The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink)

by Mccarthy, Mary

  The novella tells the story of a group of would-be utopians who, on the eve of the Cold War and just as fear of the Bomb is heating up, gather together to form a cooperative commune that, by its very existence, they think, will lodge a significant protest against the End of the World scenarios that are overtaking the West. The characters were all drawn from McCarthy’s professional and social life: the men at Partisan Review itself, as well as those who filled the vast, loosely knit world of left-wing sympathizers, bohemians, fellow travelers, and hangers-on in which she moved. Thus we have among the Utopians not only intellectual leaders but “an assortment of persons of diffuse and uncommitted good will, two editors of a national news weekly, a Latinist teacher of boys …, a trade union publicist, several New York high-school teachers …, a middle-aged poet …, an actor and a radio script-writer,” as well as their various husbands, wives, and children.

  The ideological leanings of the group are divided between the realists and the purists, led on the one hand by Will Taub (clearly Philip Rahv) and on the other by Macdougal Macdermott (even more clearly Dwight Macdonald). But whether realists or purists, all take themselves and their enterprise very seriously; above all, they take seriously their own internal divisions. They might not know how to come up with a working definition of social democracy, but they certainly know how to obsess over each other’s theoretical differences. (Informed of the large number of people who are with him, Taub instinctively responds with “Never mind that. Who’s against us?”) Whatever the issue, the Utopian leaders will show “far less constraint in characterizing the [opinions of their opponents] as childish, unrealistic, unhistorical, etc., than in formulating a rhetoric of democratic ideals.” This is the failure of moral imagination in The Oasis upon which McCarthy will concentrate her mocking attention.

  From the get-go, she taunts the mixed motives and self-deceptions with which the Communards arrive in Utopia. Imagining that what they are about to do will provide an example for the world to emulate, they are in fact, each in his or her own peculiar way, more preoccupied with secret self-regard than with Utopia’s large-minded statement of purpose. In the very first paragraph we are told that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia because

  Joe, in real life a diabetic businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to get more out of it than anybody else … He intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists … He would not have been in earnest about the higher life if he had failed to think of it in terms of the speed-up.

  Then, for (sadly) comic relief, we have Katy and Preston, who, married a bare two years and ardently of the purist party, are mainly involved in strategizing their marital misery. Whenever they have an argument Katy instantly goes on an emotional jag that Preston despises and has never known how to escape; but now he, “no doubt about it, was taking advantage of the Utopian brotherhood to shut her out from himself.” Utopia was giving him “a privacy he had sought in vain during [their] two years of marriage.” Katy, in turn, was discovering that “the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia … [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right … [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief.”

  And yet again, there is Taub’s sidekick, Harold Sidney (William Phillips): “A clever and fair-minded man, receptive to discussion and argument, he disliked giving pain, and this, in conjunction with the doctrine of necessity to which he and his colleagues were wedded, had made him somewhat weak and evasive … His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent’s position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.”

  It is Joe Lockman who is the cause of the first moral difficulty the Utopians find themselves in. “My God,” cries the ever impassioned Macdougal Macdermott, upon learning that Lockman has been admitted to the colony, “aren’t we going to have any standards?… This fellow is a yahoo.” When his wife points out that ostracizing Joe would be “an ugly beginning for a community devoted to brotherhood,” Macdermott instantly changes course (as he will time and again), announcing her absolutely right, that Joe must be admitted to their company. But the argument itself has caused unease. “The incident, in fact, had frightened them a little. They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them from themselves.”

  Still, there remains a Kantian puzzle. “Was it to follow then that anyone could be admitted to Utopia—a thief, a blackmailer, a murderer? Why not, declared the purists … Impossible, said the realists.” The point, thankfully, remains untested. “No murderers or thieves applied, only ordinary people of ordinary B-plus morality, people whose crimes, that is, had been confined to an intimate circle, and who had never injured anybody but a close friend, a relation, a wife, a husband, themselves.”

  And there we have the brilliant and quite original thesis of The Oasis: the people of the ideological left—intellectuals and plebeians alike—imagine themselves moralists of the first order, when they are in fact possessed of only B-plus morality. In the hands of an Edmund Wilson this thesis might have invoked a sense of tragedy; in the hands of Philip Rahv himself, unmitigated scorn; with Mary McCarthy it becomes an instrument of contemplative ridicule—perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

  The reason that Rahv went ballistic when he read The Oasis was that McCarthy is caricaturing his own deeply held credo when she tells us that Will Taub’s “whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value.” In practice this meant that he allowed “anyone (this automatically excluded fascists and communists) the liberty of behaving as ineffectually as he wished. But the right of a human being to think that he could resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning was something denied him with all the ferocity of [his] own pent-up nature and disappointed hopes.” And then the coup de grâce: Taub himself had nothing to offer, by way of a concrete proposal, in the matter of how right-minded people were actually to live out their ideals.

