TO LOOK at him, you would never have believed he was an intellectual. That was the nice thing about Jim Barnett. With his pink cheeks and sparkling brown eyes and reddish brown hair that needed brushing and well-cut brown suit that needed pressing, he might have been any kind of regular young guy, anywhere in America. He made you think of Boy Scouts and starting a fire without matches and Wesley Barry and skinning the cat and Our Gang comedies and Huckleberry Finn. If he had ever been hard up, he could have been a photographic model, and one would have seen his pleasant, vaguely troubled face more often in The Saturday Evening Post than in Esquire. He might have done very well as the young man who is worried about his life insurance, the young man who is worried about dandruff, the young man whose shirts won’t fit him, the young man who looks up happily from his plate of Crunchies, saying, “Gee, honey, I didn’t know breakfast food could taste so good!”
In real life, his concerns were of a different order. The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of Das Kapital and was going around telling people about how he felt afterwards. He would buttonhole a classmate after a few sets of tennis down at the old Fourteenth Street Armory. “You know, Al,” he would say, twisting his head upwards and to one side in the characteristic American gesture of a man who is giving a problem serious thought (the old salt or the grizzled Yankee farmer scanning the sky for weather indications), “you know, Al, I never thought so at college, but the Communists have something. Their methods over here are a little operatic, but you can’t get around their analysis of capitalism. I think the system is finished, and it’s up to us to be ready for the new thing when it comes.” And Al, or whoever it was, would be doubtful but impressed. He might even go home with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in his pocket—in that period, the little socialist classic enjoyed something of the popularity of the Reader’s Digest: it put the whole thing in a nutshell, let a fellow like Al know just what he was up against. Later that evening Al might remark to his wife that maybe it would be a good idea (didn’t she think?) to lay in a stock of durable consumers’ goods—in case, oh, in case of inflation, or revolution, or anything like that. His wife would interpret this in terms of cans and leave a big order for Heinz’s baked beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, and somebody else’s chicken à la king with the grocer the next day. This was the phenomenon known as the dissemination of ideas.
In much the same tone (that of a man in an advertisement letting another man in on a new high-test gasoline) Jim began to write about his convictions in articles and book reviews for the liberal magazines. Capitalism was on the skids, and everybody ought to know about it. He could never have written, “Capitalism is doomed,” any more than he could have talked about “the toiling masses.” At Yale, elevation in speech had been held to be quite as barbarous as eccentricity in dress or the wrong sort of seriousness in study; and if Jim had committed an unpardonable breach of manners in interesting himself in Marxism, his rough-and-tumble vocabulary was a sort of apology for this, a placatory offering to the gods of decorum, who must have appeared to him in the guise of football players. Certainly, his vocabulary had something to do with the enthusiasm his work excited. The ideas he put forward, familiar enough when clothed in their usual phraseology, emerged in his writing in a state of undress that made them look exciting and almost new, just as a woman whom one has known for years is always something of a surprise without her clothes on. And, in the end, it was not the ideas that counted so much, as the fact that Jim Barnett held them.
This was the thing that nobody, including Jim himself, could ever quite get over. Now and then someone would be frank enough to ask him how it had happened, and he would laugh and say that it had been an accident: he had had a roommate at college who was literary, and once you got started reading one thing led to another. But modest men, like boasters, are never believed, even when they speak the exact truth; and in 1932 everyone on the left was convinced that this “accident” was really a miracle, a sign from heaven or history that the millennium was at hand. Most men had come to socialism by some all-too-human compulsion: they were out of work or lonely or sexually unsatisfied or foreign-born or queer in one of a hundred bitter, irremediable ways. They resembled the original twelve apostles in the New Testament; there was no real merit in their adherence, and no hope either. But Jim was like the Roman centurion or Saint Paul; he came to socialism freely, from the happy center of things, by a pure act of perception which could only have been brought about by grace; and his conversion might be interpreted as a prelude to the conversion of the world.
