editor, however, seemed not at all disposed to give him this friendly push, and his self-regard would not permit him simply to disengage himself from the struggle as he might have done from a street brawl. In some way, he felt, he was condemned to “stick it out,” perhaps indefinitely, and to pay for his non-intervention by sleeplessness, indigestion, and outbursts of irritability with Nancy.

  Nevertheless, when the moment came, Jim found it perfectly simple to quit. The managing editor came into his office one afternoon and told him that in accordance with the magazine’s new budget, Miss Sargent would have to go. It was purely a matter of seniority; she was the newest employee; it was only fair that she should be the first, et cetera.

  “I wish it hadn’t worked out that way,” she continued, biting her lips and speaking in a confidential tone. “You know how excitable she is, Jim. She’ll be sure to think that it has something to do with politics. That letter, you know . . .”

  Jim smiled grimly. The Liberal, after months of silence, had endorsed the Moscow trials, and “that letter” was a denunciation of the magazine. It had been signed by Miss Sargent, by a number of ex-contributors to the Liberal, and by Jim himself.

  “But, of course,” the managing editor went on, “I forgot! You signed it too. So that shows . . .” She spread out her hands, leaving the sentence unfinished. “You know I would never deny anybody the right of criticism. I’m glad you spoke out if you felt that way. And Miss Sargent, of course, too. And the fact that you’re continuing on the paper speaks for itself. Still . . .” She paused. “It’s the effect on her I’m worried about. She’s too bitter already. There’s too much bitterness in the radical movement. I think we agree about that.”

  She was silent for a moment. Jim waited.

  “Oh, Jim,” she burst out at length. “I wish you would break it to her. Explain it to her. She’d take it all right coming from you, since you agree with each other politically. You could make her understand . . .”

  “You go to hell, Helen,” Jim said. The words came as naturally as a reflex and even in his first joy, Jim found time to tell himself that it had been morbid to worry about the matter beforehand. You waited until the right time came and then you acted, without thought, without plan, and your character—your character that you had suspected so unjustly—did not betray you.

  The managing editor gasped. Jim took his brown coat and hat from the stand and walked deliberately out of the office. He went down the street to a bar he knew and ordered a Scotch and soda. When he was halfway through the drink, he stepped into the phone booth and called up Miss Sargent at the office.

  “Come on down here,” he said, “and help me write a letter of resignation.”

  He went back to wait for her at his table, and suddenly he found himself thinking of a book he would like to write. It would deal with the transportation industries and their relation to the Marxist idea of the class struggle. He thought of the filling stations strung out over America, like beads on the arterial highways, and of the station attendants he had seen in the Southwest, each man lonely as a lighthouse keeper in his Socony or his Shell castle: how were you going to organize them as you could organize workers in a factory? He thought also of the chain-store employees as the frontiersmen of a new kind of empire: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company—the name had the ring of the age of exploration; it brought to mind the Great South Sea Bubble. Monopoly capitalism was deploying its forces, or, rather, it was obliging its historic enemy, the workers, to deploy theirs. As financial and political power became more concentrated, industry was imperceptibly being decentralized. The CIO might find the answer; on the other hand, perhaps the principle of industrial unionism was already superannuated. There was a great book here somewhere, an important contribution, and now he would have the time to write it. It would have been out of the question of course, had he stayed on the Liberal. . . .

  “Oh boy!” he said to himself, revolving the book in his mind, marveling at it, accepting it as a sort of heavenly tip for services rendered. He clacked his tongue appreciatively against the roof of his mouth. The bartender looked over at him in surprise, and Jim chuckled to himself. He was tremendously elated. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Nancy, and at the same time, he felt a large tenderness toward the girl who was even now making her way toward him through the snowy streets. He owed it all to her, of course. Hadn’t she told him from the very beginning that the Liberal was a dead end, that if he wanted to make anything of himself, he would have to get off it? And it was on account of her, in the end, that he had been able to do it. If they had not decided to fire her, he might never have . . . He stopped short in his reverie, momentarily sobered. In his excitement he had almost forgotten that she had lost her job. Here he was, ready to begin his real work, but for her the prospect was not bright. No doubt she would be glad to hear that she had made such a nuisance of herself that the managing editor could brook it no longer; there would be the surge of leftist piety, the joy of self-immolation. But, practically speaking, it was going to be hard on her. He himself had money saved, and, with Nancy’s income, he could get along well enough. The girl was not so fortunately equipped: he could guess without asking that she had not saved a cent (she was probably in debt), and it would not be easy for her to find another job. She is going to have a tough time, he said to himself. And she was not going to like it. She would dramatize her position for a week or so, but when it came down to it, she was not going to enjoy being poor, for Trotsky or anybody else. The thought of the discomfort she would have to endure bit into his happiness; it annoyed him that she should behave with such irresponsibility. She had no right, he told himself, to play for high stakes when she could not afford to lose; it was not ethical; it made the other players at the table uncomfortable. Al
ready, in absentia, she had robbed him of a little of his joy.

  With a slight effort he brought himself back to the projected book. The excitement revived as he imagined the gray winter afternoons in the public library, the notes on white cards in the varnished yellow box, the olive-green filing cabinet he would install in the spare room. “A second Das Kapital,” a voice within him murmured, but though he stilled it peremptorily, he could not help but grin in an awkward, lopsided way, as though someone had paid him an absurd, delicious compliment. The strange thing was, it was the girl’s voice that had spoken; perhaps, he thought, in years to come, she would read the book and would say that to him. By the time the door swung open and she stepped quickly into the bar, he felt very much pleased with her.