Thursday. This morning made preparations for building a boat—the first boat I ever prepared to build. Bought ten cents’ worth of wicking and borrowed some caulking tools, and prepared myself further by asking a man how to build a boat and he told me. It is to be a small scow, made of native cedar. Heard deer hunters beating through the woods this afternoon, hollering and carrying on.
Sunday. All morning at work boat-building. Had a stove going in the shop and, although it was a cold rainy morning, all was cheerful inside. The cedar shavings smell good and are worth the effort of planing. The boat has been named Flounder. I am perfectly happy doing anything of this sort and would rather construct something than do any other sort of work. When I needed a three-eighths-inch dowel stick I had to dismast a small American flag and use the staff, but it worked well and is now an integral part of Flounder.
Tuesday. Arose at six on a cold morning and by truck alone to Waterville to keep an appointment with a medical man, a drive of about eighty miles, but I would travel farther than that to find relief for a sick nose. Anyway, I like travel for its own sake, either with others or alone. It was quite cold in the cab of the truck and I had to stop occasionally to thaw out. Passed some grave diggers in a cemetery, and they were having hard going through frozen ground but were eager and undismayed.
While waiting to see the doctor bought Anne Lindbergh’s book The Wave of the Future and read it sitting in the truck. It is called a “confession of faith,” but I couldn’t make out what it is she believes in and did not think it a clear book or a good one. So read it all through again, and I think she wants a good world, as I do, but that she has retreated into the pure realm of thought, leaving the rest of us to rassle with the bear. Mrs. Lindbergh feels that the war is so large and so dreadful that a man must at all costs keep his perspective and look at it in the broader way; but I think it is even more dreadful than that, and that we ought to fight and win it. And she says that the things that are going on in the world today are so tremendous and significant that we should concentrate on taking the beam out of our own eye and never mind the mote in our neighbor’s; but I do not like that advice and do not intend to take it, for in this instance the spectacle of my neighbor’s mote is of such a character that it has moved me to tears and the tears are dissolving my beam at a fair rate—which is as good a way to get rid of it as any.
As I read and re-read The Wave of the Future, parked at the curb of a town of the present, watching the flow of life in a New England community on a winter’s afternoon, I kept waiting for the expression of faith that did not come. Mrs. Lindbergh speaks of the dream of the future, which is to be realized by taking advantage of the “great forces pushing in the world”; but either by accident or by design she identifies these great dream-fulfilling forces with the push in Germany, Italy, and Russia. In the revolutionary turbulence of fascist countries she finds a promise and a token—an ultimate answer to poverty, unemployment, depression. She speaks of a dying civilization, and her implication is that its rebirth will be in the new style now on exhibition in European show windows; but I do not agree, and do not believe that the forces that motivate fascism are any more important in future-building, or any more promising, than, for example, the forces that are resisting fascism. Each is a part of our future, the one as passionately as the other. Mrs. Lindbergh suggests, flatly, that we not resist the wave that approaches. “It is a sin against Nature,” she says, “to resist change.” But I think I shall go on resisting any change I disapprove of, for I do not think change, per se, is anything much, nor that change is necessarily good. As for sinning against Nature, I do that every time I take a drink, but it is not the whole story of alcohol by any means, and anyway, fascism sins against Nature more grievously than anything I ever saw, because it proposes to remove (and does remove) so much of what is natural in people’s lives. Mrs. Lindbergh pines for the days of her father when, she said, a person could discuss differences of opinion intelligently and dispassionately without being branded “pro” or “anti”; and I believe in that sort of discussion too and so cannot understand her pleading in the next breath that we do not resist the forces that are pledged to destroy parliaments and senates and congresses and newspapers and courts and universities.