And, like all miracles, this particular one served to quicken the faith of the stragglers, the tired workers, and the worldlings. Silly people who had gone a little to the left and then begun to wonder whether they had not, after all, made a mistake, had only to look at Jim Barnett to feel reassured. Nobody could possibly object to socialism if it were going to be run by earnest, undogmatic Yale men—some of them out of Shef, to take care of the technical side. On the other hand, serious middle-aged men who had been plugging Marxism for years in little magazines that owed the printer money and never came out on time would have a conversation with Jim and feel heartened, even inspired. If a nice, average boy like that could tumble into the movement, surely the old ideas must be bankrupt at last. When capitalism, intellectually speaking, could no longer feed her favorite children, the end could not but be very, very near.
By simply being the way he was, Jim Barnett made a great many people on the left feel happy, almost sentimental. He was a mascot, a good-luck piece; and there was perhaps some superstition behind the fact that very little was demanded of him—you must not ask too much of a talisman or the power will go out of it, and it is better not to look a gift horse in the mouth. At any rate, unlike most converts of that period, he was not expected to follow the Party line, even on a long leash. From the very first, Jim was an independent in politics, siding now with the Communists, now with the Lovestoneites, now with the Trotskyists, now with the group of middle-class liberals he had known at college who were trying to build a Farmer-Labor party of their own. In anybody else, such behavior would have been politically suspect: the man would have been damned as a careerist, on the one hand, or a dilettante on the other. Yet neither of these allegations was ever made against Jim. His heterodoxy was received by all factions with paternal indulgence. “Let the boy have his head,” was the feeling. “A wild oat or two won’t hurt him.”
With Jim himself it was a point of honor that he should never agree completely with anyone or anything. He had never swallowed Marxism whole, he used to say in a slightly boastful tone, as if he had achieved a considerable feat of acrobatics. It was true; he never swallowed any doctrine whole. Like a finicky eater, he took pride in the fact that he always left something on the plate. There was something peculiarly American and puritanical about this abstemiousness of his; in other countries children are taught that it is bad manners not to finish everything that is set before them. But at Yale a certain intellectual prodigality had been cultivated in the students; it was bad taste to admire anything too wholeheartedly. They thought “bad taste” but they meant “dangerous,” for the prodigality was merely an end product of asceticism: you must not give in to your appetites, physical or spiritual; if you did, God knows where it would land you, in paganism, Romanism, idolatry, or the gutter. Like all good Yale men, Jim feared systems as his great-grandfather had feared the devil, the saloon, and the pope.
Naturally, for boys brought up under these influences, systems of thought had a certain wanton, outlawed attractiveness; and Marxism was to become for Jim’s generation what an actress had been for the youths of the Gilded Age. During the first years of the New Deal, there were many flirtations, many platonic friendships with the scarlet woman of the steppes. Jim, being courageous, went farther than most. And, at first glance, that balkiness of his, that hesitation, that unwillingness to take the final step, might have appeared to be merely a concession to tradition, another bone thrown to the Eli bulldog, who was always extraordinarily hungry.
Actually, it was deeper and more personal than that. If other people on the left stood in superstitious awe of Jim, Jim also stood in awe of himself. It was not that he considered that he was especially brilliant or talented; his estimation of his qualities was both just and modest. What he reverenced in himself was his intelligent mediocrity. He knew that he was the Average Thinking Man to whom in the end all appeals are addressed. He was the man that Uncle Sam points his finger at in the recruiting posters, that political orators beseech and ad-writers try to frighten; he was the stooge from the audience that the magician calls up on the stage, the foreman on the Grand Jury, the YOU in “This means YOU.” He was a walking Gallup Poll, and he had only to leaf over his feelings to discover what America was thinking. There was something sublime about this, but there were responsibilities, too. The danger was that you would lose your amateur standing. It was essential to remain—not aloof, exactly, for that implied some aristocratic hauteur—but accessible, undecided. It was so easy, so fatally easy, to become a professional innocent; one day you were a bona fide tourist, and the next you were a shill in a Chinatown bus. If you were not remarkably alert, you might never know it had happened.
