Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  In the real world, the war still held off: a letter arrived from Monteverdi—he was alive but in hiding. “The only hope,” he wrote them, “is in small insurgent communities, peripheral movements . . .” Katy Norell wept, with shining St. Joan eyes, as the letter was read aloud on the verandah by Francis, the minister, and the realists averted their glance but maintained a respectful attitude, like unbelievers in a church. “Oh, dear, we haven’t done enough!” cried Katy desperately, when it was finished, banging her knuckles on a table and confronting them all with this self-indictment. It seemed to her that Monteverdi relied on them to spread the message abroad, and that they had failed him by becoming merely self-subsistent; the others, however saddened or thoughtful, felt no impulse to join her in a Domine non sum dignus which, for all its sincerity, had so clearly personal a reference; she was comparing herself, with all her shortcomings and weaknesses, to the great work the letter suggested to her. She wept because she was not perfect. “I don’t know, Katy,” answered Susan, easily. “It seems to me we’ve done mighty well.”

  An unsettled relation existed between these two learned women, in which there was a good deal of rational accord without sympathy. Monteverdi’s letter had not excited Susan, except in so far as it contained good news of himself; his remarks about small groups, peripheral action, et cetera, she found rather unimpressive—naturally, he would put faith in such movements; why not; he was an anarchist. A distrust of libertarian doctrines had stuck with her from her Marxist days. Over a period of years, she had watched her friends, one by one, having made the break from Marxism, plunge with exhilaration into Proudhon and Tolstoy, but her normally curious nature felt no inclination to share an experience so uncorseted. “That side” of the colony made her intelligence squirm, and her silence was a protest which, in her opinion, should have acted as a constraint on others, but which did not at all seem to do so, so that she felt obligated from time to time to put in an official disclaimer, when she really should have preferred—or so she daily assured herself—to bracket the matter altogether. She thought that it should have been plain enough to Katy and her associates that she, rather violently, did not wish to “go in” for Monteverdi’s ideas, lest they destroy her liking for him—he himself, in former days, when they used to meet in company, had shown a greater delicacy and seemed, by his shyness, almost to co-operate in her reluctance to having exposed to her the contents of his mind. Susan’s small-town courtesy prompted her to ignore, even in private, what did not bear thinking about. She read Tolstoy, of course, but a certain virginal decorum preserved her from his ideas. “I look on him primarily as a novelist,” she would demur when someone tried to wring from her at least an awareness of his message. Exercising what she considered to be the same charity on behalf of her friends, she strove not to acquaint herself with the details of their enthusiasm, to speak of it, when necessary as a stage which they would outgrow, or a species of mental illness from which they might recover. Indeed, she hoped that by ignoring it she could make this “phase” pass, and resented the unawareness of the Monteverdians which seemed, on its side, to take no account of her abstentions. “Why, that sounds kind of religious to me,” she would reply uncomfortably if obliged to listen to Katy’s translations of the Founder’s thought; so her own aunt had spoken, doubtfully shaking her head and laying down her sewing, when Susan brought up arguments in favor of racial equality—“Sounds kind of communistic . . .” Thus the purists’ persistence and the native shrewdness and precaution which made her look anxiously on ideas as something one could catch by contagion had kept her for some time from thinking at all about political questions which she left now to Taub, whom she considered her intellectual superior, though she disagreed with him sharply in everything that mattered to her most. To Katy, a natural proselytizer readily infected with enthusiasms, Susan’s unwillingness to change masters was a source of continual disappointment. That Susan could remain unmoved by a call so clearly heard by herself, drove her to a teacher’s despair, and her habit of incessant comparison led her at once to inquire whether Susan was not more admirable, for being less facile in feeling, than she was. Anything short of perfect communion depressed Katy, and Susan’s way of taking everything that she said literally, without the liberality that interprets and supplies feeling-tone made her imagine herself misunderstood and discovered simultaneously; and it was true enough, as a matter of fact, that Susan did not greatly care for Katy while giving her precisely her due.

