The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink)

by Mccarthy, Mary

  “Eleanor’s right!” Mac shouted, slapping his knee in delighted admiration. He applauded his wife thunderously, as if she were a team of acrobats, whenever she performed what to him was the extraordinary feat of arriving at a balanced opinion. His co-Utopians smiled. At bottom, they were grateful to Eleanor Macdermott for saving them from an act of ostracism, which would indeed have been an ugly beginning for a community devoted to brotherhood. 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. They now felt somewhat dashed to find that they behaved (or had nearly behaved) worse together than any of them might have done singly, and, reluctantly dismissing from their minds the vision of Utopia as a kind of collective security, they resolved that from now on (a phrase, alas, not new to any of them) they would set a guard on themselves and distrust their spontaneous feelings. There was no further debate about Joe Lockman, who was elected by acclamation—a good omen, everyone thought, for the success of the venture, for somehow, during the past half hour, Joe had become a symbol; the colony had found in this stray bird of the cormorant capitalist species, attaching itself so incongruously to their fortunes, its indispensable albatross.

  Was it to follow then that anyone could be admitted to Utopia—a thief, a blackmailer, a murderer? Why not, declared the purists, arguing for the life of risk and the precedent of the bishop’s candlesticks. Impossible, said the realists: the physical survival of the colony was more important than a mere demonstration of principle—a strong and self-confident Utopia could perhaps afford a murderer, but a Utopia not yet consolidated must defer this luxury until a later date. Fortunately, perhaps, the point remained academic. 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. There were no saints in Utopia, and none that believed themselves saintly. The only saint with whom the colonists were personally acquainted had disappeared in a darkened city of Europe and was believed by the American consul to be, very probably, dead.

  To members of the purist faction, the absence of this man was terrible, for it was from him, an Italian anarchist in possession of his first papers, a veteran of the Spanish war and of Vichy’s prisons, a lover of Plato and Tolstoy, a short pink-and-black man with a monk’s tonsure of baldness and a monk’s barrel chest, that they had learned certain notions of justice, freedom, and sociability which now, long after he had left them, they were endeavoring to illustrate in action. The realistic party, on the other hand, while sympathizing vividly with his American wife (far more indeed than the purists, who thought principally of the loss to themselves) and urging attention to the case upon various acquaintances in the State Department, regarded the absence of the Founder as, on the whole, a blessing. They feared, above everything else, that Utopia, like Oneida, Brook Farm, and the phalansteries, would make itself a laughing-stock by the advocacy of extreme ideas. To them Utopia was justified on sheerly practical grounds, a retreat from atomic warfare, a summer-vacation colony, a novelty in personal relations; and though in their hearts they too hoped for some millennial outcome of the experiment, for the reign of justice and happiness, they shrank from a definition of the colony which committed them to any positive belief. Conspicuous goodness, like the Founder’s, filled them with uneasy embarrassment; they looked upon it as a form of simple-mindedness on a par with vegetarianism, and would have refused admission to Heaven on the ground that it was full of greenhorns and cranks.

  That the purists had different ideas about Utopia, the realists were well aware, and well aware too that there existed in the other faction certain plans for their moral transformation in which they had not been included. That the other side was banking on the isolation of the mountaintop, the soft influences of Nature, the gentle admonitions of example, to bring out the best in them, they had seen from the beginning. But they had no intention of being changed or improved, and they smiled among themselves at this childish conspiracy, which seemed to them the final proof of their opponents’ naïveté. The prospect of remaining unregenerate and defeating the purists’ hopes excited in them a mood of zestful anticipation; it gave salt to the whole project, which otherwise they would have found insipid.

