Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  This man, who wanted no audience, no applause, except when he came home, no special pleader, had taken his conscience off to the secret judges. We are not here to discuss my guilt, he said. We are here to discuss the nature of the guilty, and that means everyone, for it is a matter of conscience, not legal wick-trimming, that we are here to decide. We are here to prove that guilt is not a moral matter, but a spiritual fact. We are here to prove that guilt is innocence, and that innocence will destroy us as is its right, so that every man of probity may be a phoenix, to build its nest of snow and ice, for under him lies the world egg. He dies. It glows. And then, though he is not there to do so in person, still, he has made the necessary arrangements, he hands it on. It hatches. It becomes another egg, to warm and to be warmed by someone else. The world egg is that universal truth which alone makes the particular endurable. It can be found glowing in its nest anywhere. The nest varies. But it is always the same egg. We find it best in nature. For Byrd, the answer was snow and ice. For Tom, it had been a little lake he could not stop at, glimpsed from the platform of the Pioneer, in Montana.

  Oh, yes, they sit up there, the eternal judges, beyond God, in the snow, beyond the timber-line, much worse, because they assist at nothing, than the Fates. There they are, in the watches of the night. They deliver no verdict, but they know. And condemned, innocent or guilty, to know they know, we do not care. What we do care is what they really think of us, and did we measure up, either to sin, or to virtue, to appearance or reality, to failure or contentment, to realization, or to the revolting and inescapable pathos of a stone.

  Oh, yes, he was interested in Antarctica, all right. The election was important. He would like to win. But what really mattered was, would Philip marry, have children, be happy or unhappy, aware or unaware, but still, would Philip measure up, too?

  For you know, it made him solemn, it was not something to say, but he rather thought, thought Tom, that given half a chance, that he himself just might. And that was what counted really.

  Meanwhile, in the National Geographic, the ice fell endlessly from the glacier, and the glacier fell away.

  We cannot have what is not there. Life is not warm. Instead our salvation waits alone, in the ice and snow.

  New York

  It was almost over now, this part of it, anyhow. He had spoken to them.

  He had delivered his words. He had delivered Sideboard’s words. He had compromised. What difference did that make? Hobbes, though not, he seemed to remember, in Leviathan, said that “Words are wise men’s counters—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” He had taken that advice. He had spent freely. Such was his answer to the Pattersons, who though they might never have heard of Hobbes, had also taken it, but in a different sense.

  At least he would not have to see them again.

  Oh, yes, he knew a lot about reality now. “Is this not reality?” asked Hofuku. “Yes,” said Chokei, who was stuck with him. “It is, but it’s a pity to say so.”

  Now where in God’s name had he read that? Not in the sort of Oriental Wisdom dished up in American national magazines, that was for sure.

  On November 4th, the eve of the election, he spoke at Madison Square Garden, not a good speech, for it was Sideboard’s Parthian shot, and Sideboard was still filtering Carl Sandburg through an old copy of The Wall Street Journal. But the audience was for him, so it did not greatly matter.

  It did not even matter that at the beginning of the rally the police had arrested a man prowling down the aisle with a loaded revolver. It was a crusade. One had come to expect that sort of thing. Tom spoke Sideboard’s immortal prose, and would so much rather have spoken his own, but he was tired. He got an ovation, all the same. He was going to win.

  Next morning he voted at a local high school and then retreated to his suite on the fourteenth floor of the Commodore Hotel (he could have gone to his apartment, but there is some news one would rather not hear at home), with two ticker-tapes in the bedroom, a radio, and his brother Edward for company, to scan the returns alone.

  All Over the Country

  It was a memorable election. It meant so much. It meant everything. It was our last chance. Half the country sat up all night, straining at the radio, hoping that for once it had pulled itself together in sufficient numbers to beat the other half and so establish some kind of decency again. But the decent half of any country is unfortunately less than half of it, is foolish at politics, and much given to hanging separately, out of its own pride to avoid a common grave. So it did not work. It almost did, but not quite.

  Still, his supporters hunched round their radios, remembering everything the country had once stood for. One felt a right to be. That is what he gave us back for a little while: the right to be. He understood. He understood wandering down the draw. He understood just being. He might make a hash of it. Nobody knew. But at least he was there, a big man who would do nothing on a small scale. And that was the America they had almost lost. The grand country. The foolish country. The open country.

  That is what they were here for. Cities will pass. States will pass. Countries will pass. We will pass. But the land won’t. Man is a symbiotic beast. Take him off the land and he shrivels up and something in him dies. They cocked their stetsons. They got oil-rich. They clipped their coupons and went to Paris. They bought hideous sculpture for a house in Tulsa, for purposes of adornment merely. But still. It was their land. Of course it was their land in Vermont, too, though mostly there they stayed home, in a mental climate of perpetual winter, with pippins rotting in the cellar, maple sugar to draw off, and spring never ahead, but a mite behind.

