The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Members of Bratian's firm asked themselves how his brain really did work. Which came first with him, the hen or the egg? Were his methods the result of his theories, or were his theories simply a part of his general attitude of making himself out to be so much more intelligent than the rest of the trade?

  Outwardly his methods were orthodox enough. His establishment had the usual false front of culture–tooled leather chairs, crowded bookcases, walnut desks, an array of charts and graphs and etchings on the walls, and a lithograph of Abraham Lincoln in his pre-whisker days in the outer office. Bratian might trust his flair, but he never overlooked a chance of checking up on it and he went in heavily for research and reader-acceptance tests. Although he was entirely unimpressed by the few surviving megalomaniacs from the neolithic days of advertising who still flew by the seat of their pants, he had no scruples about borrowing even some of their corniest tricks. In the conference room, on the wall behind the chair in which he sat, hung a framed slogan: IF ANY IDEA IS TOO BIG FOR YOU, YOU'RE TOO SMALL FOR THIS AGENCY.

  It was Bratian's pride to believe that he had a special insight into the workings of history; like the Communists, he thought he could use it as a direction-finder. He claimed that America was developing into a modern Roman Empire, and to make his point visually clear, he kept at hand a book of photographs of Roman portrait busts by which he tried to prove that the faces of famous Romans before Julius Caesar resembled Americans like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and William H. Seward. He would then flip the pages over to Romans who had flourished at the time of Claudius and Nero and compare them favourably with famous businessmen of the Babbitt era. First a republic, then a military republic with generals making the policy, then – Bratian would grin and shrug his shoulders.

  “What we deal with,” he said, “are the psychological byproducts of that set-up. Let's say our business is to be vulgar – but brilliantly vulgar. The bigger the country gets, the less sure of himself every individual in it is going to become. All right. Go hard for nationalism. Go hard for sex. Go hard for efficiency. Make every grass-root in Kansas think it's getting a raw deal if it can't pass for an orchid. Keep on telling them they deserve the best because they're Americans and that the American way of life is the best because it's the most efficient. But don't forget this – the only thing all of them are interested in is sex. Think about it. Dream about it and you can't lose.”

  But in the account for Harper Aircraft, Bratian allowed Stephen Lassiter a free hand. There was no need to remind Stephen that efficiency bred power on the American plan; he believed it completely. When display ads for Harper Aircraft went to press they showed sleek, beautiful planes flying over cities, seas, and plains, they showed intense designers poring over drafting boards and grim engineers doing a man's job in organizing assembly lines nearly half a mile long. After the United States entered the war, multiple colours were called upon to show battle scenes in which a Harper plane scored an American victory. In 1943, Stephen had his greatest success with an original idea – a comic strip magazine called The Privateer in honour of the famous Harper medium-bomber. It was the kind of magazine designed for boys with an eye to their fathers’ interests, and in it was recorded every notable war achievement performed by a Privateer, including the names of the heroes who had manned it. Within a year the magazine was being read by millions.

  One of Bratian's best accounts was a company which produced men's cosmetics, the same company he had once hoped to control himself before Stephen Lassiter sold the patent rights of the after-shaving lotion inherited from the estate of his father to Mark Wisden, the banker. Wisden kept it as a one-man business but gave the advertising account to Bratian and left it with him.

  Carl Bratian had always loved barber shops; he convinced Wisden that a men's cosmetic company was bound to succeed because the barber shop was a symbol of luxury to a large proportion of American males. Such a business would put a fine choice of barber's lotions within the range of every man's purse any day of the year, and it would provide wives with convenient gifts for their husbands. Bratian also believed that social evolution was on his side in advertising the cosmetics. He was sure there was such a desire for sexual sophistication throughout the country that smells had become a profitable commodity for men as well as women.

  When the campaign was launched it was jeered at from coast to coast, but the jeers helped sell the product. In display ads soldiers, filthy from slit-trenches and insect-eaten in jungles, were shown as yearning for the after-shave lotion with the lingering smell, for the talcum powder that matched their complexions, for the scented shaving soap in the imitation walnut bowl, for the copper-coloured oil which matched a suntan when it was rubbed into the skin.

  Wisden, who had once had a classical education, announced that he was calling the products Centurion, and he suggested a display showing a naked Roman soldier, identified by his breastplate, shield, greaves, and gladius spread beside him on a curule chair, lying beside a swimming pool being massaged by a slave. But Bratian persuaded him to change his mind. The firm was called Green Ranger. The Roman soldier was used as an inset, with the figure of Major Robert Rogers, dressed in Lincoln green standing beside him, and the legend read, “What do you mean, it's Roman? It's American!” A green-clad ranger adorned all the jars and containers of the product.

