Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “That’s all old stuff,” said Jane. “People don’t renounce any more, unless they’re compulsive or something.” “There was Kierkegaard,” said Warren. “I gave up my singing career for Harold,” observed Harriet. “Probably you wanted to anyway,” said Jane, candidly. “I mean, would you have given up Harold for your singing? I’ll bet Prince Hal was bored stiff with Falstaff. He sounds just like some of the people around here. And I’ll bet Titus, underneath, was anti-Semitic. It says right here in the play that he doesn’t want to get mixed up with Bérénice’s Jewish relations.” Laughter shook the room. “Jane’s right,” said Warren, stoutly. “Act II, Scene 2. Shall I read it?” “We remember,” said Harold Huber. “Those two queens, wasn’t it, of Bérénice’s blood, who married a slave or something?” Warren nodded. “But that isn’t anti-Semitism, Mr. Coe,” protested Dolly. “Something pretty darn close to it,” said Warren. “It shows what kind of a guy Titus was that he’d listen to an argument like that.”

  Miles sighed. “Racine wasn’t interested in character,” he said. “You have to get that through your noodle. You can’t judge him the way you do Shakespeare. Shakespeare was interested in politics and political types, which means he was interested in motive—the thing that makes people move, the way they do, in society. Underneath, of course, you’ll find the archaic patterns. The death of the father alters the Oedipal constellation; the son, so to speak, intromits the father, swallows him, and assumes his primordial role. That’s what we see happening underneath the surface of both these plays—the Henry IV sequence and Bérénice. The renunciation of Bérénice may involve a belated rejection of the mother, the feminine component, in Titus; you see the same thing with Falstaff, whose relation with Prince Hal was suspiciously homosexual.” Jane adjusted an earring. “That’s what I always told you,” she said to Warren, who nodded sadly.

  “What about the death of the mother, Miles?” inquired Harold Huber. “That doesn’t have the same importance,” said Miles. “Not for the normal man, in his prime. The normal man outlives the mother while she’s still hale and hearty. It’s only in pathological instances that you find a son coming into manhood, finally, when the mother passes on.” Jane sat picking at a spot on her skirt. For some reason, she kept staring at Miles’s shoes, which were black and very shiny looking, cut almost like a pair of slippers. “Still, Miles,” she said casually, “in our culture you’ll find a lot of fuss about the death of the mother. Or do you think that’s all commercialized, like Mother’s Day and Christmas?” “Purely ritualistic,” said Miles. “Contrary to popular opinion, the mother doesn’t count in the American scene. I used to see it in my practice. She lives too damn long. Of course, there’s a certain amount of guilt among the descendants when they eventually get rid of the old girl. Half racial memory; half social uneasiness. They think they’re expected to feel something.”

  There was a silence. If Warren was a fair sample, they were all thinking about Harriet, who was three times a grandmother and devoted to her two sons. “An angel just passed over,” she said brightly. “The angel of death,” said the vicomte, crossing himself. Harriet turned to him. “I was just reading an article,” she said. “By a Protestant minister. About how people are going back to religion. I never felt the need of it myself, but perhaps that shows I’m a back number.” “Like all of us,” said Martha, sharply. “None of us, except the vicomte, are religious.” “But what about church attendance figures?” ventured Harriet. “Aren’t modern people supposed to be feeling a lack in their lives that they need religion to fill?” Martha shrugged. “An advertising gambit,” she said. “First you convince people they lack something and then you sell them a product to remedy it. People ‘need’ religion to ‘deepen their awareness’ or give them ‘tragic irony’—the way I ‘need’ a facial cream to make my life more glamorous.” Warren felt a little embarrassed, on account of Paul; if Martha were completely sober, she would not have flared up like that. “But if there is a lack, Martha?” said Dolly. “Then it ought not to be filled,” said Martha. “If it’s a real lack, it’s a necessary hollow in life that can’t be stuffed up, like a chicken. Insufficiency. Shortcoming. I don’t need God as a measure to feel that. Do you, Dolly?” “God, no!” said Dolly.

