Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  So in Jerusalem there was nothing wrong. Besides, under the circumstances, this was scarcely the moment to disturb the easy flow of oil through Arab territory, an essential to the smooth accumulation of matériel.

  Tom borrowed the American Consul’s house for the day. It had a double staircase which converged on a landing. The Jews came up the left side of the stairs, looking at the Arabs, who came up the right, and preferred to look either straight ahead or at the wall. The Arabs drank too much coffee. It makes them irritable at times. The overlapping grievances of the two peoples interleaved with each other like a two-thumb shuffle of a poker deck, and as for who got the joker, that was anybody’s guess.

  It was disturbing. It had nitro-glycerine in it. Some day someone’s elbow would be joggled, everyone would vanish, and there wouldn’t be anything there but bare ground.

  The British preferred the Arabs, out of affinity. The Americans, the Jews, because they were industrious and business-like, and because they believed in improving things. There is something about the Arabs, to the Americans, which suggests the exasperations of trying to get an Indian to put in a full day’s work. No one will ever make an American understand that an Indian won’t put in a full day’s work, not because he is lazy, but because he doesn’t need to and sees no merit in it. He’d rather sit and meditate. As in New Mexico. Or as the Arab, even the town Arab, in a coffee-house.

  Besides, the number of really large Arab banks in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and New York is remarkably small. The Arab, when he feels like that, puts his money in a Swiss bank, which is what everybody else does, too, for that matter. If you’re going to fight, you want the prize-money waiting for you in a good safe place.

  Nor could you blame the Arabs: 2,000 years is an awful long time to be away for the summer, and then come piling in with an eviction notice, a bad temper, and several million people quarrelling among themselves for use of the spare room.

  Well, it wasn’t going to work. Tom could see that. The Judgment of Solomon is all very well, but people forget that he didn’t actually cut the baby in half, because one of the mothers welshed at the last minute; neither side was going to welsh this time; and no mother in her right mind is going to be satisfied with half a baby, which would be too much like those sides of pork coming out of the saw in the stockyards, at Chicago. Even if you try to be fair, and use the best modern machinery, one side or the other’s going to get the tail, which may be useless, but that makes the side that doesn’t get it mad, apart from a natural disappointment all round at not getting the whole pig.

  What He Hankered For

  He would have liked to go to India, which was the home of everything. But it was one of those rare moments when both Gandhi and Nehru were out of jail at the same time, and three men of independent mind loose on the same sub-continent would have been two too many, as Roosevelt said firmly, and the British no doubt agreed. Tom’s geopolitical pipe dreams might play a good tune, but it was not the tune the world had any desire to dance to. Let him expound them to China and Russia, where there was nobody to liberate, and leave the Imperium alone.

  Tom was sorry. He would have liked to see India very much, particularly the Himalaya. Now the Altai would have to do instead.

  It was a war of liberation, of course. It was fought for the cause of democracy. That was admitted. It was also being fought for something called the Four Freedoms, conceived in mid-Atlantic, as a mandala, or perhaps merely a charm against dragons. And if they rang somewhat hollow, when spun on a marble counter, nobody was going to notice that, because business was brisk, and nobody was going to fuss about small change. The Four Freedoms were America’s answer to the Occupation Mark, and gave about the same value, leading a Chinese existence of their own, like the Nine Principles of Longevity, the Thirteen Immortals, and the Treaty Ports. The Saturday Evening Post even commissioned a series of paintings depicting them. Freedom from Want showed an Indiana family sitting down to a turkey dinner; and Freedom of Worship (not from Worship), some women sitting in a pew in pretty hats. The series was almost as successful as the old Anhauser-Busch beer ad chromolithograph of Custer’s Last Stand. It was better than kitsch: it was poshlust, a word and a state of mind to be found only in Russia, where Tom would go soon, but best summed-up in the American term, smarmy.

  Turkey

  A quick trip to Ankara, which he thought resembled a middle western American town. It did. The war there had an operetta feeling. Nothing much happened, but a great deal seemed to be going on.

  The American Ambassador was balding and mixed a good martini. The German Ambassador wore cotton-wool in his ears. The night-club girls were English or Hungarian, and about what night-club girls always are. Turkey was, of course, neutral. German refugees crossed the country from south to north, fleeing from occupied Iran, which their husbands had occupied until the Russians and the British moved in. Greek refugees crossed the country from north to south, bound for Syria, since the Germans had taken over the Greek islands. On the newspaper kiosks you could buy Das Reich, Tempo, Printemps de Paris, Good Housekeeping, and a Turkish magazine entitled You’re Bringing Up Your Child Wrong.

  No doubt. No doubt.

  But the weather was good and the best place to sit in the afternoons was the terrace of the Ankara Tennis Club.

  Saratoga Springs

  A spa in New York State where people used to go to bet on the horses, sit on the veranda, and conserve their health. The biggest veranda in those days was that of the Ulysses S. Grant Hotel. The Republicans were there to nominate a candidate for Governor.