  In the last years of the war Bratian's business rose in volume like a tidal wave, and its success was accompanied by strange manifestations of guilt-neurosis on the part of some of his subordinates. The account executive for a perfume company, who in 1933 had been an instructor of English at Cornell making fourteen hundred a year, began to write articles for rough-paper magazines in praise of Soviet Russia. The head of the art department wrote a monograph on Titian, aiming to prove that if Titian were alive today he would have worked for an advertising agency. Bratian regarded these excursions with amusement, and when he found that another of his best men who had once been a divinity student was drinking too much, he guided him gently toward Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Bratian's reaction to his own success took the form of a new interest in politics. He gave large parties for certain senators and committee members in Washington, and he laughed at clients who complained that the government was ruining business. To Bratian, government was business, a peculiarly modern form of it, and he believed that the bigger it grew, the greater would become the demand for a man like himself.

  As he made more money and as the atmosphere of New York became more markedly international, Bratian began seriously to collect famous names. He made it a point to meet distinguished refugees who were experts on this and that, and he liked entertaining them in his newly acquired nine-room apartment which overlooked the East River. His living room contained a Rouault and a minor Picasso, and on either side of a mammoth fireplace shelves of rare books reached to the ceiling. There, with conversation buzzing around him, with the clever men telling each other what Churchill said to Roosevelt over the scotch in the White House, what the deal was going to be in India or China, talking over the affairs of the world in the same spirit of reality adopted by actuaries of an insurance company in discussing the lives of their clients, with the women among them clever and stupid, lush and icy slim, all selected by their men for some peculiar value of which they themselves were consciously aware – standing there by the window in his living room looking down over the river and the hospitals on Welfare Island and beyond to the factories and massed dwellings of Long Island City, Bratian sometimes laughed silently as he reflected what a joke it was that nobody except himself seemed to know in his bones that life was completely without meaning, that it was merely a fact and should be treated as such, that the only difference between success and failure was whether you satisfied a longing you had acquired in childhood – or you didn't satisfy it.

  ONLY in a certain sense did Stephen and Lucy rise with Bratian, for in so far as they could they tried to keep his business outside their personal lives. In the early years of their marriage
his cynicism never touched Lucy directly, for Stephen refused to think of himself solely as an advertising man. In working for Bratian he believed he was on his way to something better.

  “The only way for a man to protect himself against this lousy business I'm in,” he said frankly, “is to admit it's lousy. I was in a lousy business before but I didn't have the guts to tell myself the truth about it. This time it's different.”

  As the months and years went by and Lucy expressed no opinion about his work, Stephen would return to his favourite subject. “Don't worry about some of the bastards you meet in the office. They're better than you'd think. Some of them tried to be poets and novelists, some of them tried to be professors, and now they're all trying to get used to the idea of living with themselves. I was trained to deal with facts and machines and in a way I'm still doing it. There's not another agency man in the city with enough engineering background to handle this job for Harper without making Harper sick every time he has to talk to him. If it weren't for the Depression I might have been one of Harper's top designers now. This is the next best thing. Without money behind you, Lucy, you've got to take the third-rate job some second-rate son of a bitch offers and be glad to have it. Once we've got enough put away in the sock I'm going to quit Carl and go back to M.I.T. for a year. I know exactly what I've got to learn and it's not too late to learn it. After Dad died I lost confidence, and God knows being married to Joyce didn't help. It's different now. With you, and a little money behind us, the sky's the limit.”

  Such speeches usually ended when Stephen crossed the room and took Lucy in his arms, regardless of what she was doing at the time. As she felt the strength of his arms she thanked God for her incredible fortune in being married to a man who had learned to look facts in the eye, a man who could confront the kind of niggling anxieties that beset people in Grenville by throwing his head back and laughing. In spite of her desire to be loyal to the only two men she had known previous to her marriage, she found it difficult not to compare them with Stephen to her husband's advantage. Her father had been obsessed by religion, and Bruce, it seemed to her, by ideas; on both was the weight of an apparent necessity for correlating all knowledge into a pattern. But Stephen felt only the flat, factual sureness of an engineer. His only test of an idea was whether or not it would work. And with this factuality went a boyish enthusiasm when he was away from the office which more than offset his imperviousness to the kind of music she liked or the poetry she read or the flowers she wished she could grow in New York.

  Lucy loved her husband's maleness. Every aspect of it she not only accepted but consciously enjoyed, even to the way he left his clothes strewn over beds and chairs, spilled ashes on the rugs and insisted it was good for them, called his friends on the telephone at any hour of the night and wise-cracked like an adolescent, insisted on her enjoying Princeton football games when she was half frozen and didn't know the rules. He made her a full part of this overhang of college life he had resumed on returning to the east from Cleveland, and it gave her a fine feeling to see that his old college friends remembered him, were still fond of him, and – perhaps because there was not a single man of abstract ideas among them – shared his pleasure in the fact that he was getting on.