  The dark features of Will Taub, leader of the realist party, had contorted into an expression of malicious triumph when he heard that a lady purist had lightly pronounced him “salvageable.” “Idiots!” he thunderously proclaimed, pounding his fist on his coffee-table, upsetting a highball over the manuscript of a rather proprietary article on Tocqueville which he was preparing for the press. Up to this moment, he had been uncertain as to whether or not to blacklist Utopia, and his visitor, in fact, had relied on the bit of gossip to goad him into a decision, for, like many other spiteful people who infested Bohemian circles during that era, the busybody now seated on Taub’s sofa was actively campaigning against the formation of a colony which threatened no interest of his and was wholly pacific and benevolent, so that long before Utopia had crystallized, an anti-Utopian movement of the most definite character existed, and men and women were calling on their friends, trying to dissuade them from the project, against which their only conceivable grudge was the fear of not being invited, and giving more time and energy to this cause than they had ever been able to summon up for the fight, say, against fascism or Stalinism. In the case of Will Taub, however, the visitor had made an error. He was not sufficiently versed in his host’s ingenious psychology to guess that the slug, which he had just inserted in the mechanism, would hit the jackpot, but in a manner quite unexpected. “Salvage,” Taub softly exclaimed. “I’d like to see that,” and he gave the peculiar short harsh laugh that was indicative of his polemical humor. “We’ll go,” he abruptly announced, tapping his wife familiarly on the shoulder, as if to apprise her that a show was about to begin into which he had privately written a sardonic star part for himself. His wife, inured to surprises, merely raised her penciled eyebrows. Taub’s imagination continued to work. “What fools they’ll make of themselves. It will be marvelous,” he cried, nudging his visitor this time, and rolling slightly on the sofa. The tip of his tongue fastened itself against his lower teeth, and the center broadened and protruded in a truly malignant fashion as he emitted another grating laugh, vainglorious and taunting. “A-a-ah,” he exclaimed, and the visitor, half-forgotten, felt embarrassed and even slightly frightened by the directness of this hostility. “It was quite strange,” he later declared. “He positively stuck his tongue out. Do you think I was wrong to tell him? I feel quite alarmed for the Utopians.”

  Yet Will Taub in reality was not wholly displeased by the remark which had been repeated to him. Something shy and childlike in his nature felt obscurely flattered by the judgment. He and his whole party, to tell the truth, would have been glad to be redeemed or “salvaged,” if this could only be accomplished privately, and without the loss of that ideological supremacy which had become essential to their existence. As inheritors of “scientific” socialism, they based themselves on Marx and Engels, and though they had discarded the dialectic and the labor theory of value and repudiated with violence whatever historical process was going on behind the iron curtain, their whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value. The failure of socialism in their time, the ascendancy of the new slave state were for them, therefore, an excruciating personal humiliation. To identify their survival with the arms of Western capitalism had been a natural step, but one which they took uneasily and with a certain semantic embarrassment—they showed far less constraint in characterizing the opponents of this policy as childish, unrealistic, unhistorical, etc., tha
n in formulating a rhetoric of democratic ideals.

  They had accepted as their historic mission the awakening of the let to the dangers of Red totalitarianism, and this task, with the aid of actual developments, they had accomplished with credit, but history itself (surely their real enemy) had superseded them, taking matters into its own hands, while the ungrateful let had failed to reward them with the unquestioning trust and obedience which they felt to be the logical sequel, and kept demanding, in articles, book reviews and private conversation, that they produce new ideas or else yield place to their juniors. As they patiently searched out the pages of Marx and Engels for precedents for a policy of “critical support” to governments, others, more reckless than they, hurried on ahead of them to rediscover the blessings of capitalism; still others remained obstinately true to the axioms of the socialist textbook—protection for minorities, opposition to wars and governments—and a third group, most recusant, tried to reject the whole of materialist doctrine and either to embrace religion or to assert, in small groups outside the main current, man’s power to dwell in relative harmony and justice. In most of these deviations, there was a common factor, an assumption of human freedom, which the realistic party felt it its duty to combat.

