The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  Pflaumen looked hurt.

  “Of course,” he said, “it’s none of my business …”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” you said, in a stubborn childish voice.

  The warm, twosey smile had died on his lips, but he revived it with an effort.

  “Personally,” he went on, “I should have thought Peterson was more in your line. I asked him specially because I thought he could do you some good …”

  He paused. The unresolved sentence hung coaxingly in the air, begging your denial, your explanation, your attention. But cruelly you ignored it, and leaned back in your chair, as if to catch the words of the neighboring conversation. “Did you hear that?” you said finally. “They are picketing The Tsar to Lenin.”

  Pflaumen glanced up at you, refusing the diversion. “Oh Meg,” he murmured reproachfully, “I thought we were such friends.”

  “Don’t be tiresome!” you exclaimed. “Why don’t you get me another highball?” You put your glass in his hand with a decisive gesture.

  “All right,” he acceded, scrambling to his feet. You thought you had won. At a single sharp word that hungry ego had scuttled back into the shell of function, where friendship and hospitality were identical and every highball was a loving cup. But he had taken only a few steps toward the bar, when he stopped, as if he had forgotten something, and turned back to you with an anxious face. “You’re not drinking too much, are you?” he asked, in a true stage whisper. Several people, including Erdman, turned their heads.

  At last, you thought, the bill had come in. The dinners, the letters of introduction, the bottle of perfume, the gardenias, the new Soviet film, the play, the ballet, the ice-skating at Rockefeller Plaza had all been invoiced, and a line drawn underneath, and the total computed. How recklessly you had accepted, like a young matron with a charge account (“Take two, madam; the bill will not go out till after the first of the year”). Now, when you looked at it, the total was staggering; it was more than you could pay.

  You remembered suddenly all the warning signs. How deep Pflaumen always was in the confidence of his friends, how offended if two of them should meet in his absence! How careful people were to serve the whisky Pflaumen’s client made—you recalled how a young husband had hurried out, unshaved, to the liquor store, so that the label on the bottle should be right when Pflaumen arrived for highballs; you remembered another husband pouring wine into a decanter so that Pflaumen should not know that it came from his client’s competitor. And how fond Pflaumen was of talking about loyalty! “It’s the only thing I expect of my friends,” he would say, sententiously. Loyalty, you now perceived, meant that Pflaumen should never be left out of anything. He was like an x that you can never drop out of an equation no matter how many times you multiply it or add to it this side of infinity. All at once, you saw how he could be generous and humble and look predatory at the same time; the hawklike mouth was not deceptive, for he was a true bird of prey: he did not demand any of the trifles that serve as coin in the ordinary give-and-take of social intercourse; he wanted something bigger, he wanted part of your life.

  For the first time, you understood why it was that this apartment of Pflaumen’s affected you so unpleasantly, why you went there almost surreptitiously, not telling anyone, so that your closest friends were hardly aware that you knew Pflaumen. You saw that it was indeed a house of assignation, where business deals, friendships, love affairs were arranged, with Pflaumen, the promoter, taking his inevitable cut. When you had refused to tell Pflaumen about Erdman—though, so far, there was nothing really to tell—you had violated the code. You had tried to cheat him of his rightful share; you had been guilty of disloyalty. And he was going to crack down on you; he had, in fact, already begun.

  When he came back from the bar with your glass in his hand, he was smiling, but the down-curved lips were strained and angry. You took the glass and set it down; Erdman in a cheap tweed coat was making his way toward you, ready to say good-bye. You smiled at him faintly, knowing that Pflaumen was watching you, and knowing, too, with a certain vindictive happiness, that of all the things about Erdman, Pflaumen was most envious of that baggy Kollege Kut coat with its raglan collar. You thought of your own poor coat, and you could see the two of them hanging side by side in Pflaumen’s closet, like two pairs of shoes outside a hotel room in a naughty French movie, sentinels to a private, serious world that Pflaumen could never—even vicariously—invade.