  But that did not help. They had moved into the culture of cities. And so, since the culture of cities is merciless, and rather squeamish about the land that feeds it, there wasn’t any mercy in American life any more, and not much kindness. In time of trouble, some turn to God, but Americans alone had turned to mediocrity, as to a mother, as the only thing to save them from the responsibilities of value. They have to be sure of the future. They have to be sure of today, and the future has to be just like today. So the whole culture is one vast charge account, in which nobody ever pays off the bill, for then what would they do? Wouldn’t it be awful if there wasn’t anything left to buy? That would mean taking a good squint at what we’ve got. So instead they turn the unpaid model in for a new one, heave a familiar sigh of relief, and go on with the payments. That way they’re sure. What made it so deadly, was that it was a spiritual and moral charge account as well. Maybe the whole world had gone that way. Who could say for sure? But one thing was for sure, it made the old despised Puritan system of ethical banking a paradise by comparison.

  It don’t do no good to talk about. There’s nothing to be done. Not about the awful, heartbroken sadness of the thing we carry around with us, wherever we land, the awful sadness of America, a sadness of disappointed hopes, shrunk to the dimension of a TV screen, of heroes so shrunk from moral dimension, that only in the endless walk-down of a western is any heroism either approved or figured forth.

  And whatever life in the present world may be, it is not a walk-down, for virtue has no exemplar now, and vice no courage. The great continuous woods are gone. The passenger pigeon is extinct. That little grey thing, the mourning dove, it’s gone too, it’s something nobody saw. The wilderness is a National Park. There is no frontier. There is nowhere to hide out. There is nowhere to rest. There is no peace, no enjoyment, and no pleasure. There is only an omnivorous diversion. The great ranches are going. The farms have gone. The highways lead nowhere; and the suburbs are worse and worse built; they cost more and more, and everybody drives.

  Take Monticello. Jefferson was a gentleman, and could build his own house. Now, when the new rich take a step up in the world, they hire a decorator. They don’t dare do it themselves. So the day of the decorator was at hand. And there weren’t hardly no one with the guts to care.

  At His Own Place

  A man who thinks clearl
y is not apt to be downed by his own or anybody else’s defeats, nor by his victories, either. He has the great strength of standing outside himself, poking fun at the poor pompous pitiable creature, and of knowing that the solution to the moral dilemmas of the age is something so childishly simple that few have the wits to employ it, thinking that life’s disasters are so complex, that they demand complex answers. Well, they don’t. All one has to do is face up to them, accept them, and go on from there. That’s all there is to it. But it takes a lot of stamina to be unflinching, there is always the danger one may be taken in by one’s own reactions, or by one’s self, so maybe that’s quite a lot to it, after all. Then, too, seeing through people is more soothing to the self than seeing them plain, so cynicism has to be guarded against. Otherwise, it’s easy. One must be like bamboo, bend to the wind, but never break, and when the wind passes, straighten up again. If one has kept one’s integrity, if one hasn’t broken faith with one’s self, one can straighten up. There’s nothing to it. One gets up from one’s chair and sends the necessary telegram.

  Not so easy, until one’s really up. It took him a while.

  It was so quiet in the apartment you couldn’t hardly move. Quiet as the amphitheatre during a serious operation. You asked for a scalpel. You asked for ticker-tape.

  There was a small shift from the rural to the urban areas. Had it been bigger, he could have won. But the President understood cities. All Tom understood was the country. So the President took the cities, except for Cincinnati.

  “Don’t be afraid, and never quit,” someone had said to him once. But way back. When he was twenty-two or three, probably.

  At one in the morning he wandered down to the ballroom at the Commodore, where his campaign workers had been. They weren’t there now, and the Pattersons had cleared out long ago. He went back to the living-room of his own apartment, that apartment Janet Flanner had summed up for her readers a few weeks ago as containing a demodé fringed lampshade. He found himself glowering at the lampshade, and at the equally demodé straw hat, which should have been in storage for next summer, but was sitting on a chair. Edna had been cleaning out the closets, he supposed. It was quite true: the lampshade was ugly. But if we are to be judged by what we never got round to removing from our environment, instead of by what we added to it, we would never get far, and it happened that that particular lampshade gave just exactly the right light for reading. That American habit of the newly arrived of performing a bowel section on their own past, as though it had been a cancer, scooping their insides and houses out like a melon, and filling in the hole with gin and the minor works of William Pahlmann seemed to him futile. He was not a hoarder. He never kept anything he didn’t want. But it just happened that he wanted his own past right there with him, where he could see it, five-foot shelf, fringed lampshade, and all. The fringed lampshade had belonged to his father. Besides, it gave a good light.

  Also, he liked straw hats.

  The whole goddam thing wrong with this country was that it didn’t have an attic any more, and an attic, apart from being a good place to spend a rainy afternoon, is the memory of the house. In any self-respecting household you could go up to the playroom, that hadn’t been used in years, stand there for a while, take a look at Philip’s old toys, remember, and come back down refreshed. Here, in New York, if you wanted to do that you had to find the key, go down to the basement, yack with the janitor, unlock the storage bin, and rifle umpteen boxes. It wasn’t any help that way. You don’t store your past. You leave it lying around where you can find it when you need it. For without memory there is no tradition, and so nothing to work with. We can only improvise. And it was the same way with their goddam minds.