  Other letters besides Monteverdi’s began to come from Europe. The manifestos of the colony had apparently been circulating through the yet-unoccupied countries, and from all sorts of persons, mostly poor, middle-aged, and obscure, requests for information, for literature, and above all, for passage-money arrived. Leo Raphael, reading these, charmed by the strange locutions and the naïveté of the demands, began to conceive a vast plan for a peace-fleet, to be financed by the United States Government, that would carry away from Europe all those who rejected for themselves a totalitarian way of life and who yet were unwilling to risk the terrible cost to humanity of another war for democracy. He saw a poetic vision of a continent left empty before the advancing invader—the silent factories, and houses, the anti-aircraft guns, the museums, waiting like a shell to frustrate the will of the victor, who would find on hand to receive him only those who welcomed his tyranny. This version of the scorched-earth policy had also, as he pointed out at a general meeting held on the Fourth of July in the dining room, the merit of practicality. It would be actually cheaper for the United States to send over empty ships to bring back the peace-loving passengers than to send, as it was doing, steel, planes, bombs, guns, to governments which were, in many cases, too timorous and unstable to use them, or to send wheat, corn, and fats to keep alive populations whose life-expectancy, clearly, was a matter of weeks or months. “The armaments we are now shipping will simply fall into the hands of the enemy. If we must feed democratic Europe, it is cheaper to do it here. If we must fight, we will do it here, also supposing that we are invaded. They ask us to divide the world with them in a policy that is called appeasement. Let us agree to do this, but only in a geographical sense. Let them keep the geography of their hemisphere and we will take the populations. Canada,” he continued, warming, “will clearly be willing to co-operate. Already in the last war, there was talk of moving the British Government to Ottawa. We will establish socialism,” he went on, as the implications of his thought became fuller, and his dark eyes lit up with a fanatic love for the beautiful; he saw the American continent from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan, blue, white, golden, productive, inhabited by all the nations, each speaking its own tongue and cultivating its own gardens, the Italians in the California vineyards, the French in the moist valley of the St. Lawrence, the English on the ranches of Wyoming and in the councils of Washington and Ottawa, the Spaniards in Peru and Mexico . . . “Socialism,” he explained, “will be a necessity. The task cannot be accomplished without it. We will create an internal market in an economy of abundance. This will be the new imperialism, full production for peace.”

  He drew a deep breath.

  “This country,” he continued, more quietly, “has one tradition that is viable. It has been from the earliest times a haven of refuge from tyranny. The Puritans in New England, the Catholics in Maryland, the Irish peasants oppressed by the landlords, the victims of ’48, Russian Jews fleeing military service, the refugees from Mussolini and Hitler.” Harold Sidney coughed. “What is this, Leo, a Fourth of July speech?” he demanded with a self-conscious laugh. “Sssh,” put in Susan, peremptorily, “I want to hear what he has to say.”

  “All our messianic wars,” Leo explained, realizing that the word imperialism and the citations from American history were having a misleading effect, “have been fiascos. We have mistaken our role. We cannot carry democracy abroad with military expeditions or food shipments. We can only receive it here, when it comes to us looking for entrance. America is ideally a harbor, a
state of the utmost receptivity. It is not our role to lead, but to be open. America, I imagine, if this plan can be put into effect, will disappear, at least as we know it. America is only a vessel, waiting to be filled, a preparation for something that has not yet happened. That is what we all have been sensing in the air, ever since we were children, a restless, bemused expectancy of an event that will come to stay with us, like a visitor. I remember,” he went on, “those summer afternoons on a lake in New Jersey, with a still haze floating over everything and a phonograph playing somewhere, and a row boat drifting in the water, as if time itself were pausing, just on the edge of the incredible. I express myself very badly,” he interpolated, slipping into a more ordinary voice.

  “Never mind your autobiography, Leo,” called Macdermott, laughing. “We get you. Go on. What do you propose?”