Jim Barnett, however, was alert, and he took every possible precaution. His mind and character appeared to him as a kind of sacred trust that he must preserve inviolate. It was as if he were the standard gold dollar against which the currency is measured. It would be wrong to debase it with lead, but it would be equally wrong to put more than the specified amount of gold into it. The dollar was supposed to be impure in certain unalterable proportions: you could not change that without upsetting the whole monetary system. Jim’s function, as he saw it, was to ring the new ideas against himself, and let the world hear how they sounded. It was his duty, therefore, to “be himself,” and his virtues and his weaknesses were alike untouchable. On the one hand, he could not drop into the life of a Communist front man, because this would have involved a suspension of individual judgment, a surgical sterilization of the moral faculty that was odious to him; on the other hand, he could not lift himself into the world of Marxist scholarship, because, to put it frankly, this might have overtaxed his powers, might (who knows) have crippled him for good.
It did not occur to him, or, indeed, to anyone else, that he was taking the line of least resistance. This state of being unresolved, on call, as it were, was painful to him, and he used to envy his friends who, as he said, were “sure.” The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thoughts troubled him a good deal. He found, for example, that he liked to drink and dance and go to medium-smart night clubs with medium-pretty girls. Yet he believed with Veblen that there was no greater folly than conspicuous consumption, and his eyes and ears told him that people were hungry while he had money in his pocket. This was a problem all well-to-do radicals had to face, and there were any number of ways of dealing with it. You could stop being a radical, or you could give your money away. Or you could give a little of it away and say, “I owe something to myself,” or give none of it away, and say, “I’m not a saint, and besides I have something more important than money to contribute.” The Communist Party in those years did its best to settle this delicate question gracefully for prosperous fellow-travelers. It was reported that Browder had declared that there was nothing worse for the movement than what he called “a tired radical,” and that men and women would be better workers for the cause if they let themselves go and enjoyed life once in a while. This pronouncement was widely quoted—over cocktails in the Rainbow Room, and sometimes (even) over a bottle of champagne in more intimate boîtes; it was believed that this showed “the human side” of the Party leader, and gave the lie to those perpetual carpers (tired radicals, undoubtedly) who kept talking about Communist inflexibility. The example of Marx and Engels was also cited: they had had great Christmas parties and had called the young Kautsky a mollycoddle because he would not drink beer. (And how right their judgment had been! Forty years later Kautsky had betrayed the revolution by voting war credits in the German Reichstag, and Lenin had called him, among other things, an old woman.) Jim Barnett tried all these formulas on his conscience, but stretch them as he would, he could not make them cover the abyss between the theory and the practice. He decided, at last, to let the abyss yawn, and in the course of time he fell into it.
The second year Jim was in New York, he went to work as assistant editor on one of the liberal weeklies. The whole staff was instantly delighted with him, from the septuagenarian editor and publisher down to the red-haired telephone girl. He brought a breath of fresh air into the office, the women told each other, while the old man muttered happily about “young ideas,” and the men of forty-odd, Harvard graduates who remembered Jack Reed and who were rather dried and historical themselves, they, too, welcomed Jim Barnett in their own way, shaking their heads over him and prophesying with a certain relish that he would soon lose his illusions and resign himself, as they had done, to the world. The gratitude and joy everyone felt translated itself at once into action. The magazine began—with an alacrity that was almost fatuous—to smarten itself up. The advertising manager had herself an expensive permanent, Labor and Industry took to using mascara, the library got a set of modernistic chairs, some of the new lamps with indirect lighting, and a thick-piled gray rug from a neo-cubist furniture store on Eighth Street. Tea was served in the afternoons; a new format was planned for the magazine; the switchboard girl began to listen in to phone calls; and the managing editor asked a well-known Marxist hothead to do a series of articles on the New Deal.