  In practice, of course, Taub and his friends conceded to 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 they denied him with all the ferocity of their own pent-up natures and disappointed hopes. The idea that there was a loophole by which others were escaping while they themselves played trustees to the law of cause and effect drove them to a fury that they could hardly rationalize. Thus they were at once the victims and the masters of a doctrine of inevitability. The dictators of a diminishing circle of literary and political thinkers, they maintained the habit of authority by a subservience to events, demonstrating irrefutably that an occurrence that had already happened could not have happened otherwise and translating this security into predictions of the future. They had been for some time more or less inactive politically, and their materialism had hardened into a railing cynicism, yet they still retained from their Leninist days, along with the conception of history as arbiter, a notion of themselves as a revolutionary élite whose correctness in political theory allowed them the widest latitude in personal practice. The misdeeds, which they obstinately defended against the attacks of “morality” were, as a matter of fact, of the most trivial and commonplace character, quite lacking in social élan, yet the faction was committed to these failings as if to a higher principle. They could not repent them, though repentance might have afforded relief, and they could not embark openly upon a new course of conduct, lest their whole past, in this light, appear unjustified. They were thus in a desperate situation, for their position, while unassailable from without, offered any egress either. They had grown to dislike criticism so heartily that even self-criticism struck them as a form of lèse-majesté; with crushing arguments, they refused the inner voice before it had finished speaking. This did not prevent them from feeling dissatisfied and unhappy, maligned and misunderstood; it only increased their sense of being surrounded by hostile forces. Time and age also, they felt, were conspiring to make them ridiculous; in business, once they had entrenched themselves in sinecures with an air of majestic astuteness, they soon found themselves discomfited precisely by their “executive” leisure and feared, above everything else, the eyes of their hard-working subordinates which seemed to be calculating their deficit on some impersonal adding machine.

  The necessity of going to an office, indeed, had become a source of genuine grievance with them. They felt positively imposed upon by the fact of an exploited class through whose room they were obliged to pass going and coming from lunch, arriving late on Mondays and leaving for the week-end on Thursdays. They were short and harsh with the typists, rude to the telephone girls; they slipped in and out without saying good day, found querulous fault with their secretaries, and beefed confidentially to them about the onerousness of the work. The more unpopular they knew themselves, the more they felt called upon to exercise—as a declaration of freedom—those very prerogatives which were the cause of resentment. All of this was quite at variance with their private characters, which were expansive and easy-going, if somewhat inclined to sloth. As realists, however, they were in no position to assert that the office self they presented, made up as it was simply of actions, was false to the inner picture. These tribulations had decidedly soured their tempers, and the compromises they had made in adjusting themselves to the “realities” of capitalism appeared to them sometimes in the light of a supreme sacrifice, a sacrifice quite unappreciated by Macdermott and his circle of irresponsible moralists, toward whom despite nominal friendship they felt a slow and vengeful anger like the rancor of the veteran toward the artful draft dodger.

  Thus their wish to see Utopia fail was sincere and even righteous; they looked forward to its debacle with a true Old Testament fervor and were prepared to go down themselves, like Samson with the temple of the Philistines, in vindication of the reality principle which remained the sole justification of their otherwise miscalculated lives. At the same time, they wished to do nothing to provoke the disaster which they foresaw; a sense of fair play, a feeling for scientific method which made them look on Utopia as an experiment which must be conducted under rigidly controlled conditions in order that the outcome they predicted should appear as the inevitable result, resolved them to give the colony the benefit of the doubt, to behave toward it peaceably and co-operatively, and not get the name of obstructionists. The very caution of this reasoning edged the door ajar to salvation, but only the purists discerned this and rejoiced at their opponents’ error. The point eluded Will Taub, who had persuaded himself that he was entering Utopia in a spirit of adamant skepticism, and had stipulated nothing more than to be on his good behavior at the preliminary council meetings. That this formula represented for him at that moment the zenith of ethical strivings, he was not aware, but sometimes, during a council meeting, shooting a suspicious glance at the demure and earnest face of one of his allies, Taub could not be sure that he was not the dupe and that his whole faction had not bamboozled him and gone over to the purist side. And even in himself he discovered a certain mood of armistice which confirmed his alarms and which at the same time was not displeasing to him—a sense of generosity and of the protocol of forbearance. He participated in the forms of equity with increasing confidence, and though of course he did not take any of it seriously, his heavy and rather lowering nature performed the unaccustomed libertarian movements with a feeling of real sprightliness and wondering self-admiration, as if he had been learning to dance. He did not encourage his wife to attend these council meetings and, coming home in the evenings, spoke of what had passed with a brief snort of disparagement; from this she was able to perceive that his emotions had become involved.

