Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Perhaps it is Francis’ growing addiction to drink (he no longer waits for you to notice his empty glass but helps himself from the shaker or inquires boldly, “Did someone say something about another drink?”) that keeps him late and is also responsible for the mounting truculence of his conversation. In the old days Francis was always prompt to shut off one of his anecdotes when his companion’s interest slightly wavered away from him; indeed, much of his conversation seemed to be constructed around the interruption he awaited. Gradually, however, he has become more adhesive to his topics. He may be interrupted by the arrival of a newcomer, the host may excuse himself to fetch somebody’s coat, or the hostess may go in to look at the baby—but Francis has put a bookmark in his story. “As I was saying,” he resumes, when the distraction has passed. Furthermore, his opinions, which he used to modulate to suit the conversation, never taking up a position without preparing a retreat from it, have now become rigid and obtrusive. This is particularly true of him in his female aspect. Frances Cleary, once the indistinct listener, now arrives at a party with a single idea that haunts the conversation like a ghost. This idea is almost always regressive in character, the shade of a once-live controversy (abstract vs. representational art, progressive vs. classical education), but the female Frances treats it as though she personally were its relict; any change of subject she regards as irreverence to the dead. “Others may forget but I remember,” her aggrieved expression declares. If the hostess is successful in deflecting her to some more personal topic, a single word overheard from across the room will be enough to send her train of ideas puffing out of the station once more. She has dedicated herself, say, to the defense of Raphael against the menace of Mondrian; momentarily silenced, she will instantly revive should one of the other guests be so careless as to remark, “She’s as pretty as a picture.” “You can talk about pictures all you want,” Frances will begin. . . .

  In the male Francis Cleary this belligerency is more likely to take a physical form. More and more often nowadays, Francis breaks glasses, ash trays, lamps. His elbow catches the maid’s arm as she is serving the gravy, and the hostess’s dress must go to the cleaners. All during an evening, he may have been his old undemanding self, but suddenly, at midnight, a sullenness will fall on him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he will ejaculate when the talk goes over his head. Or he may grab someone else’s hat and stumble savagely out, knocking over a table on his way.

  As a couple, he does not drink too much. On the contrary, he quietly but firmly refuses the third and even the second drink. He arrives early, the two of him, and ensconces himself on the sofa (the Clearys of all numbers and genders have an affinity for the sofa, which they occupy as a symbol of possession). From this point of vantage, he, or shall we say for convenience’ sake, they, overlook the proceedings with a kind of regal lumpishness. Though their position as friends of the family may be new and still insecure, they treat the very oldest and dearest members of the wife’s or the husband’s circle (the college roommate, the former lover) as candidates for their approval. They do not consider it necessary to talk in the ordinary way, but put sharp, inquisitorial questions to the people that are brought up to them (“Would you mind telling me the significance of that yellow necktie?” “Why do the characters in your novels have such a depressing sex life?”), or else they merely sit, demanding to be entertained.

  Like the drinking Francis Cleary, they stay until the last guest has gone, and present a report of their findings to the host and hostess. Nothing has escaped them; they have noticed your former roommate’s stammer and your lover’s squint; they have counted the highballs of the heavy drinker and recorded the tremor of his hand; the woman you thought beautiful is, it turns out, bowlegged, and the lively Russian should have washed his hair. And they present these findings with absolute objectivity; they do not judge but merely report. Though each human being is, so to speak, a work of art, the Clearys are scientists, and take pride in disobeying the artist’s commands. If the artist places a highlight at what he considers a central point of his personality, a highlight that says, “Look here,” the Clearys instantly look elsewhere: the expressiveness of a man’s eyes will never blind them to the weakness of his chin. And you and your wife, who have hitherto obeyed the laws of art and humanity and looked where you were told to look, are now utterly confounded by this clear, bleak view. Your friends whom you regarded as wholes are now assemblages of slightly damaged parts. You are plunged into despair, but you do not question the Clearys’ right to conduct this survey, for their observations are given a peculiar authority and force by the fact that they refer to the other guests—whom they have just met—by their first names. “John drinks terribly, doesn’t he?” they say, and it is useless for you to pretend that this particular evening was exceptional for your friend—that “John” asserts a familiarity with his habits that is greater, if anything, than your own. By the time they have finished their last glass (“Just a little cool water from the tap, please”) and you have seen them to the door you and your wife are utterly drained of energy and belief. There is not even a quarrel left between you, for they have exposed your friends and hers with perfect impartiality. Your world has been depopulated. You have only each other and the Clearys.