  The final test for the Utopians, which they fail badly, comes when a strange family starts picking strawberries in their fields and, after speaking reasonably to the poachers and receiving no response, Preston and another colonist, not knowing what else to do, drive them off the land by taking potshots in the air with a gun filled with blanks. Joe Lockman, of all people, is the one to call them on this appalling solution to the problem with which they thought they had been faced: “ ‘You’ve done a terrible thing,’ he said solemnly, going up to the two young men and putting a hand on the shoulder of each. ‘You’ve driven a man and his family off this property with a gun … I never thought this could happen here.’ ”

  McCarthy sums up the incident:

  A phase of the colony had ended, everyone privately conceded … The distaste felt by some … was so acute that they questioned the immediate validity of staying on in a colony where such a thing could take place. The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle-class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.

  The mockery ends in self-mockery as one of the Utopians observes, “Nice people like these are always all right, unless you take them off guard.”

  The Oasis was first published in England in the British magazine Horizon. Its English readers, who could easily identify the original of all the major players, roared with laughter (as we would have, had the shoe been on the other foot) at this marvelously executed send-up of the American intellectual scene; many American critics, however, prono
unced it brilliant but heartless. They were wrong. The book is not heartless. It is not out for blood. True, irony inevitably means some fundamental sympathy is being withheld, but the irony here is not savage. Its deliciously witty sentence structure is rooted in the heartfelt disappointment of a moralist whom the reader feels has really wanted the good (that is, the genuine) in our midst to prevail.

  Today, everyone connected with The Oasis, including its author, is long dead, and as the world from which it emerged is also long gone, the roman à clef aspect of the novella seems no longer of consequence. What does remain of consequence is the moving sense of familiarity with which we encounter McCarthy’s Utopians who, decked out in their all-too-human shortcomings, are still hungry to make anew a world in which we can all be saved from ourselves.

  In fact, it must be confessed that, both in this world and the next, the wicked are always a source of considerable embarrassment.

  —FROM THE PASSAGE ON MADAME

  DE WARENS’S RELIGIOUS VIEWS

  IN ROUSSEAU’S CONFESSIONS

  OBEDIENT TO THE SOCIAL LAW THAT MAKES THE moot guest the early bird at a tea party, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia. The past cannot be discarded in a single gesture, and Joe, in real life a diabetic businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to get more out of it than anybody else. This determination was purely spiritual. Translated from his factory and his garden to this heavenly mountain-top, he intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists. He meant no evil by this; he called it leadership. He expected to be a spur and an incentive, as he had been to the brothers and the brothers-in-law in Lockman Leathergoods below. He would not have been in earnest about the higher life if he had failed to think of it in terms of the speed-up.

  Habits die hard, particularly with the successful, and where the other colonists, defeated, for the most part, in their earthly endeavors by drink, pride, greed, caution, or laziness, looked upon Utopia as a concerted New Year’s resolution, an insurrection of slaves against the inner masters, as well as a secession from society, Joe saw it simply as an extension of opportunity. He had always been a good man, and the only sin he had ever committed—the brother whom he had pronounced dead the day the shortage in the firm’s accounts was discovered—he considered a righteous act. His one regret in real life, aside from family cares, was that he had not found sufficient time to give to his painting, a hobby he had taken up in middle age for purposes of relaxation, only to find in art (he had gone straight to the moderns) something bigger and better than business, a gigantic step-up transformer for the communication of personal electricity which excited his salesman’s vision with promises of a vast “development.” He looked forward with the greatest interest to the conversation of writers and painters, and it did not occur to him that he was participating in an anarchistic experiment. He knew himself to be a good mixer, as well as a good neighbor, and the communal program of the colony filled him, therefore, with no alarms—“What’s mine is yours,” he was fond of saying to acquaintances, and though he voted the Republican ticket, he had long been of the opinion that there was too much selfishness in the world. His exodus from Belmont, therefore, had an orderly and calmly transitional character. He had the AAA map out the route for him as usual, outlining the best highways in a serene wide ribbon of turquoise that ended abruptly, however, at the junction down in the valley, where the dirt road to Utopia trailed off from the numbered highway, anonymous and unmarked.

  It was in the AAA office that Joe had experienced his first qualm. Before the blond secretary, he felt really humiliated to think that Utopia did not figure on his Socony Automobile Guide. Etymology being one of his hobbies, he had already done the derivation of Utopia from ou, not, topos, a place (“Notaplace, get it?” he had said to his wife, Eva), yet the stare of the secretary unmanned him. He could not resist the impulse to put Utopia on the map. Seizing a pencil from the girl’s desk, he had quickly drawn in a mountain where no surveyor had ever found one. “Look,” he said. “Next year Socony will have it, right between Shaker Village and the birthplace of Stephen A. Douglas.”