  For nearly a year their only friends in the city were men Stephen had known in Princeton who came in groups to drink beer and whiskey and talk about themselves while Lucy sat quietly and listened, filled with a sense of wonder at being a woman surrounded by men. But their circle of acquaintances soon widened; an industrial designer and his wife whom they met at a large cocktail party sensed common tastes or interests and invited them to dinner; at the dinner they met an architect and his wife, and a doctor and his wife who was a child psychiatrist, all friends of friends who had time in so large a city to reach out with warmth toward a strange Canadian wife. Their spirit was new to Lucy. She never felt she knew any of them deeply; she never felt that it mattered much that she should. They were mostly like Stephen himself, living in the present, forgetful of the past, taking their chances with the future. It wasn't that they were more generous than Canadians at heart; the difference depended, she knew, on the fact that Canada was a harder country than the United States, chances were fewer, and people had to be more cautious. It was easy to forget about caution in New York.

  And yet Lucy's old habit of reflection never left her. She discovered as she met more and more people in New York that she was almost too observant, too acutely aware of individual personalities, and she learned to conceal her opinions from Stephen, whose likes or dislikes were immediate and unqualified, because he became disturbed if she mistrusted a man he had put down as a swell guy. Gradually she managed to make their entertainment more selective, to invite only those people to a single small dinner party who were most likely to enjoy each others’ company. Stephen had no sense of the human ingredients which go to make up good entertainment; if left to his own devices he was content to ask half a dozen men to dinner, together with their wives, who had nothing more in common than the fact that they all happened to be living in New York. But he enjoyed the parties Lucy gave and he was pleased when Bratian told him she was the best natural hostess he had ever met.

  Years after she felt herself fairly well established, with a real identity in this new world, Lucy maintained her sense of wonder and gratitude for her position as Stephen's wife. She loved the sense of his physical strength standing between herself and the new, strange ways of a vast and indifferent city. Along with his physical strength went a physical candour which rapidly effaced the last traces of puritan shame she had brought with her when she married him. Stephen had a natural sexual gusto and he took an unquenchably boyish pleasure in the fact that she not only appreciated it but learned to respond to it with an eagerness as frank as his own. When they were at parties together, often the length of a room apart, she would discover his eyes following her, so that she knew she was never alone in the midst of strangers. She would meet his look with a private smile and pass the rest of the evening warmed by a secret glow of anticipation, knowing that he, too, was waiting for the moment when they would be alone again.

  Stephen was enormously proud of his son. After John was born he began to act the role of the conscientious father with a diligence which Bratian said was corny. He enrolled John at Lawrenceville when he was two weeks old; he arrived home with presents every Saturday afternoon; he talked of the advantages of having a large family. Even before Sally was born his interests began to widen. Theatres, night clubs, and the ballet gave place to weekend drives in the country. After they felt they could manage a competent nurse as well as a maid, Lucy went with him on occasional business trips.

  In spite of all she had read about the United States, Lucy made discoveries that amazed her, aspects of the country which surprised Stephen as well when she talked about them, since without meaning to she saw a different side of the many facades he had always taken for granted. Some of the people she met from old eastern families seemed to her more like the English than were any Canadians she knew. She quickly discovered that the famous American eagerness for money was nothing but a by-product of the American generosity. Above all she loved the openness of Americans, their quick way of saying what they thought whether it sounded rude or not, as they made no attempt to hide themselves from their neighbours. Her strangest discovery of all was this: while as individuals most Americans she met seemed younger than Canadians in the way their minds worked, less reflective and quicker to be satisfied with an easy answer, their society as a whole seemed older in every way, more advanced in time.

  But the real adventure of Lucy's marriage was not what she saw and did and learned; it lay in the mere fact of living day after day with a man who loved her, and in seeing the world day after day through a man's eyes.

  The money continued to come in, not big money as Stephen's father would have understood it, but not money his father would have despised, either. The plans they made took more definite shape. Stephen wanted
a hundred thousand dollars in gilt-edged securities; then he would leave Bratian and go back to engineering. He wanted four children if they could be divided among sons and daughters, and a place in the country near New York. To be a part of such plans, even though she knew that at his present rate of spending it would be years before Stephen accumulated so much in the bank, seemed to Lucy more important than their realization could ever be. Making plans meant that Stephen was giving her room in which to grow, that their life together had a definite aim, so that even though they were living in an ultra-modern apartment in a strange city, she had a home of her own at last.

  Ten days after Pearl Harbor Stephen tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps, taking it for granted that he would be accepted, in spite of his age, because he already knew how to fly. He was turned down when the doctors discovered that he had a tendency toward high blood pressure. The same thing happened a month later when he tried to enlist in the Marines. It was a defect which would have gone unnoticed for years if he had stayed away from recruiting stations, but the knowledge that he had a physical defect of any kind was a violent shock. The shock worked itself out in a sense of humiliation over being ruled out of the only important enterprise in the world while men he had always considered his inferiors were swarming into it.

  In the early spring of 1942 he approached the president of Harper Aircraft whom he admired more than any man he had ever known. He asked to be given any job in the Maryland plant that would directly help the war. Myron Harper refused to consider the request. “You're doing a swell job of public relations right where you are,” he said. “Stay with it. That's exactly where I need you. And don't try to get away from me because I'll make it tough for you if you do. I've got enough pull in Washington to nail you right where I want you.”