All this attention embarrassed Jim a little. It did not go to his head. He even opposed some of the changes, in the manner of a small boy who says, “Aw, Ma, you’re taking too much trouble.” There was talk of moving the paper uptown, but Jim squelched this by insisting that the old-fashioned offices had a quaint integrity of their own, that the very editorial policy might be imperiled by a move to more glittering quarters. He perceived that the editors were ready to do anything he wanted—and he did not like it at all. It was true, he was anxious to put over his ideas, but he saw himself accomplishing this by argument, not by ingratiation. In his eyes, there was something ugly about the fact that these seasoned liberals should go to such lengths to please him. It was like having a girl give in too quickly; you felt that she did not take you, as an individual, seriously—she only wanted a man. At the back of his mind he was aware of a contempt for the Liberal’s editorial board, like the contempt he had felt for the easy makes, the town girls in New Haven; and it was a contempt that was restless and full of fear, since the idea that kept pushing itself in was, “They would have done it for any young guy. They have no political respect for me as a person.” This was one of the penalties of being the Average Man, that you were never sure whether people were not mixing you up with someone else. Sometimes you did not feel average so much as anonymous. Jim could never understand quite why it was, but whenever anyone talked about losing yourself in a cause, or in the Common Will, a thrill of horror would go through him, and he would recall the lost feeling; the tangled-up feeling, he got in a certain recurrent dream he had, where he could not find out who he was.
In the editorial staff of the Liberal, Jim sensed a great aching unspecific need for somebody, anybody, to think by and live by, as a mother lives by her son. Only the old man, with his long black coat and pompous manners and his eyeglasses on a black ribbon, seemed to be exempt from this necessity, and it was only with him in his private office that Jim felt truly comfortable. The others wanted to be bullied or taken by storm; the old man merely wanted to talk. He was interested in what Jim had to say, while the others, Jim felt, did not so much listen to his remarks as eavesdrop on them, waiting for him to express a preference they could gratify, or a decision they could concur with. It was like walking down Fifth Avenue with your mother or your girl during the Christmas shopping season: you did not dare pause for an instant before a tennis racket, an English sweater, or a toilet case in a store window; if you showed the faintest flicker of interest she would buy the thing for you, whether you wanted it or not. With the old man, however, Jim felt safe. He could say whatever came into his head and know that it would not appear, in a slightly garbled form, in one of the lead paragraphs on the following Wednesday. The two of them would sit in the old man’s room, facing each other on a pair of squeaky swivel chairs, and discuss the AAA, the court-packing plan, the Kirov assassination and the execution of the hundred White Guards.
On all of these subjects the old man held opinions that were in the eyes of most of his staff and many of his readers an indication of failing powers. Mr. Wendell was uncompromisingly against what he called, in a public-auditorium voice, this new spirit of bureaucracy, this specter that was haunting the world under the name of progressivism or communism. He believed in socialism, but he held out for an economy of abundance, for a free judiciary, and trial by jury. He stood for inviolable human rights rather than plans or programs; and no plan, he declared, was worth a nickel that would sacrifice these rights at the first hint of trouble. Years later, Jim decided that time had, in each of these instances, proved the old man right. At the moment, he was not so sure. He did not quite agree with his friends who considered Mr. Wendell a tiresome old fuddyduddy. Still, he thought that you could probably trust Mr. Roosevelt and Comrade Stalin to abrogate liberty only just so much as was absolutely necessary—and always in the right direction, that is, to abrogate your opponent’s liberty rather than your own. When he told the old man that he was making a fetish of civil liberties, that the liberties were for the people and not the people for the liberties, Mr. Wendell replied that Jim was making a fetish out of socialism. Jim had to smile a little ruefully, conceding the point.