  The two men were shaking hands. “Come again,” said Pflaumen, “and I’ll get Farwell from the Yale Law School to meet you. And bring your wife,” he added, in an emphatic voice. “You ought to meet her, Meg.”

  “Yes,” you said thinly. “I didn’t know Mr. Erdman was married.”

  “He tries to keep it dark,” said Pflaumen, suddenly very jovial. He slapped Erdman on the back and began to propel him toward the door.

  You went quietly into the bedroom and took your coat out of the closet. By the time Pflaumen returned from the elevator, you were ready to go.

  “You’re not leaving?” he said, looking alarmed. “If you wait till the others go, I’ll drive you.”

  “Don’t bother,” you said. “I’m used to the subway.”

  “But what about the Berolzheimers?” he asked breathlessly, in a sort of panic. Clearly he had not intended that things should go quite so far. “Next Wednesday?”

  You had forgotten about the Berolzheimers. Now you hesitated, weighing the invitation. Sooner or later you would break with him, you knew. But not yet, not while you were still so poor, so loverless, so lonely. “All right,” you said, “you can pick me up at my place.”

  The time after the next, you promised yourself, you would surely refuse.

  FIVE

  Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man

  TO LOOK AT HIM, you would never have believed he was an intellectual. That was the nice thing about Jim Barnett. With his pink cheeks and sparkling brown eyes and reddish brown hair that needed brushing and well-cut brown suit that needed pressing, he might have been any kind of regular young guy, anywhere in America. He made you think of Boy Scouts and starting a fire without matches and Wesley Barry and skinning the cat and Our Gang comedies and Huckleberry Finn. If he had ever been hard up, he could have been a photographic model, and one would have seen his pleasant, vaguely troubled face more often in The Saturday Evening Post than in Esquire. He might have done very well as the young man who is worried about his life insurance, the young man who is worried about dandruff, the young man whose shirts won’t fit him, the young man who looks up happily from his plate of Crunchies, saying, “Gee, honey, I didn’t know breakfast food could taste so good!”

  In real life, his concerns were of a different order. The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of Das Kapital and was going around telling people about how he felt afterwards. He would buttonhole a classmate after a few sets of tennis down at the old Fourteenth Street Armory. “You know, Al,” he would say, twisting his head upwards and to one side in the characteristic American gesture of a man who is giving a problem serious thought (the old salt or the grizzled Yankee farmer scanning the sky for weather indications), “you know, Al, I never thought so at college, but the Communists have something. Their methods over here are a little operatic, but you can’t get around their analysis of capitalism. I think the system is finished, and it’s up to us to be ready for the new thing when it comes.” And Al, or whoever it was, would be doubtful but impressed. He might even go home with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in his pocket—in that period, the little socialist classic enjoyed something of the popularity of the Reader’s Digest: it put the whole thing in a nutshell, let a fellow like Al know just what he was up against. Later that evening Al might remark to his wife that maybe it would be a good idea (didn’t she think?) to lay in a stock of durable consumers’ goods—in
case, oh, in case of inflation, or revolution, or anything like that. His wife would interpret this in terms of cans and leave a big order for Heinz’s baked beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, and somebody else’s chicken à la king with the grocer the next day. This was the phenomenon known as the dissemination of ideas.

  In much the same tone (that of a man in an advertisement letting another man in on a new high-test gasoline) Jim began to write about his convictions in articles and book reviews for the liberal magazines. Capitalism was on the skids, and everybody ought to know about it. He could never have written, “Capitalism is doomed,” any more than he could have talked about “the toiling masses.” At Yale, elevation in speech had been held to be quite as barbarous as eccentricity in dress or the wrong sort of seriousness in study; and if Jim had committed an unpardonable breach of manners in interesting himself in Marxism, his rough-and-tumble vocabulary was a sort of apology for this, a placatory offering to the gods of decorum, who must have appeared to him in the guise of football players. Certainly, his vocabulary had something to do with the enthusiasm his work excited. The ideas he put forward, familiar enough when clothed in their usual phraseology, emerged in his writing in a state of undress that made them look exciting and almost new, just as a woman whom one has known for years is always something of a surprise without her clothes on. And, in the end, it was not the ideas that counted so much, as the fact that Jim Barnett held them.