  Afterwards, he was ashamed of what he had done. “Joe,” he said to himself, in the hillbilly dialect he had adopted for interior disputation, “you hadn’t ought to act thataway. What you care what folks think? We-uns up in the mountains don’t give a damn about they-uns down in the valley.” Self-parody was Joe’s misfortune; he was a buffoon even with his soul. A sad Jewish comedian, grey-haired, grey-eyed, grey-skinned, sick, intelligent, unsure, he lacked audience-sense to an almost fatal degree. He used a dozen masks, accents, patters, soft-shoe steps, to parry an invisible laughter whose source he could not locate; in the confusion of these disguises, he had lost himself. The go-getting business man, the official greeter, the barber-shop harmonist, the Scout leader, the comic Englishman, Ikey the Jew, all these stereotypes were Joe’s repertory, but they were also Joe. He had made himself grotesque for fear of becoming ridiculous, and though somewhere within him there was a voice crying in the wilderness, it spoke in a babble of tongues, in the base dialect of the Philistines. He was a prophet without honor to himself.

  “He is the antithesis of everything we stand for,” shouted Macdougal Macdermott, the editor of a libertarian magazine, the night Joe’s name was proposed to the Utopian council. “My God, aren’t we going to have any standards? I don’t hold his business against him; he may be a decent employer; but, my God, the man is uncivilized. Don’t you believe in anything? This fellow is a yahoo.” Ordinarily a generous-minded man, ready to oppose sectarianism whenever he observed it in others, Macdougal Macdermott felt the proposed admission of Joe Lockman as a personal affront. Of all the enrolled Utopians, he was closest to Joe by temperament. Tall, red-bearded, gregarious, susceptible to a liver complaint, puritanical, disputatious, hard-working, monogamous, a good father and a good friend, he had suffered all his life from a vague sense that he was somehow crass, that he did not belong by natural endowment to that world of the spirit which his intellect told him was the highest habitation of man. That he could not see this world was a source of perpetual grievance to him; he knew that it existed through perceiving its effect on others, as a man in a snug house infers that the wind is blowing from the agitation of the leaves on the trees. Had he not seen a poem, he would have scoffed at the idea of poetry, and had the idea of poetry not been presented to him, he would have scoffed at a poem. Nevertheless, ten years before, he had made the leap into faith and sacrificed $20,000 a year and a secure career as a paid journalist for the intangible values that eluded his empirical grasp. He had moved down town into Bohemia, painted his walls indigo, dropped the use of capital letters and the practice of wearing a vest, and, having thus impressed his Sancho Panza into the service of quixotic causes, he now felt it to be the keenest ingratitude that he should be asked to admit into the fellowship a man who had done nothing. A whole habit of thrift in him cried out against the proposed largesse. Where was the justice in the world, if the savings of a lifetime were to be wiped out in a sudden inflation of the currency? Like the Prodigal Son’s brother, he rebelled against this capriciousness of favor; his logical character cried out against the illogic of grace.

  In the heat of the discussion that followed, two tendencies crystallized, the strict and the latitudinarian, and the strict would have won the day had not Mac himself, in one of those reversals of feeling characteristic of amateur parliaments, suddenly shifted ground. The ease with which his arguments were prevailing awoke him to question their validity; the novelty of winning a point put his dormant conscience on guard. He had been carried to the center of opinion more rapidly than he had anticipated, and the very smoothness of the voyage made him distrust the current of passion that had swept him there. The elation of his supporters disguste
d him and invoked a sympathy for Joe which persuasion could not have induced in him. “The man is human,” he yelled, all at once, disregarding his previous contentions, just as though someone else had uttered them. “My God,” he exclaimed, wheeling on his chief constituent, “what is this word, philistine? You talk as if he were an ape.” “Mac,” his supporter protested, “you’re being inconsistent.” “What if I am?” he shouted, waving his arms in the air. “You know what Emerson said. All right,” he conceded, “I was wrong. The man has a right to exist.” “And what,” said Mrs. Macdermott, entering the argument unexpectedly, now that she found herself in agreement with her husband, and speaking in a quiet voice, “is Utopia but the right to a human existence?”

  The others fell silent, mortified, recalled to their principles or to the principles, at any rate, of the colony, to which, however dubiously, with whatever reservations or secret hostilities, they were lending a gingerly credence. A few of the men grumbled, not because they disagreed with Mrs. Macdermott, but because they grudged Mac Macdermott the luxury of being both right and wrong in the same argument—one opinion apiece was enough in a democracy. And the placidity of Mrs. Macdermott’s tone, sounding into their discord, fretted them as usual; Mrs. Macdermott, unlike the other colonists, had been born into New York society, and though a gentle disposition and an identification with the unfortunate had given her pretty, slight form and fragile pastel features that downtrodden and even necessitous appearance so common among charitable women, she still expressed herself in the secure manner of one who has enjoyed advantages; the silver spoon tinkled in her mouth whenever she spoke against privilege. Retiring and diffident as she was, she nevertheless appeared to feel herself as a modest pivot at the very center of judgment, and the long pale baby on her lap tonight, as always, seemed to point the finger of reproach at the less “responsible” members of the party—the Macdermott children, naturally, had not been made slaves of a schedule and enjoyed all the democratic freedoms, including the freedom of assembly.