One day a new argument occurred to him, one he had heard the Communists advance. After all, he said, there has to be a limit to everything. Nobody can be allowed to practice freedom at the expense of everybody else. The government, for instance, has to protect itself against sedition and against the betrayal of state secrets in wartime. He looked up at the old man expectantly, wondering what he could answer. “Doesn’t it?” he asked earnestly, when Mr. Wendell remained silent. “I don’t believe in war,” the old man answered calmly, and Jim blushed. He did not believe in war, either; at least he said he didn’t, not in imperialist war anyway; but the words he had just spoken seemed to show that he did, that he believed in it more than anything else, more than free speech, more than the right to agitate against the government. He was so deeply chagrined by this discovery that the thread of the debate slipped from his hands, and it did not occur to him until he lay in bed that night that the old man had not answered the question but only parried it, and in such a way as to assert his moral superiority, to remind Jim of his long and heroic career as a fighter for peace. Jim laughed to himself, and turned over, contentedly. Of course there had to be certain restrictions on liberty; anybody but an anarchist would admit that. Of course there would have to be policemen, even in a classless society. “I’m too much of a realist,” Jim said to himself proudly, “to imagine that anywhere, at any time, a state could be run on the honor system.” Yet there was a problem. People said that you must never forget that the Soviet Union was moving toward greater democracy all the time; you had to look at a thing like this Kirov business historically: if you remembered the Czarist repression and the hated Okhrana, you would see that the execution of a few White Guards was a step forward—there were merely a hundred or so of them after all. But that, Jim thought, was like patting a mass killer on the head because this time he had only committed one little murder. “No!” he heard himself say, loudly and defiantly into the darkness. It was wrong to condone an affair like these executions. So far the old man was right. But there must be some middle ground. You ought to hate the sin and love the sinner. That was very difficult in practice, but everything was difficult. At least, he congratulated himself, he had faced the problem, even if he had not solved it. He settled himself comfortably on the horns of the dilemma and fell asleep.
When he married Nancy Hodges, he invited everybody on the Liberal to the wedding. Some of the older women looked a little dowdy and were inclined to be skittish about the champagne, but Mr. Wendell made a distinguished appearance, and, in any case, Nancy’s parents, good, well-to-do Connecticut people, were not precisely streamlined themselves. The women, on their side, were faintly disappointed in Nancy. She was pretty, everyone conceded that; she had a straight, short nose and blond hair and sweet, direct, blue eyes. Yet somehow, they thought, she was not very exciting. She looked too much like her mother, which was a very bad thing in a girl. If Jim had to marry, they felt, it should have been somebody like an actress or a fast society girl or a painter or a burning-eyed revolutionary, somebody out of the ordinary. For Jim to have chosen such a humdrum little person as Nancy was, it seemed to them, a reflection on themselves. Around the office he had been so very careful: a cheerful word and a joke for everybody, but never a lunch or a dinner alone with a female member of the staff. They had not permitted themselves to feel resentment because they knew from the phone operator that there was a girl in the picture; and they had, one and all, persuaded themselves that she must be infinitely more beautiful and glamorous than they were. In this way, their own charms were not called into question. If a man prefers, say, Greta Garbo to you, it does not mean that you are not perfectly all right in your own style, not perfectly adequate to any of the usual requirements. The sight of Nancy in her wedding dress dispelled these comforting illusions. Every moderately young woman on the Liberal looked at Nancy and was affronted. “Why not me?” they all thought, as they clasped her small, plump hand, and murmured an appropriate formula.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be one of those Dos Passos situations,” the literary editor said to the managing editor on the way back on the train. “You know. She won’t let him see his friends or do or think anything that her father wouldn’t approve of. She’ll make him buy a house in the country, and they’ll live exactly like all the neighbors. She looks sweet, but like all those women she probably has a will of her own.”
Jim, however, had been alert enough to consider these possibilities for himself. Nancy was conventional in many ways, but she was not ambitious or priggish or socially insecure. Nancy believed that you ought to have children and that they ought to have good doctors and good schools and plenty of fresh air and wholesome food. She believed that it was nice to go dancing on Saturday nights, and that it was nice to take a vacation trip once a year. She wanted to have big comfortable chairs in their apartment, and a big comfortable colored maid who came in by the day, and the first thing she bought was the very best Beautyrest mattresses for them to sleep on, and the very best box springs for their twin beds. Later, they got a good radio and phonograph combination, and they collected the choicest classical records they could find. Nancy was, from the beginning, careful with Jim’s money and she put most of it into things that did not show, like the box springs, or a good plain rug, or life insurance. She subscribed to Consumer’s Union, and to the hospitalization plan. She bought her clothes at Best’s or Lord and Taylor’s, and if she had fifteen dollars to spare from her household budget, she would put it into a new electric mixer for her maid rather than into an after-dinner coffee service for herself.