  Your sole escape from this intolerable situation is for one of you to blame the Clearys on the other. You can divide them up between you. If the husband, say, can be held responsible for Mr. and Mrs. Cleary (“You were the one who insisted on having them”), the wife can take Francis as her charge. You can treat them, that is, as friends, and this will immediately result in the exclusion of both factions. But now a super Francis Cleary must be found, a zero raised to a higher power, a negation of a negation. The search may be long, you may wander down false trails, but finally one night at a cocktail party you will find him, the ineffable blank, and you and your wife will seize him and drag him home with you to eat sandwiches and talk excitedly like lovers, of why you have never met before. Your difficulties are over, your wife smiles at you again, and when the two of you stand in the doorway to see him off, your arm falls affectionately across her shoulder.

  But alas the same process is about to begin again, and the stakes have been raised. Your new nonentity is larger and emptier than your original little friend; naturally, he commands a higher price. Dozens of other couples are competing with you for this superb creation; he does not hold himself cheap. You realize very quickly from the envious glances your colleagues and neighbors cast toward him whenever you display him at a public gathering that if you want to hold on to him you will have to pay through the nose. Gone are the potted plants, the Christmas cheeses, the toys for the children that were regularly issued by the old Francis Cleary. The super friend gives nothing; he does not even try to make himself agreeable; he will not talk to old ladies or help with the dishes or go to the store for a loaf of bread. His company is all you will ever get of him, and the demands he makes on you will grow steadily more extortionate. If you want him around, his demeanor will tell you, you will have to give up your former friends, your work, your interests, your principles—the whole complex of idiosyncrasies that make up your nature—and your only reward for this terrible sacrifice is that your wife will have to make it too. Soon he will be bringing his own friends to your house, and these friends will be the other couples with whom you share him (did you imagine that he could confine himself to you?). Already he borrows your money, your books, and your whiskey.

  He will stop at nothing, for he has always hated you and now he knows that he has got you where he wants you—you cannot live without him. Watching this monster as he sits at his ease on your sofa, your wife may look back with feelings of actual affection on your queer old friend, Hugh Caldwell; but now it is too late. Hugh Caldwell spits at the mention of your wife’s name, and, quite possibly, at the mention of your own; and, anyway, you ask yourself, are you really sure that you want to see Hugh Caldwell again, especially if it would mean that your wife, in return
, could see one of her old friends? No, you say to yourself, we cannot have that; there must be some compromise, some middle way—it is not necessary to go so far. Your mind beats on the door of the dilemma. Surely somewhere, you exclaim silently, somewhere in this great city, living quietly, perhaps, in a furnished room, there is a friend whom neither of us would have to feel so strongly about. . . . Some plain man or woman, some dowdy little couple of regular habits and indefinite tastes, some person utterly unobjectionable, unobtrusive, undefined. . . . With loving strokes, you complete the portrait of this ideal, and all the while there he sits, grinning at you, the lesser evil, but you do not recognize him.

  After all, you say to yourself, my requirements are modest; I will give up anything for a little peace and quiet. You forget that it was in the name of peace and quiet that this despot was welcomed—just as the Jewish banker in the concentration camp forgets the donation he made to the Nazi party fund, back in 1931, when his great fear was communism; just as Benedetto Croce, anti-fascist philosopher, forgot in Naples the days when he supported Mussolini in the Senate at Rome, because order was certainly preferable to anarchy and bolshevism was the real menace. You cannot believe, you will not ever believe, that your desire for peace and quiet, i.e., for the permanent stalemate, has logically resulted in the noisy oppressor on the sofa. On the contrary, his presence there seems to you a cruel and unaccountable accident.