  They’d been a little leery, in case Tom should turn up, his absence made them feel better, so after watching a fifteen-minute film extolling the virtues of Thomas Dewey they nominated him unanimously, left it to the backstage boys to put together the rest of the ticket, and went back to play, which in their case meant chiefly girlie shows and poker. It was a real good convention, and as far as they were concerned, made up for the nightmare Philadelphia had been in ’40. Yet Tom still bothered them. Do what they could to bury him, he kept getting up like Lazarus, and he still had all those votes. They didn’t like it.

  “I think it is a great mistake for the National Committee to have expressed any policy at all on post-war action,” said Taft. As for Tom, Representative Dewey Short of Missouri expressed the general Republican feeling about him on the floor of the House. “May God forgive me for ever having supported such an impostor, this fifth columnist (Norway was in the news just then), this Trojan horse who is seeking to split the Republican Party wide open.”

  The isolationists had gotten their second wind.

  So had Tom. If a Houyhnhnm with an axe was what they wanted, that was what they would get. “The Party that pussyfoots, opposes, and obstructs during a national emergency writes its own death warrant; but the party that cooperates and encourages national unity survives with colours flying high. The choice stands clearly before the Republican Party today,” he announced.

  Well, they made it.

  So did he, which is why they hated him so. It takes the well-balanced and therefore the amiable man to be at ease with something bigger than himself. There is the large hand and the small. He with the large has a different grip on life than we do. For serious work what you need is a broad hand, stubby fingers, an octave and a half reach at the least, and the musculature of a bull whip. One has to know when to crack it, too. Which was perhaps why Mussolini, whom nobody minded really, wound up hanging in mid-air, by a rope, in a landscape like that shocking painting by Botticelli, of the woman weeping seated beside an enormous wall.

  They preferred Dewey. With Dewey you knew where you stood. If he behaved himself in Albany, they might even let him run for President in ’48. It was a matter of character. And so it was. Dewey, said a wit, was the first man ever to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Which made him a man of the times, like all those others who were trying to digest what little and that stale meat they had been able to snatch out of the
war.

  Bagdad

  Iraq was enjoying what a military theocracy likes best, the minority of its titular ruler, a well-bred little boy of seven who had an English nanny and had just been photographed by Cecil Beaton, as well-bred little boys often are. He had enormous eyes and looked fragile. Also he knew too much. From time to time his guardian, the Regent, took him for walks, hand in hand, through the palace rose garden.

  In Baghdad members of the government told Tom their suspicions of the British, and indeed of all, government, behind a high screen conveniently set round a bar, so they might have a drink without being seen to break one of the sterner pronouncements of Mohammed, the founding teetotaller. It was hot. They were thirsty. They were also avid.

  In America, at Atlantic City, Miss Jo-Carroll Dennison sang Deep in the Heart of Texas rather badly, but with that feeling which dislodges art, and so became Miss America of 1942, to the great distress of Miss Chicago, who burst into tears right on the stage. Fully aware of the crisis across the seas, Miss Dennison said she had taken a vow not to marry for the duration. It got a big hand.

  Tehran

  Lunch with the Shah, Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, in the garden, beside the swimming pool. He was a terrifyingly handsome young man, elegant, compact, and only twenty-two. After lunch the Shah was taken for his first plane ride, and so had the privilege of looking down to see how neatly his country was divided between the occupying Russian and British forces.

  One thing one notices in these countries, is the complete absence of a middle class, except for Turkey, where you notice the complete absence of an upper one. That made for an explosive brew, said Aristotle. It is an absence which makes most Americans profoundly uneasy, for it suggests that the struggle for survival has little or nothing to do with the maintenance. of the status quo, a terrifying thought, though Tom was doing his best to make them realize that it was not so much a thought, as an essential fact, and that the steady flow of more (and therefore automatically better) consumer goods is not the only, or even an adequate, answer to man’s essential needs, something Americans dimly suspected already, which was still another reason why they felt compelled to buy more and more.

  One of the troubles Washington was running into, was the reluctance of manufacturers to curtail their civilian lines, for how could they or the country survive, amid the horrors of war, without a new car, a new refrigerator, a new spectator sport, and maybe even new teeth, to protect them from growing any older?

  But the Shah was delightful. Tom watched the Shah.

  He had been asked: “Did America intend to support a system by which our politics are controlled by foreigners, however politely, our lives dominated by foreigners, however indirectly, because we happen to be in the way of where you want to send and receive your goods?”

  It was a difficult question to answer honestly. Being honest, all he could say was that he hoped not. But while he said he hoped not, he could not help but notice that everywhere in the East everyone stood on a handsome carpet, as on a chess square. It was impossible to remove the carpets, of which there were sixty-four. But the pieces standing on them hopped about until they were swept away.

  Not, however, the Shah.

  He was something worth meditating upon, that young man.

