Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  John Bentkoop and his wife, Virginia, were in their night-clothes when Domna cranked the old bell. He came downstairs, blinking and pulling on his bathrobe, followed by Virginia in a pink woolen dressing-gown. She would not let him open the door until he turned on the flashlight and they saw through the side-panes the Russian girl standing on the porch. Virginia, who was a sensible girl, instantly drew her into the dark house, put an arm around her and guided her into the living room. She had met her only once, at a college lecture, but she divined correctly that her feet were wet. John hastily made a fire. Domna sat crouched on a hassock by the fireplace; she would not take off her shoes or her polo coat at the beginning, apologizing that she had been pacing outside the house for hours, trying to make up her mind whether to intrude on them, and would go at once when she had said what she had to say. After the first few words, Virginia absented herself; she came back with a pot of coffee and big, white, cheap cups on a tray, served them, and sat down by the oil lamp in a rocker—there was no electricity in the house. “You must stay,” she proffered. “I’ve made up a bed upstairs. I’ve always wanted to know you. Next year, I’m going to take your course.” Without further parlance, she took up her knitting, a pale green baby sweater; the motion of her needles kept pace with the conversation. She had pale, almost greenish fair hair, pale sea-like green eyes, a pink and white complexion, fair brows, delicate hands; everything about her was pastel and tranquilly decided—in short, she was the complement of Domna, whom she scanned with earnest attention, as though the other girl were something—a flower, a chemical process—she had read about in a book and she was now satisfying herself as to her reality. This child-like faculty of attention was her notable characteristic; nothing appeared to strike her as aberrant in a world that was myriad with difference; she looked at her husband carefully whenever he made a point, as though studying afresh the whorls of his personality. Before the discussion was over, she had finished the sweater, laid it aside in a basket and begun casting a new set of stitches on the yellow needles. Toward the end, when it was nearly morning, she added her voice to the symposium. This voice, surprisingly, was rather clear and loud, like a boy’s voice that has not changed yet.

  John threw another log on the fire and paced up and down before it. “I think, Domna,” he said judiciously, “you’re doing him a minor injustice. It doesn’t seem to me likely that they cooked it up between them, as you say. More likely she half guessed and he told her. I’m willing to buy that for what it’s worth.” Domna’s shadowed face showed a faint stirring of relief; as she listened, she slipped her coat from her shoulders and Virginia silently came and took it. “I’ve never put much credence,” continued John, easily, like a wound-up bobbin unreeling, “in Hen’s power to keep a secret. To the best of my knowledge, he told one of his tutees the very first thing, probably before he told you. If he hadn’t told Cathy finally, she would have been one of the few people in the community he didn’t favor with his confidence. The town’s buzzing with it; I heard it from the garage-man and the grocer and the druggist, all very concerned about Mrs. Mulcahy and about Mr. Mulcahy’s prospects for paying their precious bills. Why, I think Hen could get up a real rank-and-file movement among the tradespeople here to petition for his continuance.” He laughed but Domna sighed restlessly. “I would pay them myself to be rid of him,” she declared in a passionate tone. John studied her concernedly, with a pursing of the large lips. “You’re really suffering,” he discovered. “Drink some more coffee. It’s mainly shock, you know. You’re one of the few people on this campus that really had faith in Hen. It’s a shame it had to be you to discover this. Those of us who’ve known him a little longer would have been better prepared.” “Oh, that dinner!” she suddenly moaned, as it came back to her. “They talked about love, Virginia. ‘Could I love a leper?’ ” “Could you?” asked Virginia, setting the cup in her hand. “I don’t think so,” said Domna. “Neither could I,” said Virginia. “At least, I never have.” “But what I was supposed to understand by this,” said Domna, raising her eyes to John, “was that Henry was a moral leper and that I didn’t love him sufficiently. Of course, it’s perfectly true. I don’t. Not sufficiently for this.” Her face stiffened. There was a silence. “Did you really suspect it?” she demanded, in a different, half-hopeful tone. “Honor bright,” said John. “Ask Virginia.” Virginia paused in her knitting. “Yes, he did. You aren’t married or you’d see how hard it is to keep something from your wife.” “And you really think,” insisted Domna, “that it wasn’t cooked up, deliberately, beforehand, as a bid for sympathy?” John shook his long head. “That’s not how these things work, Domna; one begins by persuading oneself, and this germ of persuasion is infectious. Hen has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It’s a rare asset; it could be useful to him in politics or religion.” He spoke with perfect seriousness. “He’s capable of commanding great loyalty, because he’s unswervingly loyal to himself. I’m not being sarcastic. Very few of us have that. It’s a species of self-alienation. He’s loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause. In the world today, there’s a great deal of free-floating, circumambient loyalty that fixes itself on such people, who seem to offer, by their own example, the possibility of a separation from the self that will lead to a higher union with the self objectified in an idea. It’s Hen’s fortune or his fate to have achieved this union within his own personality; he’s foregone his subjectivity and hypostatized himself as an object.”