On the other hand, Nancy gave money to beggars in the street. She was tender-hearted, and she had majored in sociology in college. She knew that conditions under capitalism were horrifying, and she would always sign a check for a worthy cause. Her father showed a tendency to snort over Jim’s activities; but Nancy handled this difficult situation perfectly: she took Jim’s side but she did not argue; she merely patted her father on the cheek and told him he was an old fogy. “Do you mean to tell me you believe in this communistic talk of his?” the old man would ask. “I don’t believe in all of it,” she would answer with dignity, “but I believe in Jim.” The phrasing was a little trite, but the sentiment was unimpeachable, for Nancy’s father, like everyone else, believed in Jim, too. He could not help it.
Nancy was limited, but she was good. And she expected things of Jim. This was what drew him. Unlike the people in the Liberal office, unlike the radicals of all groups that he had been hobnobbing with, Nancy did not want Jim on any old terms. Nancy was not exacting, and yet there was an unwritten, unspoken contract between them. If she, on her side, had renounced all dreams of fortune and large success, he, on his side, was renouncing the right to poverty, loneliness, and despair. She was not to goad him up the social ladder, but he must never, never let her down. It was understood that he should not be pressed to go against his convictions; it was also understood that she must not go hungry. When he thought about them in the abstract, it seemed to him, now and then, that these guarantees were mutually incompatible, that Clause B was in eternal obstinate contradiction to Clause A. In practice, however, you could, if you were sufficiently agile, manage to fulfill them both at once. The job on the Liberal kept his conscience clean and brought the bottle of Grade A to the door every morning. Many a discord, he thought, which cannot be resolved in theoretical terms, in real life can be turned into perfect harmony; and his own marriage demonstrated to him once again the superiority of pragmatism to all foreign brands of philosophy.
Still, he had misgivings. Sometimes it appeared as if his relation with Nancy were not testing his convictions so much as his powers of compromise. Their wedding had been a case in point. Nancy’s parents had wanted a church wedding, and Jim had wanted City Hall. What they had had was a summer wedding on the lawn with a radical clergyman from New York officiating. It was the same way with their choice of friends. Park Avenue and Fourteenth Street were both ruled out. The result was that the people who came to their cocktail parties, at which Nancy served good hors d’oeuvres and rather poor cocktails, were presentable radicals and unpresentable conservatives—men in radio, men in advertising, lawyers with liberal ideas, publishers, magazine editors, writers of a certain status who lived in the country. Every social assertion Nancy and Jim made carried its own negation with it, like the Hegelian thesis. Thus it was always being said by Nancy that someone was a Communist but a terribly nice man, while Jim was remarking that somebody else worked for Young and Rubicam but was astonishingly liberal. Every guest was a sort of qualified statement, and the Barnetts’ parties, in consequence, were a little dowdy, a little timid, in a queer way (for they were held in Greenwich Village) a little suburban. For some reason, nobody ever came to the Barnetts’ house without his wife, unless she were in the hospital having a baby. They came systematically in pairs, and, once in the apartment, they would separate, as though by decree, and the men would talk, standing up, against the mantelpiece, while the women chattered on the sofa. The same people behaved quite differently at other parties; but here it was as if they were under a compulsion to act out, in a kind of ritualistic dance, the dualism of the Barnetts’ household, the dualism of their own natures.