  “That should be clear,” said Leo. “I propose a United States of Europe, to be constituted in the Western Hemisphere, with a system of joint government by all the member nations. A United States of Europe in Exile, to be made up, not of politicians, but of ordinary people and intellectuals. I leave the details to you,” he added, winking broadly, and sat down.

  “Supposing they don’t want to come, Leo?” insinuated John Aloysius Brown, with such an affected air of smiling and subtle scholasticism, that no one paid any heed to what was really a sensible objection.

  “Hear, hear!” shouted Joe, silencing him and jumping dynamically from his seat. Everything half-articulate in himself, his humanitarian feeling, his Americanism, his Jewish sense of the melting-pot, his respect at the same time for a variety of cultures, with each man worshipping his own gods without interference, he saw suddenly clothed in glory by the poet’s gift of expression. The tears stood in his eyes as he considered the beauty and simplicity of this idea and the lives it might have saved if someone had only thought of it sooner. “You’ve got a great business head, my boy,” he declared. “Bring the consumer to the goods, that’s telling ’em.” His admiration for Leo’s plan paid full tribute to its practicality, but this implied no derogation of its idealistic intent. “The internal market,” he repeated, wonderingly. “That does it!” “Think of the housing developments,” someone else put in, half-seriously. But Joe was not joking. “Yes,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “There’s a billion dollars’ worth of business right there.” He felt as though this were the moment that had been promised him from the instant he first heard of Utopia and perhaps from the instant of his birth. His day of fulfilment had come, and if he himself, like Moses, were never to see the Land of Promise, he at any rate tonight had glimpsed it from this mountain-top, like Moses on the mountain of Nebo. In all his weeks in the colony, this was the first truly Utopian suggestion he had heard.

  “Not bad,” said Taub, concedingly, when the business man went to press him for his opinion; they had been friends for nearly three weeks. “Not bad?” cried Joe. “What are you talking about? It’s great.” Taub protruded his full lower lip, reflecting. “An interesting propaganda scheme,” he admitted. “Propaganda!” Joe demanded, unbelievingly, his grey face paling and contracting, as though with a physical pain. He made a short aggressive movement toward Taub, and Susan believed for a second he would strike him. “It’s something to work toward,” she explained, in a soothing voice. “No congressman would ever vote for such a thing,” she elucidated. “You know how shamefully they acted about the DPs.”

  “Pressure,” said Joe. “Promotion. Private enterprise could help.” He turned the idea over in his mind. “Business is pretty backward,” he twinkled an eye at his audience, “but we’re the boys that get things done.” He turned suddenly to Leo, who had begun to move about restlessly, like a performer who feels out of his element, now that the show is over. “There was a little too much socialism in that talk of yours,” he remonstrated playfully. “Listen to the old fogey,” he added, raising his hand to his mouth, in a vaudeville stage-whisper to Eva. Eva bridled. She had been having a wretched time here. Her plump little sybaritic feet had been swollen from almost the first day; she had caught poison-ivy all along her white arms, still smooth and womanly at fifty; her fingernails had cracked from the hard water; she detested a double bed; but more painful still than these afflictions, was the sense that her husband was making a holy show of himself before all these younger people. Having no interest whatever in the arts, though she did not object to piano music, she nevertheless, felt that she knew how to comport herself in an artistic atmosphere, a conviction of authority which she had derived principally from the movies and magazine-reading. Artists, she knew, were sensitive people who surrounded themselves with beautiful things, and the sensitiveness of her pampered little body, her love of material comfort, she took as evidence that she herself possessed a latently artistic temperament. She saw nothing in the behavior of the Utopians to confirm her preconceptions, yet the fact that quite frequently in the public rooms she heard conversations she could not understand overawed her to the extent that she felt mistrustful for Joe, whom she considered as ignorant as herself and far less dexterous in concealing it. “If he would only be quiet,” she ejaculated in an undertone to the minister’s wife, who was the only person she felt wholly in accord with. “He’ll pay for this tonight,” she promised, with a sigh, and for a moment her well-preserved face held a hint of the furies, though the retribution she had in store for him was simply a digestive disturbance, the result of too much excitement. “He pays for it every time,” she added. There was an appropriateness, seized though not fully analyzed by Eva, in the fact that Joe’s body, which he refused to coddle, should prove to be her ally, and her allusions to its behavior suggested a wealth of knowledge more intimate and exclusive than love.