  He settled himself on the hearth-rug and wound his arms round his long, bony legs in their white pajama bottoms. Virginia laid down her knitting and joined him; she rested her head on his shoulder. The fire threw a ruddy light on the three absorbed faces, as in a painting by La Tour. Around them, outside the circle of the lamp, the room was nearly dark: they might have been sitting by a campfire on a chill beach after a night picnic, or in a forest-clearing, keeping watch. The even heat of the fire in their faces, the lateness of the hour, the shadows, the rattling of the small-paned windows, the eeriness of the man they spoke of, produced a sensuous content and numbness; they felt close to the primeval mysteries, the chiaroscuro of good and evil. John hugged his knees. His olive student-face assumed a didactic mien. “The criteria of truth and falsity, as we know them, don’t exist for Hen. He doesn’t examine his statements from the point of view of the speaker but from the point of view of the listener. He listens to himself as you or I might listen to him and asks himself, ‘Is it credible?’ Even in private soliloquy, credibility is the standard he applies; that is, he looks at truth with the eyes of a literary critic and measures a statement by its persuasiveness. If he himself can be persuaded he accepts the moot statement as established. This is real alienation. In the critical part of his mind, he’s extraordinarily cold with himself, cold and dedicated. Hence his incessant anxiety, like the anxiety of a military commander or an author or a stage-director; he’s busy with problems of reception, stage effects, cues, orchestration; his inner life is a busy rehearsal and testing for activity on the larger stage of tomorrow, where the audience, as usual, will miss the finer points. Immersed in all these difficulties, hung up on the little snags of production, he’s impatient, understandably, with outside interrogation. ‘Is it true?’ you want to know, but the question’s irrelevant and footless. Do you ask an amber spot whether it’s true? Or an aria? At bottom, he doesn’t give a damn, Domna, what you or I think, any more than a general cares about democratic opinion. We’re not his critics or even, primarily, his audience; we’re amateurs whom, unfortunately, he must use in his production, green troops whom he has to put up with since the great Commander we all act under saw fit to send him no better.”

  Domna cupped her pointed chin in her hand; she stared reflectively into the blaze. “So,” she pondered finally, “when Cathy guessed or he told her, he had no hesitation in going through with the imposture? He felt
justified in doing it since she might have found out and might have been dead by this time for all Maynard cared?” John laughed. “Such might-have-beens are for neophytes,” he said, stretching. “When Cathy found out, Hen as an intelligent man saw that it was simpler that she knew. The worry of protecting her was removed and he was supplied with a consultant he could trust.” He sat up cross-legged on the hearth-rug and conned the two girls’ faces. “Be honest with me, both of you,” he demanded. “What would you have done in his place? Would you actually have interrupted the proceedings to announce that Cathy knew and there was no further worry on her score? Think what it meant to him. What were his chances of being rehired if the college didn’t have Cathy on its conscience? Most people, I’m afraid, would do pretty much as Hen did. What about you, Virginia?” “I really don’t know,” said Virginia, “I like to think I would come out with the truth, but probably I would try to play possum until the matter was settled. I would stay away from my supporters and hope that nobody would ask me.” Domna leaned forward. “Is it conceited of me? I think I would tell the truth.” The taut declaration made a silence. Virginia’s look consulted her husband. She spoke. “You don’t really know, Domna,” she argued. “You’ve never been in the position he is. In your situation, it wouldn’t cost much to tell the truth.” A look of pride glittered in Domna’s face; her nostrils flared. “It costs nothing to tell the truth when one has the habit. One becomes entangled in self-pity and lies.” She drew out the last word with a strong diphthong and sibilant hissing of the s. “He threw himself on our pity. This was not an honest act. He lied to Maynard about Cathy and lied to us about the lie. Or is he lying to us now and she is healthy and it is all a fantasy that we believed?” Heated and gleaming in the firelight, her pure features were almost ugly. “And now we are all in it; we are all lying for him. I lied this morning to the President: my students do not praise Henry—it is I who praise him to the students, who sit with their faces so.” She made an idiot face with sunken jaw and goggling eyes. “I lied tonight at his house, two, three times. I lie to myself about him.” She jumped up and lit a cigarette and stood by the mantelpiece, puffing. “And now what am I to do? I am to lie some more, I presume. You know that I cannot carry this nasty story to the President. I cannot. I tell myself that it’s my duty but I cannot. If Henry had not been my friend, still I could not do it. Do you blame me? And I cannot tell Henry, either, that I know and am not deceived by him. I think this is a weakness. I’m ashamed for him; I cannot face him; I am afraid of him and that terrible white freckled face.” “Undoubtedly, he knows that you know, Domna,” put in John, by way of comfort. Domna flared up. “So what will he do, murder me? Let him do it,” she cried recklessly, striking the mantelpiece a blow. John smiled at these heroics and then grew thoughtful. “He’s more likely to accuse you of something,” he said gravely, after due reflection.