Jim recognized that his social life was dull, but he did not object to this. He worked hard during the day; he was alert and gregarious; he had a great many appointments and a great many duties. There were people who believed that he used Nancy as a sedative, to taper off his day, as some men take a boring book to bed with them, in order to put themselves to sleep. Yet this theory, which was popular in the Liberal office, was not at all true. Jim loved Nancy with an almost mystical devotion, for Nancy was the Average Intelligent Woman, the Mate. If there was narcissism in this love, there were gratitude and dependence, too, for Jim had a vague notion that Nancy had saved him from something, saved him from losing that precious gift of his, the common touch, kept him close to what he called the facts. Some businessmen say humorously of their wives, “She keeps my nose to the grindstone.” Of Nancy, Jim was fond of saying, “She keeps my feet on the ground.” The very fact that his domestic life was wholesome and characterless, like a child’s junket, was a source of satisfaction to him. He had a profound conviction that this was the way things ought to be, that this was life. In the socialist millennium, of course, everything would be different: love would be free and light as air. Actually, this aspect of the socialist millennium filled Jim with alarm; he hoped that in America they would not have to go so far as to break up the family; it would be enough if every man could have the rock-bottom, durable, practical things, the things Nancy cared about so very, very much.
Moreover, the insipidity of his domestic life was, in a sense, its moral justification. Jim could think of the poor and the homeless now, and conscience no longer stabbed him, for he had purchased his immunity in the true American Way. Unable to renounce money, he had renounced the enjoyment of it. He had sold his birthright to gaiety for the mess of pottage on the dinner table and the right to hold his head up when he walked through the poorer districts in his good brown suit. Christ could forgive himself for being God only by becoming Man, just as a millionaire can excuse his riches by saying, “I was a poor boy once myself.” Jim, in a dim, half-holy way, felt that with his marriage he had taken up the cross of Everyman. He, too, was undergoing an ordeal, and the worried look he had always worn deepened and left its mark around his eyes, as if anxiety, hovering over him like a bird, had at last found its natural perch, its time-ordained foothold in bills and babies and dietary disturbances.
Jim was quite sure that his marriage was “real.” It pinched him now and then, and that, to his mind, was the test. What disturbed him at times was the fact that it had been so extraordinarily easy to reconcile his political beliefs with his bread and butter. There ought to have been a great tug of war with Nancy at one end and Karl Marx at the other, but the job on the Liberal constituted a bridge between the opposing forces, a bridge which he strode across placidly every day, but which he nevertheless suspected of insubstantiality. There was something unnatural about a job that rewarded you quite handsomely for expressing your honest opinions; it was as if you were being paid to keep your virtue when you ought to be paid to lose it. More and more often it seemed to Jim that, if he was “facing facts” at home, in the office he was living in a queer fairy-tale country where everything was comfortable and nothing true. He might, however, have smothered this disquieting notion if he had not heard somebody else put it into words.
It happened at tea in the library one afternoon, when Jim had been married only a short time. Jim did not ordinarily come in for tea, but there was a new girl in the office, an assistant to the literary editor, and at four o’clock, the managing editor had poked her head in at Jim’s door and said in a sprightly voice, “You must come and meet our gay divorcee.” Jim had no interest in divorcees, and it seemed to him that the managing editor was being a little corny, as he put it, about the facts of life; nevertheless, he obeyed. When he shambled into the library, the girl was sitting across the room in a wing chair, with a cup of tea in her lap. She was telling anecdotes about Reno in a rather breathless voice, as if she were afraid of being interrupted, though everyone in the room was listening to her in fascinated silence. There was something about the scene that Jim did not like, and he went over to the shelves and took down a book.
He had seen the girl before—he knew this at once—somewhere, in a bright-red evening dress that looked too old for her. It must have been at a prom or a football dance at Yale. Suddenly he remembered the whole thing—he had noticed her and thought that she was good-looking and a little bit fast (she had worn long gold earrings), and he had cut in on her without being introduced, just to see what she would say. To his astonishment, she had talked to him about poetry; the mask of the enchantress had dropped from her face and she had seemed excited and happy. In the middle of it, the man she had come with had tapped him on the shoulder with a grumpy air, and danced off with her. Jim had watched her from the sidelines for a little while, admitting to himself that she was having too good a time, or rather, that she was having the wrong kind of good time: she was not floating from man to man as a proper belle should, but talking, laughing, posing, making part of the effort herself. He ought not to have cut in on her without asking her man or some other person to introduce him; yet she had created the sort of lawless atmosphere that provoked such behavior. He did not cut in on her again, and he had never been able to make up his mind whether he liked her or not.