  On the day set for the great migration, therefore, the Utopian prospect looked brighter than an outsider might have supposed. The party of mechanized pilgrims guiding their family cars up the rutted road to Utopia was by no means entirely composed of the two factions, but included an assortment of persons of diffuse and uncommitted goodwill, two editors of a national news weekly, a Latinist teacher of boys who practiced a Benedictine Catholicism, an unemployed veteran of the Second World War, a girl student, a Protestant clergyman, a trade union publicist, several New York high-school teachers, an alcoholic woman illustrator, an unmarried private secretary who would organize games for the children, a middle-aged poet who had once been a Southern agrarian, an actor and a radio script-writer whom no one could remember voting for. All these, together with their husbands and wives, made up the Utopian center, voting sometimes with the realists and sometimes with the purists, inclining, naturally enough, a little to the purist side (otherwise they would hardly have been t
here) but siding with the realists on several important issues, the exclusion, for instance, of communists from the membership, an issue which had temporarily created a new alignment of forces, the Latinist, the radio writer, the clergyman, and the ex-agrarian backing up the realists, to everyone’s surprise, while the two magazine editors, who had their own brand of realism, the horse-sense, let’s-look-at-the-facts-boys, indigenous American side.

  “Cross your bridges when you come to them,” handsome editor Haines had advised. “Don’t commit yourself unless you have to. Let’s see how we feel when a Commie wants in.” This argument and, above all, Jim Haines’s seasoned and sagacious manner of unfolding it convinced the colony of the practical wisdom of following his prescription. The purists believed they had won, and the middle-of-the-roaders were content that the colony should keep its principles at least until the moment when it became necessary to apply them, a moment that seemed remote, since any communists who were not in the hands of the authorities were, according to common knowledge, infiltrating the subterranean armament factories, drilling subversively in the training-camps, or enrolled in America Last, an anti-war organization so reactionary that it had not yet been certified as disloyal.

  Utopia was too small a movement—it comprised only fifty persons—to serve the communist interest by obstructing the national war drive. It had hopes of extending its influence by inspiring other persons to form oases of their own in the contemporary desert, but the flag of secession it raised was no Fort Sumter. It had been investigated by the Attorney General as a possible communist front group (one of its enemies having denounced it as “objectively” giving aid to communism), but the case against it had been dropped, since the worst that could be said against it was that most of its membership had been guilty of “premature” anti-Stalinism. Pacifism had not yet been made a crime, providing that the pacifist was above the age to bear arms or suffered from some physical disability. The Administration was doing its best to preserve some vestiges of civil liberties (it was badly in need of war aims), and it could point to its toleration of Utopia with patriotic complacency. Moreover, the Home Defense Authority had been urging decentralization as an anti-air raid measure; it was not against the law for a group of people to move together to the country; the Utopians could not even be said to be violating a zoning ordinance. The men and women of the colony had registered with their draft boards as agricultural workers; the children were too young to qualify for the service; there was not a doctor or a scientist among the colonists; all of them, in fact, were quite “unnecessary” people, even Will Taub, who had offered himself to the State Department as an expert on communist strategy, only to endure the scrutiny of a pair of plainclothes detectives, to have his wires tapped and his tax-returns opened to question, and to be told in the end that his arsenal of ideas was rusty, since he had lost contact with the Party at the time of the Spanish Civil War.