  He appeared to consult again with himself. “Look here, Domna,” he finally suggested, “there’s a good deal to be said for Hen on the plus side. You felt it once yourself or you wouldn’t be suffering disillusion. Your friendship wasn’t a deception; Hen is extremely likable in the early stages of an acquaintance. He has a taste for abstract conversation that makes him peculiarly accessible, like some of the old philosophers. He’s interested in ontological questions, which are the great binders of diverse humanity. On some of the better students, he has an extraordinarily tonic effect. To my mind, he’s worth keeping here aside from the question of Cathy and the four children and the bills and all the rest. He has an agile mind and excellent training. What I said at our first meeting is a true statement of what I believe. I think it valuable for the Literature department to have a theist teaching in it. Hen’s brand of theism and mine differ; in his personal life, he may belong to the devil’s party, but the devil is a theist too. What’s needed at Jocelyn or any college is a mind concerned with universals and first principles; the students take to them like catnip if they’re given half a chance. Your department’s monstrously one-sided—you’re concerned with formal questions exclusively: Tolstoy’s method, the method of Virginia Woolf, the elucidation of Mann’s symbols, the patterns of Katherine Anne Porter. All appropriate enough for criticism, but it isn’t what the student reads for. A student reads an author for his ideas, for his personal metaphysic, what he calls, till you people teach him not to say it, his ‘philosophy of life.’ He wants to detach from an author a portable philosophy, like the young Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist—a laudable aim which you discourage by your insistence on the inseparability of form and content.”

  “But that is true,” protested Domna, dropping to her knees on the hassock. John shook his head in reprimand. “True, but also not true. And not relevant to the student’s purpose. Content can be paraphrased. What we’re doing here at Jocelyn is a sinister thing for our students; we’re turning out classes of sophisticated literary hollow men, without general ideas, without the philosophy or theology that’s formed in adolescence, without the habit or the discipline of systematic thought. Our students have literally no idea what they think or believe except in questions of taste, and they’ve been taught to fear formulation as a lapse in literary manners. Hen is the one force here that runs counter to this tendency. His Jesuit training formed him in an older mold and his Joyce studies confirmed him in the habit of universalization. Finnegans Wake: one book which shall be all books, the Book of Life.”

  Domna interrupted. “John,” she said tensely, “I have to tell you something.” Her pale, severe face was sharp with trepidation, as if she feared being overheard; they moved a little closer. “This is my confession. I think Henry is mad. He comes to see me at night and talks, talks, talks. He has a delusional system centering on Joyce. He speaks of Joyce’s life as a Ministry. He speaks of the Book, the Revelation, the Passion.” John raised his eyebrows. “Most of the Joyce brotherhood are a little batty,” he cautioned. Domna shook her head firmly. “This is different; it’s not an ordinary obsession. He believes that he’s been subject to persecution for propagating the Word. This, he insists, is at the bottom of his troubles; all the rest is pseudepigraphal—that was his own word. He is hated, he says, by Joyce’s enemies, who comprise the whole academic world, with the exception of rival Joyce experts who hate him also, since they are really Joyce’s enemies in disguise.” Virginia laughed delightedly. “How wonderful!” she cried in sincere enjoyment and admiration. Domna laughed also, but more grudgingly. “Yes, it’s funny,” she admitted, “but terrifying, too. You know that stick he carries; he’s put it aside, he says, for the duration of this emergency in token of symbolic burial. His Communist period, he says, was a ritual conversion symbolizing Joyce’s baptism in the religion of naturalism—the precursor. And the Communists hate him because he transcended naturalism, just as they hate Joyce. Behind Joyce, you see, is the identification with Christ. Bloom was Christ; Earwicker was Christ—Henry Mulcahy is Christ in the disguise of Bloom and Earwicker, the family men, the fathers eternal consubstantial with the Son.” The laughter died out of her voice. “I’ve tried to assure myself,” she declared, “that all this is merely an allegory, the pastime of an ingenious mind, that he uses to give form to his experience, to console himself in a rather bitter way by the sense of repetition, but, John, I’m afraid he believes it literally, just as you believe in the Incarnation.”

  John’s dark eyebrows knitted; like an upright young judge he seemed to search his experience for precedents and normative explanations. At the same time, with his short black hair standing up, there was something alert and lively about him, like a hare after its quarry: understanding. “Christ’s experience,” he announced finally, with an odd eager smile, “is the great paradigm for the persecution psychosis. It displays the whole classical syndrome: belief in divine origin, special calling, chosenness, the cult of exclusive disciples, betrayal, justification—one might even add, following Freud’s analysis of paranoia, homosexuality, for it’s noteworthy that He not only eschewed wome
n, but that His betrayer was a man. The betrayer for the paranoid is always of his own sex, the loved and feared sex. One could say,” he continued breathlessly, with a sort of awkward ardency, “that by becoming man precisely God underwent what could be described as madness: the experience of unrecognition fusing with the knowledge of godhead, the sense of the Message, the Word, the Seed falling on barren ground, the sense of betrayal and promised resurrection. And like the mad, who use symbolic language, He spoke in parables.” Domna huskily laughed. “Jésus-Christ, c’était un fou qui se croyait Jésus-Christ.” John nodded. “Yes; in so far as He was human, this was his predicament. But is it any wonder that man who seeks in his highest moments to identify himself with God, should do so also in his time of tribulation, in the dark night of the soul. And if Hen is mad, Domna, to choose to imitate Christ, in the pattern of his sufferings, where are all the Thomas à Kempises?”