  This was the thing that nobody, including Jim himself, could ever quite get over. Now and then someone would be frank enough to ask him how it had happened, and he would laugh and say that it had been an accident: he had had a roommate at college who was literary, and once you got started reading one thing led to another. But modest men, like boasters, are never believed, even when they speak the exact truth; and in 1932 everyone on the left was convinced that this “accident” was really a miracle, a sign from heaven or history that the millennium was at hand. Most men had come to socialism by some all-too-human compulsion: they were out of work or lonely or sexually unsatisfied or foreign-born or queer in one of a hundred bitter, irremediable ways. They resembled the original twelve apostles in the New Testament; there was no real merit in their adherence, and no hope either. But Jim was like the Roman centurion or Saint Paul; he came to socialism freely, from the happy center of things, by a pure act of perception which could only have been brought about by grace; and his conversion might be interpreted as a prelude to the conversion of the world.

  And, like all miracles, this particular one served to quicken the faith of the stragglers, the tired workers, and the worldlings. Silly people who had gone a little to the left and then begun to wonder whether they had not, after all, made a mistake, had only to look at Jim Barnett to feel reassured. Nobody could possibly object to socialism if it were going to be run by earnest, undogmatic Yale men—some of them out of Shef, to take care of the technical side. On the other hand, serious middle-aged men who had been plugging Marxism for years in little magazines that owed the printer money and never came out on time would have a conversation with Jim and feel heartened, even inspired. If a nice, average boy like that could tumble into the movement, surely the old ideas must be bankrupt at last. When capitalism, intellectually speaking, could no longer feed her favorite children, the end could not but be very, very near.

  By simply being the way he was, Jim Barnett made a great many people on the left feel happy, almost sentimental. He was a mascot, a good-luck piece; and there was perhaps some superstition behind the fact that very little was demanded of him—you must not ask too much of a talisman or the power will go out of it, and it is better not to look a gift horse in the mouth. At any rate, unlike most converts of that period, he was not expected to follow the Party line, even on a long leash. From the very first, Jim was an independent in politics, siding now with the Communists, now with the Lovestoneites, now with the Trotskyists, now with the group of middle-class liberals he had known at college who were trying to build a Farmer-Labor party of their own. In anybody else, such behavior would have been politically suspect: the man would have been damned as a careerist, on the one hand, or a dilettante on the other. Yet neither of these allegations was ever made against Jim. His heterodoxy was received by all factions with paternal indulgence. “Let the boy have his head,” was the feeling. “A wild oat or two won’t hurt him.”

  With Jim himself it was a point of honor that he should never agree completely with anyone or anything. He had never swallowed Marxism whole, he used to say in a slightly boastful tone, as if he had achieved a considerable feat of acrobatics. It was true; he never swallowed any doctrine whole. Like a finicky eater, he took pride in the fact that he always left something on the plate. There was something peculiarly American and puritanical about this abstemiousness of his; in other countries children are taught that it is bad manners not to finish everything that is set before them. But at Yale a certain intellectual prodigality had been cultivated in the students; it was bad taste to admire anything too wholeheartedly. They thought “bad taste” but they meant “dangerous,” for the prodigality was merely an end product of asceticism: you must not give in to your appetites, physical or spiritual; if you did, God knows where it would land you, in paganism, Romanism, idolatry, or the gutter. Like all good Yale men, Jim feared systems as his great-grandfather had feared the devil, the saloon, and the pope.

  Naturally, for boys brought up under these influences, systems of thought had a certain wanton, outlawed attractiveness; and Marxism was to become for Jim’s generation what an actress had been for the youths of the Gilded Age. During the first years of the New Deal, there were many flirtations, many platonic friendships with the scarlet woman of the steppes. Jim, being courageous, went farther than most. And, at first glance, that balkiness of his, that hesitation, that unwillingness to take the final step, might have appeared to be merely a concession to tradition, another bone thrown to the Eli bulldog, who was always extraordinarily hungry.