  “But you two are superior people,” said Jane thoughtfully. “Take the average person; take Mrs. Silvia, my cleaning woman—” “I refuse that,” said Martha. “I am an average person.” Everybody laughed at the haughty air with which Martha said this. “Oh, come on, Martha,” said Jane, yawning and rearranging her hair. “We all know we’re superior to the ordinary person, mentally, anyway, and we all live more interesting lives. We don’t need religion; we’ve got books and pictures and music. We don’t have to go to church for spiritual stimulation. It’s just like in Rome; Christianity was a slave religion. A person like Titus was above it, the way he was above marrying Bérénice, because he was the Emperor. Love’s a form of slavery too; an Emperor couldn’t be a slave to love—that’s what the play is saying.” “But what about his promise?” squealed Warren, anxious to get the conversation back on the main track. “Do you think some people are superior to promises?” “Oh, Warren,” said Jane. “Promises in love don’t mean anything. Look at all the people who get divorced.” She clapped her hand over her mouth. Warren felt about the size of a pin. But Dolly rescued the situation. “It seems to me,” she remarked, “that there isn’t any ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ at issue in the play. It’s really taken for granted what Titus ought to do. The interest is in whether he can do it.” The vicomte nodded. “Quite right,” he said. “It is not a modern problem play. The standards are there, for Titus and Bérénice; no one in the play doubts them. The question is whether the characters can rise to conformity with them.”

  “Conformity!” Warren hopped on the word, which was the one he had been seeking all along, he joyously realized. “You’ve put your finger on it, Paul,” he announced excitedly, waving his hand for silence. “That’s what I hate in this play. It’s all about conformity. The characters are a bunch of conformists. Bérénice, for about two minutes, is a rebel, and then she throws in the sponge and conforms like the rest of them.” “But that is tragedy, my dear fellow,” said the vicomte. “The principal figure learns to be sage.” “Not for me, it isn’t,” said Warren. “Oh yes,” said the vicomte. “The old Oedipus, for example, has learned to be wise.” “To me, that’s just horror,” exclaimed Warren. “Oh no, it isn’t,” said Harriet. Everybody, suddenly, began talking all at once, the way they always did when a discussion got promising. Warren could hardly hear himself think. “Life is horrible,” said Harold Huber, dryly. “Oh no, it isn’t,” cried Dolly. “It’s beautiful!”

  “Oh, I know life is horrible,” Warren interrupted, with a happy smile. “I learned to accept that long ago. Everybody’s a bastard, including me and Jane. But that doesn’t stop me from being mad as all hell about it.” Every eye turned on him in bewilderment. “Excuse me, Warren,” said Harold, “but I don’t get you. What’s the argument? If you’ve learned to accept the facts of life, what’s eating you about Racine?” Warren looked miserably about him; nobody understood him, not even Jane. He caught Martha’s eye imploringly. “I see what he’s getting at,” said Martha, after a moment’s thought. “What Warren misses in Racine is the bitterness. Isn’t that it? In the Greeks you get bitterness and you get it again in Shakespeare. There’s acceptance without resignation—a kind of defiance, in the end, like Othello’s last speech: ‘I have done the state some service and they know’t.’ There’s none of that in Racine—none that I remember. The characters are too subservient to official morality, serviables, like courtiers.” Warren bobbed his head up and down, exultantly, in dumb show, while she was talking; this, he presumed, was what he had meant to convey. Pleased with herself, manifestly, Martha smoothed back a vagrant lock of hair and sank back into her chair with a sigh. They had finished with Bérénice.