  In the Plane

  After a world war, a recent phenomenon, but we have had two so far, and no doubt there will be others, the victors suddenly swell to enormous Alice. Everyone is guilty, and all must have prizes; everyone has been to her and mentioned me to him; nobody can swim; and if I should push the matter on, what would become of you? They are all just a pack of cards anyhow, and after they have swept through the air, Alice is lucky if when she wakes up she has a chair to sit in, let alone Dinah. The basic principle, however, remains sound:

  Don’t let him know she liked them best;

  For this must ever be

  A secret, kept from all the rest,

  Between yourself and me.

  That must not happen, would happen, and yet he had somehow to prevent it. There remains Dinah. She would not perhaps miss Alice very much, but still she needs a lap to sit in, so no matter what happens to Alice, that must be taken care of. Also a dish of cream.

  He did not like to say these things, but he had no choice in the matter. There is a movement abroad in the world, he said. Particularly in Asia and the Far East. After the war there must be no colonies, nor will there be.

  As for the resultant new states, they would soon find out that to run one’s own corner of the world is neither so pleasant nor so profitable as it looks. Even Nehru, the best of these new functionaries, who had gone to jail quite regularly in order to prove his independence, written a history of the world there, like Bunyan, and like Bunyan, found it turning into the parable of Mr. Goodman and Mr. Badman, upon emerging from confinement found it difficult not to keep the key. Perhaps it is just as well he did. The presence of gaol matrons placed at strategic points, however, was irksome, and there were still riots in the prison yard. Pakistan set up its own jail. Thus must it ever be.

  Not, any longer, that Tom felt that America was any better. He began to revise his opinion of Wilson, and would have liked to say in Congress, what Lord Lyndhurst had once said in the Upper House: “My Lords, self-reliance is the best road to distinction in private life: it is equally essential to the character and grandeur of a nation.” Nor was self-reliance to be confused with self-interest, which destroyed it, supplanted it, aped it, but in no way equalled it as a survival factor.

  Russia

  To get there one had to switch to a Russian plane. The Gulliver, converted or not, was a bomber, it was a foreign, and therefore a dangerous particle, but the excuse was that Russia knew the charts and we did not.

  Russia was the one major country in the world which behaved worse than we did, but her tanks were better, a fact which the Americans were the first to admit, since we were allies, and the last to remember, later, when our relations became somewhat different.

  But the Russians were fighting on their own ground. That gave what they were doing both a meaning and a dignity which they were later to lose, but they had it then. It also gave them strength.

  On the whole, Russia took a little thinking about.

  Hyde Park

  The war gave the President full scope for one of his favourite hobbies, his addiction to exiled royalty. They were asked to Hyde Park, where life was very pleasant, except for his habit of addressing them by their first names, whereas they called him “Mr. President”. However, they were older and wiser than he, and though they found that habit of his galling, they also found it rather touching and funny. There was nothing to do but accept it, laugh at it, and remember he was what he said he was, a one-man dynasty, who had founded his kingdom and seemed to know how to keep it, so after all, why not?

  Besides, it was agreeable at Hyde Park. If there was nothing kind about him, and little humane, he was usually gracious, and also, the faucets in the bathrooms worked. Wilhelmina, in particular, who had spent long hours in Buckingham Palace, sitting or standing in cold and empty rooms, huddled like a sparrow, with little to say, found herself more at ease here, for Holland, too, has a country house culture, and she, too, was a country squire. Like the Pastons, she saw nothing unusual in the habit of ruling the county in the intervals of putting up one’s own jellies.

  None the less, the war was a serious matter. Lieutenants junior grade in Washington and Caserta might be having the best time of their lives, but it aged those who really had to run it. Roosevelt, in particular, aged very rapidly.

  There was even rationing and civilian shortages. That brought the war home all right. It was now clear what we were fighting for. We were fighting a war to get coffee back again, to get more chrome on the front bumper and the grille, and to be able to dump all the cheap Central American rum back into the sea it tasted as though it had come from.

  And people died. Some of them bravely.

  Washington

  Th
e Pattersons had moved on. They had at last found a proper use for those smear campaigns which were their specialty; never had sincerity flourished in a better culture, in the scientific sense of that term; and feeling, quite sincerely, that they had done all they could to help, they transferred their efforts to the beer industry, which paid better. The beer industry had done so well, that it was able to pour money into advertising as though funnelling sugar into a bin.

  There was an election coming up in ’44, and Tom, they admitted it now, had been a definite mistake. Apart from that they never mentioned him, and never thought of him. He was two years back, in the clipping books. Next time it would be either Taft or Dewey, of that they were sure, and they were fairly sure it would be Dewey. Tom was not even to be asked to preside on the platform at the convention, as was customary.

  “Have one of the State Committees offer him a gallery ticket,” said Celia. That would be the crowning indignity, and she wanted to see Tom paper-hatted like a fool in some cartoon by Goya. He had almost made them lose their footing. He should be made to pay for that.

  “But suppose he accepts?”

  They were still afraid of him.

  “He won’t,” said Celia. “He has too much pride and he knows when he’s licked.” Then she sent her husband up to Albany. It always pays to keep up with old friends, though it was a pity this one, unless photographed exactly right, so much resembled a cartoon seal barking, shifting its flippers eagerly, and waiting for fresh fish.