  Actually, it was deeper and more personal than that. If other people on the left stood in superstitious awe of Jim, Jim also stood in awe of himself. It was not that he considered that he was especially brilliant or talented; his estimation of his qualities was both just and modest. What he reverenced in himself was his intelligent mediocrity. He knew that he was the Average Thinking Man to whom in the end all appeals are addressed. He was the man that Uncle Sam points his finger at in the recruiting posters, that political orators beseech and ad-writers try to frighten; he was the stooge from the audience that the magician calls up on the stage, the foreman on the Grand Jury, the YOU in “This means YOU.” He was a walking Gallup Poll, and he had only to leaf over his feelings to discover what America was thinking. There was something sublime about this, but there were responsibilities, too. The danger was that you would lose your amateur standing. It was essential to remain—not aloof, exactly, for that implied some artistocratic hauteur—but accessible, undecided. It was so easy, so fatally easy, to become a professional innocent; one day you were a bona fide tourist, and the next you were a shill in a Chinatown bus. If you were not remarkably alert, you might never know it had happened.

  Jim Barnett, however, was alert, and he took every possible precaution. His mind and character appeared to him as a kind of sacred trust that he must preserve inviolate. It was as if he were the standard gold dollar against which the currency is measured. It would be wrong to debase it with lead, but it would be equally wrong to put more than the specified amount of gold into it. The dollar was supposed to be impure in certain unalterable proportions: you could not change that without upsetting the whole monetary system. Jim’s function, as he saw it, was to ring the new ideas against himself, and let the world hear how they sounded. It was his duty, therefore, to “be himself,” and his virtues and his weaknesses were alike untouchable. On the one hand, he could not drop into the life of a Communist front man, because this would have involved a suspension of individual judgment, a surgical sterilizati
on of the moral faculty that was odious to him; on the other hand, he could not lift himself into the world of Marxist scholarship, because, to put it frankly, this might have overtaxed his powers, might (who knows) have crippled him for good.

  It did not occur to him, or, indeed, to anyone else, that he was taking the line of least resistance. This state of being unresolved, on call, as it were, was painful to him, and he used to envy his friends who, as he said, were “sure.” The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thoughts troubled him a good deal. He found, for example, that he liked to drink and dance and go to medium-smart night clubs with medium-pretty girls. Yet he believed with Veblen that there was no greater folly than conspicuous consumption, and his eyes and ears told him that people were hungry while he had money in his pocket. This was a problem all well-to-do radicals had to face, and there were any number of ways of dealing with it. You could stop being a radical, or you could give your money away. Or you could give a little of it away and say, “I owe something to myself,” or give none of it away, and say, “I’m not a saint, and besides I have something more important than money to contribute.” The Communist Party in those years did its best to settle this delicate question gracefully for prosperous fellow-travelers. It was reported that Browder had declared that there was nothing worse for the movement than what he called “a tired radical,” and that men and women would be better workers for the cause if they let themselves go and enjoyed life once in a while. This pronouncement was widely quoted—over cocktails in the Rainbow Room, and sometimes (even) over a bottle of champagne in more intimate boîtes; it was believed that this showed “the human side” of the Party leader, and gave the lie to those perpetual carpers (tired radicals, undoubtedly) who kept talking about Communist inflexibility. The example of Marx and Engels was also cited: they had had great Christmas parties and had called the young Kautsky a mollycoddle because he would not drink beer. (And how right their judgment had been! Forty years later Kautsky had betrayed the revolution by voting war credits in the German Reichstag, and Lenin had called him, among other things, an old woman.) Jim Barnett tried all these formulas on his conscience, but stretch them as he would, he could not make them cover the abyss between the theory and the practice. He decided, at last, to let the abyss yawn, and in the course of time he fell into it.