  The conversation broke up into dialogues. Mile
s went to make himself a drink and brought Martha one. He sat down beside her. “That was fast work,” he commented, mopping his brow. Martha smiled at the tribute; her face wore its mischievous look. “Still,” Miles went on, in a low voice, “between you and me, what is it they accept, d’you think, in the Greeks and Shakespeare? Not a social code of morality or manners, as the Frenchies understood it.” Warren took a seat on the floor near them. “They accepted the way things are,” said Martha. “Inevitability. The way things happen, regularly. The laws of geometry of the universe.” “I’ll buy that,” said Miles. “There’s one big exception,” he added. “I know,” said Martha. “Hamlet.” “You think so too?” inquired Miles with a genial start. He was always surprised, Warren had noticed, when anybody had the same thought he had. “In Hamlet,” Miles continued, “everything has gone screwy. No more laws. No more regularity. A ghost is masterminding the action, and nobody’s sure whether he comes from the good place or the bad place. In Hamlet—Martha, you’ll appreciate this—ambiguity raises its ugly head. Is Gertrude’s marriage unnatural or isn’t it? Is Claudius a villain or just the fall guy? Is Hamlet crazy? That question never gets settled. You can read it that he is crazy, like a lot of loonies that pretend to be mad, thinking that they’re fooling their keepers. Or you can read it the other way. Hamlet himself isn’t sure whether he’s crazy or not. He keeps pinching himself, like a person trying to find out whether he’s dreaming. That’s the famous doubt.” Martha smiled. “I agree,” she murmured. “But doesn’t that open the question of whether Hamlet is really a tragedy? Or a pathetic case history, which is what some actors make it seem?” “Ummm,” said Miles. “Jones’s interpretation—too narrowly psychoanalytic. Those categories are all right for the groundlings, but I don’t find them too helpful in my own thinking nowadays. If Hamlet’s just a neurotic, the problem loses interest. For me, Hamlet initiates the crisis in epistemology. If it’s clinical, it’s a case history in the annals of philosophy. A hero questions, for the first time, the whole apparatus of cognition. He sees differently from the ‘normal’ people in the play, from his mother and old Polonius and Uncle Claudius and Ophelia. Is his vision distorted by the ghost’s revelations? Should he trust the ghost or mock him? And this doubt is involved with the whole epistemological puzzle, with how do you know what you know.” “Exactly,” cried Martha. “The mistrust first of our senses and then of our moral perceptions. That was what I was working on, for my doctorate, the history of that. The two mistrusts are related, as Kant saw when he tried to reorganize the whole subject: how much do we know and how?” “I always said you had a head for philosophy,” observed Miles, blowing his nose.

  “The same thing in ethics,” pursued Martha. “Raskolnikov’s question: if there is no God, how do I know that I shouldn’t murder a useless old woman? Raskolnikov’s question was Kant’s question.” “Why shouldn’t Raskolnikov?” burst in Warren. “I’ve often thought about that. Jane and I read it two years ago, and it seemed to us that Dostoevski stacked the cards at the end there. He never gives you a reason why Raskolnikov should feel sorry at the end. Raskolnikov was right, according to his lights. I wouldn’t want to murder an old woman myself, but that’s probably because of the way I was brought up—my conditioning. Logically, there’s no reason.” “Logic doesn’t answer those questions,” murmured Martha, with a side glance at Miles. “You have to start with a datum. Put the question the other way round. ‘I wouldn’t want to murder an old woman; what are my reasons?’ You’ll get further that way.” Warren rubbed his head in perplexity. “But gee,” he said, “that’s a pretty big assumption you make there. I mean, why should I assume that my own private preferences hold good for the rest of us humans? I don’t want to murder old women, but some other fellow might be made differently. It seems to me you’ve got to consider that. You’ve got to give that fellow a reason. Don’t you think so, Miles?” Miles looked down into his pleading eyes. “The electric chair,” he said. “That’s the reason we give him.” Warren felt deeply hurt; Miles was only playing with him. “But you can’t do that,” he protested. “You have to show him why you’re giving him the electric chair.” “He’s right, in a way, Miles,” intervened Martha. “You have to make universals. ‘Behave so that thy maxim could be a universal law.’ I agree with Kant.” Miles frowned. “Kant’s effort failed—too mechanically monistic. Listen, Warren,” he said thickly. “For you, it’s an academic question. If you don’t want to murder old women, let it go at that. Don’t worry about the other fellow. Live selfishly.”

  A snort of laughter broke from him. Martha smiled too. Warren could see that she disagreed with Miles, but instead of arguing with him, she changed the subject. “He’s like Shaw,” she said to Miles, with a teasing look down at Warren. “A doubt-spreader. He wants to marshal the logical reasons for every conceivable villainy, even though he himself wouldn’t hurt a fly or touch a cup of coffee. That’s why poor Shaw couldn’t write a tragedy even when he tried. The tragic action turned into a discussion group, with everybody putting forward his point of view, for debate. Just like you,” she said to Warren, who was snuggled at their feet.