The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done. The push of eager, dispossessed, frustrated people, united zealously under a bad leader, is one ingredient; the resistance of those whom this push hurts or offends or threatens is another. To Mrs. Lindbergh the push of the one (for reasons that she doesn’t explain) is the new, hopeful current in life; the resistance of the others is the old, decadent, disagreeable current. It seemed odd, sitting with my feverish nose and being told by Anne Lindbergh that fascism was the wave of the future, when she knows as well as I do that it is just the backwash of the past and has muddied the world for centuries. “Somehow,” she says, “the leaders in Germany, Italy, and Russia have discovered how to use new social and economic forces; very often they have used them badly, but nevertheless they have recognized and used them. They have felt the wave of the future and they have leapt upon it.”
I think it is only fair to ask Mrs. Lindbergh to name one new social or economic force that has been discovered by dictators. I can’t think of any that aren’t as old as the hills. The force that Hitler employs is the force generated by people who have stood all the hardship they intend to, and are exploding through the nearest valve, and it is an ancient force, and so is the use of it by opportunists in bullet-proof vests. The turbulence on which she builds her dream of a better world is an historically discouraging phenomenon, but I think it is a common fallacy to say that because a movement springs from deep human distress it must hold thereby the seed of a better order. The fascist ideal, however great the misery that released it and however impressive the self-denial and the burning courage that promote it, does not hold the seed of a better order but of a worse one, and it always has a foul smell and a bad effect on the soil. It stank at the time of Christ and it stinks today, wherever you find it and in whatever form, big or little—even here in America, the little fascists always at their tricks, stirring up a lynching mob or flagellating the devil or selling a sex pamphlet to tired, bewildered old men. The forces are always the same—on the people’s side frustration, disaffection; on the leader’s side control of hysteria, perversion of information, abandonment of principle. There is nothing new in it and nothing good in it, and today when it is developed to a political nicety and supported by a formidable military machine the best thing to do is to defeat it as promptly as possible and in all humility.
I think it is inaccurate of the author of The Wave of the Future to ascribe modernity to such old chestnuts or to imply that they bode good for the world. She herself states that the evils in the system are the “scum on the wave,” but makes it clear that this is the wave. It is of course anybody’s privilege to believe that a good conception of humanity may be coming to birth through the horrid forms of nazism; but it seems to me far more likely that a good conception of humanity is being promoted by the stubborn resistance to nazism on the part of millions of people whose belief in democratic notions has been strengthened. Is my own intellectual resistance, based on a passionate belief that the “new order” is basically destructive of universal health and happiness, any less promising than the force of nazism itself, merely because mine does not spring from human misery but merely from human sympathy? I don’t see why. And I do not regard it as a sin to hang fast to principles of a past that I approve of and believe are still applicable and sensible merely because they are, so to speak, “past” and not “future.” I think they are future too, and I think democracy—which Mrs. Lindbergh seems to feel is sick of an incurable disease—is the most futuristic thing I ever heard of, and that it holds everything hopeful there is, because “demos” means people and that’s what I am for, and whatever Nazi means it doesn’t mean people, it means “the pure-bred people,” which is a contemptible idea to build a new order on. Mrs. Lindbergh always uses quotation marks round the word democracy as though it had to be held gingerly in the fingers. But I still think it a good word and a beautiful word, even after the drubbing it took on the campaign platforms of 1940, and I find the wave that it sets up a more agreeable wave than any other, and more promising and more buoyant and prettier to look at.
Mrs. Lindbergh says it is the duty of a writer to state the problem correctly, and I agree with her but do not think she has done a good job, because many of her statements, although accurate enough in themselves, are followed by an inferential remark that a logician would find inadmissible. She tells me that the German people are not innately bad, which is correct and is not even news as far as I am concerned; but then she draws the inference that therefore the star the German people are following is good, which I think is illogical and a perversion of the facts. And she tells me that life is nothing but change, which is correct; and then implies that change is on that account beneficial, which I doubt in many cases. And she tells me that the fascist push originated in frustration and injustice, which I say is true and correct; and then infers that because the push stemmed from human misery it bodes good for the world, which I feel is fallacious, for I know a lot of things can start with human misery and not bring anything except more human misery.