  You are not happy with your wife but you do not want change. In a more romantic period you might have dreamed of voluptuous blondes, fast women and low haunts; you might even have run off with the lady organist or the wife of the Methodist minister. But you are a man of peace and careful respectability. You do not ask adventure or the larger life. Though at one time, theoretically, you may have desired these things, you have perceived that adventure for one can readily be the excuse for adventure for all, and who knows but what your wife’s or your neighbor’s capacity for adventure might be greater than your own? If all men were created equal, programs for achieving equality would not exist. The industrialist would welcome the people’s army into the gates of the factory, if he could be sure that nobody would be any better off than he. We do not want more than anyone else, though we may take more for fear of getting less. What we desire is absolute parity, and this can only be achieved by calculating in a downward direction, with zero as the ultimate, unattainable ideal. Our lives become a series of disarmament conferences: I will reduce my demands if you will reduce yours. With parity as our aim, it is impossible to calculate in an upward direction, for a nation will be allowed a navy which it has not the productive capacity to build, or a man may be granted freedoms which he has not the faculties to exercise, and gross inequalities will immediately result.

  So long as you and I cannot accept the doctrine “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs,” the totalitarian state will supply the answer to the difficulties of democracy and Francis Cleary will be the ideal friend. At this very moment, you are planning to overthrow the incumbent Cleary, who happens to be staying with you for the weekend. In a loud voice he has demanded something to eat, though he finished lunch only an hour ago. Your wife has rushed out to the kitchen to make him a chicken sandwich, and you sit watching him in uneasy silence. You are afraid to play the phonograph because he does not like music; you are afraid to initiate a topic of conversation because he resents any mention of persons he has not met or things he does not understand; you are afraid to pick up a newspaper lest he take it as a slight—and if you cross him he will pinch the baby.

  The fires of resistance are lit in your heart as the sandwich comes in and he opens it with a blunt critical finger and asks for pickles and mayonnaise. Your pulse quickens in little throbs of solidarity with your unfortunate wife. You will make, you say to yourself, common cause with her and eject the tyrant. If she will do it for you, so much the better; but there can be no question whatever about the heartiness of your support. The danger is, of course, that in the warm fraternity of the revolt, the coziness of plans and preparations, the intimacy of secret meetings in lonely houses at night, with a reliable farmer standing guard (Qui passe?), certain illusions of your wife’s may be revived. The whole question of friends may be opened again; a period of anarchy may even follow in which all the ghosts of both camps will meet once more in your living room and debate the old issues; tempers will rise and you will have to fling out of the house late at night and look for a room in a hotel. In the interests of peace, you say to yourself, would it not be wiser to select in advance some common friend and avoid the interregnum? Somewhere, only recently did you not meet a couple . . . ? In vain, you try to recall their faces and their name. Memory is obstinate but you do not despair. The very dimness of your impression convinces you that you are on the right track. They are the ones. If you meet them again, you will know them at once and rush forward to meet them with a glad cry of recognition. There is only one difficulty. Supposing they are already engaged . . . ?

  Your only way out of this recurrent nightmare (not counting the humane one, which is hardly worth mentioning) is for you and your wife to take the logical next step, to become the Clearys, say, of Round Hill Road. Why should you shrink from it? What have you to lose? In what do you differ from the man on the sofa?

  The Cicerone

  WHEN THEY first met him, in the wagons-lits, he was not so nervous. Tall, straw-colored, standing smoking in the corridor, he looked like an English cigarette. Indeed, there was something about him so altogether parched and faded that he seemed to bear the same relation to a man that a Gold Flake bears to a normal cigarette. English, surely, said the young American lady. The young American man was not convinced. If English, then a bounder, he said, adjusting his glasses to peer at the stranger with such impassioned curiosity that his eyes in their light-brown frames seemed to rush dangerously forward, like strange green headlights on an old-fashioned car. As yet, he felt no unusual interest in the stranger who had just emerged from a compartment; this curiosity was his ordinary state of being.