  “Private enterprise?” Leo inquired, his alert head tilted to one side as if he were listening for a new music that might be drawn from these old syllables. He had the virtues of gravity and sweetness, accompanied by a nimbleness of mind that found inspiration in the most commonplace remarks. “Well, Joe,” he said, “let’s see,” and he linked arms companionably with the older man, prepared for a long discussion. At the same time, there was something merry and quizzical in his face which admonished his listener that conversation was an art. “Privateering?” he speculated. “That, too, is in the tradition.” And very rapidly he sketched out a plan for a covey of small frigates, manned by individual enterprise, to conduct rescue raids on the European coast. “If we get the co-operation of the State Department (and you’re quite right, business can do it) we land the passengers in New York Harbor. If not,” he waved his hands airily, “there are other places in the Americas.” And his mercurial fancy, working supplely with historical materials, at once created a new image in which the War of 1812, the old slave raids on the African coast, the secret rearmament of Palestine, Henry Ford’s peace ship, the exploits of smugglers and pirates, caves, dark inlets, rowboats with muffled oars, furnished a solid mass of precedent shot through with the gold of romance. Joe once again was charmed, but the doubt implanted by Taub caused him, after a moment of contemplation, to look up suddenly at Leo with a frown and catarrhal sniff of suspicion. “Is this on the level?’’ he said.

  “You think it’s not practical, Joe?” Leo answered him, almost tenderly, a light caress in his voice. “You think it can’t be done. I recognize your objection. It must be the oldest in history. You remember the story of Columbus. And there was Archimedes and the airplane. And Dunkerque, you remember, was described as a military impossibility. Every daring invention . . .” He paused to smile faintly. “Sex, surely, must have been the first. What a ludicrous action if looked at from a rational standpoint. Many of the philosophers complained of it.”

  Joe motioned him to stop. He was a modest man and there were ladies present; moreover, the asceticism of his nature inclined him to agree with the philosophers—like many virile business leaders, he was sexually recessive. “You’ve proved your point,” he said. “All right, let’s get busy.” The other colo
nists turned toward him. Many of them had been moved by Leo’s first proposal to feel a fresh stirring of political hope. The second proposal they had dismissed as merely fanciful, and in fact even the most visionary of them, the Norells, the Macdermotts and Nelly Boardman, the woman illustrator, who was drunk, suspected that about the whole evening there hung an element of japery, for they knew Leo well enough to recognize that there was nothing dogged or persistent in him. He was not earthbound like themselves; he parted easily from a notion when it proved inconstant and often grew bored with his theories when someone else tried to unite him to them in a marriage of practice. This opinion of his political seriousness, naturally, was held even more emphatically by the realist group.

  Yet, despite this, and despite a certain discomfort which his readiness in oratory induced in them (the joke about sex was self-plagiarized), an altruistic fervor in the colony was kindled by what he had said. Most of the Utopians, no matter how selfish, had been in the habit of working at least part-time on behalf of others, whether as teachers, as editors, or as simple entertainers; even Taub considered that he had had an educative function to perform in the world down below. They had supposed that their altruism would have full play in the cooperative work of the colony and in the example they would set to the world, but the truth was that, having identified themselves whole-heartedly with the enterprise, they had lost the sensation of sharing, and hence it seemed to many of them that their life here on the mountain-top was almost too hedonistic, since they were enjoying a happiness which had become an end in itself. Their withdrawal from the world had appeared legitimate, when a war which they could neither avert nor dominate threatened Western civilization, but now that the war held off they began to pose once again the question of alternatives, and to ask themselves whether this haven, which they had so readily constructed for themselves, could not in some manner be enlarged until a retreat from war became indeed a counter-attack upon it.