  The vote seemed to stand at 449 to 82 electoral votes. But there was still possibility of a statistical victory. He clung to that. Not that he’d suffer any. There were many jobs waiting for a defeated candidate. He’d have lots to do.

  “It’s a good thing for your son to learn now that there’s nothing unethical in being adequately compensated for leading a cause in which you deeply believe,” Clarence Darrow told his father once, but asked too much, so his father had wound up with the case instead.

  Pay for a defeated candidate came high.

  The hours dripped by. He felt horrible. He practically wanted to die. He was a man with a habit of winning. And the only anodyne, the only thing in the world that is really dignified, is to be dead and buried. That was a Dane called Jensen.

  Rats.

  He remembered something he’d shoved into his memory out of Edward LeComte, for use later. “Sometimes, when one is at the centre of misfortunate, one looks out with surprise at the emotions it has engendered in others.” He thought about it. It helped.

  He was not licked yet. He had other fish to fry. Getting up, he ambled over to the phone and sent the mandatory telegram of congratulation to the President. It was easy. But it had taken six days to make it so. He hadn’t been able to get that telegram off until the 11th.

  The President was relieved. It was his first real battle in eight years, but he had won it, as usual, and therefore he could afford to be gracious.

  “If you had known as much about politics as I do,” he told Tom afterwards, “you could have won.” And thought that was the end of it.

  Part II

  A Short Wait Between Planes

  It wasn’t the end of it. Not by a long shot.

  Tom went off to the theatre. It was what he usually did when he felt fed up. He liked musicals. He liked them best by Rodgers and Hart. In the dark there, while you looked at the bright lights, they made the world seem warm. Their cynicism was endearing, their pathos like the brandy at the bottom of the glass, at which one looks ruefully before swallowing it and setting the glass down. Of course the world has always insisted that great and solemn events be set to music. But the musical underscores the nicer dream world of the trivial. Its being useless to be a grown-up in an awkward age, it’s pleasant to sneak off that way, once in a while.

  Hart was dead now, though. So instead of Pal Joey or On your Toes or Babes in Arms, what you got was Oklahoma. That was all right. It was a good show, and the music was by Rodgers anyhow. The trouble was, though Hart may not have been exactly the best man in the world, somehow, now he was dead, some of the excitement seemed to have gone out of Rodgers’s music. It still had bounce, but the old sparkle had gone. It used to be touching and wistful. Now, somehow, it was wistful and sad. Not that Hammerstein wasn’t good in his own way.

  Coming down the aisle with his family, and then again on leaving, Tom got a standing ovation. It was such a surprise, he couldn’t do anything except stand there, blink, and smile. Nobody could figure that one out. Dewey was in the audience that night, but as he got in and out of the theatre, nobody even seemed to notice him.

  The Republicans couldn’t understand it. Neither could the Democrats. The President had received 27 and a half million votes, Tom 22 and a half million. But for some reason, even though the election was over, he still seemed to have them. “Once, by accident, and not because the leaders of the party wished it, a real leader appeared,” said the columnists. Maybe that was it.

  The GOP hated that. But Tom had found his footing again. When we allow our own misfortunes to colour our judgment, we are doomed. It takes guts not to allow that to happen, but his judgment was not only unimpaired, it was better than ever. He had learned a lot. He knew perfectly well that they hated him. He even knew why.

  “Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire,” said Blake, “who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil utter’d these words:

  “‘The worship of God is: Honouring His gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.’

  “The Angel, hearing this became almost blue; but mastering himself he grew yellow, and at last white, pink, and smiling.”

  Tom had not read Blake, did not regard
himself as a great man, but he did know the colour yellow when he saw it. It looked bruised.

  He stayed in New York; not that there are not native New Yorkers, but still, it is above all the home town of people who don’t have one, don’t want one, are ashamed of their own, who have outgrown it, or can’t get back. An unhappy breed, to be found in any international city. That’s why Tom had those farms at Rushville. But New York made a handy centre of operations.

  He had been outfoxed, but that didn’t matter. There were more important things going on in the world than his own defeat. He had something to fight for now. In the past two months he had seen the whole country, and that is what he had to fight for.

  He had grown up.

  The President was fit to be tied. He’d beaten the man, and yet the man was still there, bigger than ever somehow. 1940 became 1941. Given time, Tom might have widened into an elder statesman, a harmless enough figure, such as Bernard Baruch. But there wasn’t time to give. So the President packed him off to England on a Goodwill Mission, which solved that problem for the time being. Since he was still a power in the land, it would do no harm to get him out of it for a while. By the time he got back, perhaps things would have cooled down.

  The Republican Party felt the same way. “If he had revealed his position before the Republican Convention, he would never have been nominated,” said Landon, who had been and had lost. Tom told them to pull themselves together, behave themselves, try to shape themselves into a Loyal Opposition for a change, instead of just sitting out in back on the fence to throw rocks, and took himself off to England, where he had a marvellous time.

  “He is neither a visiting cowboy nor a movie star,” warned the English Daily Telegraph. “He is a powerful man and the representative of a powerful State. It behooves us to treat him accordingly.”