  It was so hard, the young lady complained, to tell a bounder in a foreign country; one was never sure; those dreadful striped suits that English gentlemen wear . . . and the Duke of Windsor talking in a cockney accent. Here on the Continent, continued the young man, it was even more confusing, with the upper classes trying to dress like English gentlemen and striking the inevitable false notes; the dukes all looked like floorwalkers, but every man who looked like a floorwalker was unfortunately not a duke. Their conversation continued in an agreeable rattle-rattle. Its inspiration, the Bounder, was already half-dismissed. It was not quite clear to either of them whether they were trying to get into European society or whether this was simply a joke that they had between them. The young man had lunched with a viscountess in Paris and had admired her house and her houseboat, which was docked in the Seine. They had poked their heads into a great many courtyards in the Faubourg St. Germain, including the very grandiose one, bristling with guards who instantly ejected them, that belonged to the Soviet Embassy. On the whole, architecture, they felt, provided the most solid answer to their social curiosity: the bedroom of Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon had informed them that the French royal family were dwarfs, a secret already hinted at in Mme Pompadour’s bedroom at the Frick museum in New York; in Milan, they would meet the Sforzas through the agency of their Castello; at Stra, on the Brenta, they would get to know the Pisani. They had read Proust, and the decline of the great names in modern times was accepted by them as a fact; the political speeches of the living Count Sforza suggested the table-talk of Mme Verdurin, gracing with her bourgeois platitudes the board of an ancient house. Nevertheless, the sight of a rococo ceiling, a great swaying crystal chandelier, glimpsed at night through an open second-story window, would come to them like an invitation which is known to exist but which has been incomprehensibly lost in the mails; a vague sadness descended, yet they did not feel like outsiders.

  Victors in a wo
rld war of unparalleled ferocity, heirs of imperialism and the philosophy of the enlightenment, they walked proudly on the dilapidated streets of Europe. They had not approved of the war and were pacifist and bohemian in their sympathies, but the exchange had made them feel rich, and they could not help showing it. The exchange had turned them into a prince and a princess, and, considering the small bills, the weekly financial anxieties that attended them at home, this was quite an accomplishment. There was no door, therefore, that, they believed, would not open to them should they present themselves fresh and crisp as two one-dollar bills. These beliefs, these dreams, were, so far, no more to them than a story children tell each other. The young man, in fact, had found his small role as war-profiteer so distasteful and also so frightening that he had refused for a whole week to go to his money-changer and had cashed his checks at the regular rate at the bank. For the most part, their practical, moral life was lived, guidebook in hand, on the narrow streets and in the cafés of the Left Bank—they got few messages at their hotel.

  Yet occasionally when they went in their best clothes to a fashionable bar, she wearing the flowers he had bought her (ten cents in American money), they hoped in silent unison during the first cocktail for the Dr.-Livingstone-I-presume that would discover them in this dark continent. And now on the train that was carrying them into Italy, the European illusion quickened once more within them. They eyed every stranger with that suspension of disbelief which, to invert Wordsworth, makes its object poetical. The man at the next table had talked all through lunch to two low types with his mouth full, but the young man remained steady in his conviction that the chewer was a certain English baronet traveling to his villa in Florence, and he had nearly persuaded the young lady to go up and ask him his name. He particularly valued the young lady today because, coming from the West, she entered readily into conversation with people she did not know. It was a handicap, of course, that there were two of them (“My dear,” said the young lady, “a couple looks so complete”), but they were not inclined to separate—the best jockey in a horse race scorns to take a lighter weight. Unfortunately, their car, except for the Bounder at the other end, offered very little scope to his imaginative talent or her loquacity.