And she tells me that this is not a war of good versus evil, which is correct, and then she says, No, it is more a war of past versus future, and I take it from a close study of her text that by “past” she means what has happened in England and France, and by “future” she means what is happening in Germany and Italy. And that is an inaccurate and really a very irresponsible statement to make. She says: “I do feel that it is futile to get into a hopeless ‘crusade’ to save civilization.” Maybe it is, but I do not think it entirely futile to take up arms to dispossess tyrants, defend popular government, and promote free methods.
And she says look at the French Revolution, there were plenty of atrocious things going on at that time, yet we don’t judge it by the atrocities. So I looked at the French Revolution, but did not find a parallel case; for the revolutionists in France were fighting because they were fed up with aristocracy and were seeking individual liberty; but in Germany the people were fed up not with a ruling class but with hard times and were surrendering their individual liberty on the promise that they would themselves become a ruling class and a ruling country.
“The things one loves, lives, and dies for are not … completely expressible in words,” she writes. No, they are not. But sometimes, with much pain, a man can come close, and it is peculiarly desirable now that anyone who writes any statement such as The Wave of the Future should come as close as possible. After all, life is not entirely complex. It is certainly no figment of my imagination that today hundreds of writers and artists and scholars, whose lives and works are a monument to truth, culture, freedom, and tolerance, are muzzled—locked up in camps in the grip of the disease that Anne Lindbergh finds hopeful. Is this their wave of the future? I doubt it. They simply want to get out of camp and into harness again, and it’s as simple as that.
I am determined to express, as nearly as I can, my disappointment with this book because I have heard many people speak of it and almost all of them said something like this: “Of course I don’t agree with her about everything, but there’s something to what she says just the same.” And so I read it twice and with great care, sentence by sentence, to find what this mysterious something was, and it wasn’t there, not for me it wasn’t. Yet the book had a double fascination for me, because it contains so many small and rather attractive truths that all add up to make one big fallacy, and to a writer that is always a fascinating performance. And even after all my conclusions I do not believe that Mrs. Lindbergh is any more fascist-minded than I am, or that she wants a different sort of world, or that she is a defeatist; but I think instead she is a poetical and liberal and talented person troubled in her mind (as anybody is today) and trying to write her way into the clear. But although her first two books contained some of the best stuff and some of the best reporting I have ever read, this one reminded me of what Somerset Maugham wrote in The Summing Up when he said: “… there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own clarification.”
And when I went in at last to the doctor’s office and was admitted I still was thinking about these matters and felt low in my spirits and spent, and it was the first time I had seen this doctor but he didn’t look at me but just said: “What’s matter?”
“My nose,” I replied, but I was really thinking about Anne Lindbergh and wondering about her book and about what she believed and whether she had come close to expressing it, or not close, and whether it was the book of someone who was bothered by a confusion of loyalties.
“What’s trouble with nose?” the doctor asked.
“Stuffed up,” I replied.
And he asked me how old I was and I said forty-one, and he wrote that down on a piece of paper, and I wanted to say “My nose is forty-one too,” but thought better of it. So I told him about my hay fever, which used to rage just in summertime but now simmers the year round, and he listened listlessly as though it were a cock and bull story; and we sat there for a few minutes and neither of us was interested in the other’s nose, but after a while he poked a little swab up mine and made a smear on a glass slide and his assistant put it under the microscope and found two cells that delighted him and electrified the whole office, the cells being characteristic of a highly allergic system. The doctor’s manner changed instantly and he was full of the enthusiasm of discovery and was as proud of the two little cells as though they were his own.
I’m to go back Tuesday to be skin tested, to see what foods and pollens and bits of fluff disturb me, but none of them disturbs me so much as Mrs. Lindbergh’s confession. These systemic disturbances are more mysterious than even doctors know, and these days he would have to scratch me with substances more subtle than rabbit’s hair and duck’s feathers to find my misery.