  “But isn’t that what the Greeks thought, Martha?” objected Warren, sitting up. “We saw the Antigone this summer at the Arena Theater and, golly, it seemed to me, that all the characters were in the right there. Just like Saint Joan or Don Juan in Hell—we have that on records. I mean, everybody has his point of view. Creon is right, the way he looks at it, wanting to uphold the law, and Antigone is right, the way she looks at it, wanting to bury her brother. It’s awfully interesting if you compare that with Saint Joan, where Joan is right in her way, and the Archbishop, Cauchois, is right in his. If you compare the texts, you’ll see what I mean.” A happy thought struck him. He jumped up. “Let me just run out to the studio and get them, and I can show you.” “Sit down. We can remember,” Miles said curtly. “It’ll only take a minute,” pleaded Warren. “No,” said Miles, looking at the watch on his freckled wrist. Warren complied. He knew Miles’s irascible humors and he was afraid that if he disobeyed him, Miles would be gone when he returned. “Tell me the difference, then,” he said, scrambling back to his place on the floor, by their side.

  “You tell him, Miles,” said Martha. “After you,” said Miles, with a courtly bow from the waist. “No, please, you do it,” cried Martha. “Well,” commenced Miles, “in Shaw, it’s a matter of logical demonstration. Each character ‘proves’ the validity of his position, sometimes by paradox, like Candida’s father. In Sophocles, it’s different,” he broke off, rather irascibly. “For God’s sake, Warren, get me a drink.” Warren could hear them conferring as he fixed them both drinks. His conscience troubled him a little, for he felt they had both had plenty, but he knew they would go on talking as long as he supplied them with liquor. “In Sophocles, Warren,” said Martha, when he came back, “the characters don’t set up a debate. They act. And it’s shown that action itself is ambivalent. An action like Antigone’s can be both right and wrong simultaneously—not right from her point of view and wrong from Creon’s but right and wrong absolutely, in the chain of consequences it sets off. Her brother gets buried, as piety demands, but her lover, Haemon, kills himself, as the result of her deed and its punishment. You can see it better with Orestes. Orestes’s action in killing his mother, Clytemnestra, was both right and wrong—enjoined on him by the gods and yet accursed. He had to purge the action of its wrong aspect by penance and madness before reconciliation could take place, and the Erinyes become the Eumenides. Did it ever strike you,” she interrupted herself, turning to Miles, “that Hamlet is Orestes in reverse? Hamlet pays for his murder by suffering and madness ahead of time, while Orestes kills his mother on credit and has to pay the bill in the sequel. In Hamlet, by the time Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup, all passion has been spent.” Miles laughed. “I always thought of Hamlet as an early bohemian,” he said. “A student, frequenter of actors, constantly philosophizing and living off his uncle. That
’s why the poor devil couldn’t make anything happen, till the end, when he balled everything up and killed the wrong people.”

  Martha giggled. Warren had seldom heard such an interesting discussion, but he wished they would stay on the subject, instead of making fun of it. “What did you mean,” he said, hitching himself closer to Martha, “about Antigone being right and wrong at the same time? You mean she shouldn’t have buried her brother if some innocent third party was going to suffer for it?” Martha shook her head, rather crossly; all at once, she looked dead tired. “No,” she said. “She had to bury her brother. There’s no should or shouldn’t. Or right or wrong, in the modern sense. There’s only the tragic perspective: the eye of eternity or the Greek measure of limit, which everybody oversteps, by a sort of fatality. Nobody can stay in the right—I mean in real life—that’s the terrible thing, Warren. If you think you’re in the right for more than a few seconds, you’ll find that you’re in the wrong. Nobody can have a permanent claim on being the injured party; it seems horribly unfair, but there it is. As soon as you feel injured and begin to cry for justice, you discover that your position has gotten undermined; the ground has shifted beneath you, in a slow sort of landslide, and you find yourself cut off.”

  “You mean you become unpopular—you’re talking about martyrs? We see a lot of that in the law courts,” said Harold Huber, easily. For some time, everybody had been listening to the conversation; Martha’s tone had become rather dramatic and personal. From Jane’s saucer eyes and Dolly’s worried frown, Warren could see that everybody must be drawing the same inference he was: that she was alluding to herself and Miles. “Unpopular—that too,” said Martha. “Though that isn’t what I meant. But it’s the same thing. You can joy in unpopularity, and that becomes evil too, very quickly. It’s another form of righteousness, of that fatal feeling that you’re triumphantly in the right.” “I get that fatal fe-e-ling,” sang Harriet Huber.