Here she was again, looking rather prettier and younger, almost virginal, he thought, in a black dress with a white organdy ruffle at the neck; and yet again she was somehow out of bounds, and here in the library as on the dance floor she was having too much of a success.
“This is Miss Sargent,” the managing editor said, taking his arm and leading him up to the girl’s chair.
Jim smiled vaguely.
“I liked your last article,” she said, “the one about the smooth-paper magazines.”
“Speaking of that,” said Labor and Industry, “do you know that Trotsky has been writing for Liberty?”
“Writing against Russia,” put in the foreign-news man, who was sympathetic with the Communist party.
The managing editor bit her lips. “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed plaintively, like a mother who has lost control of her children, “I wish he wouldn’t do that! It’s such a shame to divide our forces now, when we need unity so badly.”
The cup rattled on the new girl’s saucer. When Jim looked down he could see that she had spilled her tea. There was a brown pool in the saucer, and her cup dripped as she picked it up again.
“It was just an historical piece,” she said stiffly.
Several of the women exchanged smiles. “She’s supposed to be a Trotskyist,” the advertising manager, who was good-looking, whispered to Jim.
“Is that all?” said the foreign-news man. “It’s simply a funny coincidence, I suppose, that it appeared in the place where it could furnish the most ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet Union?”
“You would have been delighted to run it in the Liberal, of course,” said the girl with an ironical smile.
The managing editor cut in. “Well, no, we wouldn’t. We have published things by Trotsky, but I think he goes too far. Solidarity on the left is so important at this moment. We can’t afford self-criticism now.”
“What do you think, Jim?” said Labor and Industry.
Jim cocked his head and considered the question. “I don’t agree with Helen,” he said finally, nodding toward the managing editor. “Any movement that doesn’t dare hear the truth about itself hasn’t got much on the ball, in my opinion. But I would say that you have to be careful where you print that truth. You want it to be read by your friends, not by your enemies. I think we should have published Trotsky’s piece in the Liberal. On the other hand, I think Trotsky made a mistake in giving it to Liberty. He might just as well have given it to Hearst.”
The girl drew a deep breath. She looked stubborn and angry. All at once, Jim was sure that he liked her, for she was going to fight back, he saw, and it took courage to do that on your first day in a new job. He wondered, inspecting her clothes and trying to price them, whether she needed the money.
“It’s a delicate problem,” she began, speaking slowly, as if she were trying to control her feelings and, at the same time in that stilted way that the Trotskyists had, as if they all, like the Old Man, spoke English with an accent, “and it’s a problem that none of you, or I, have had to face, because none of us are serious about revolution. You talk,” she turned to Jim, “as if it were a matter between you and God, or you and your individual, puritan conscience. You people worry all the time about your integrity, like a debutante worrying about her virginity. Just how far can she go and still be a good girl? Trotsky doesn’t look at it that way. For Trotsky it’s a relation between himself and the masses. How can he get the truth to the masses, and how can he keep himself alive in order to do that? You say that it would have been all right if he had brought the piece out in the Liberal. It would have been all among friends, like a family scandal. But who are these friends? Do you imagine that the Liberal is read by the masses? On the contrary, Liberty is read by the masses, and the Liberal is read by a lot of self-appointed delegates for the masses whose principal contact with the working class is a colored maid.”
“The trade-union people read the Liberal,” said the managing editor, her square, plump face flushing indignantly.
“Who? Dubinsky? Sidney Hillman?” She pronounced the names contemptuously. “I don’t doubt it. The point is, though, that you—” she turned again to Jim—“you admit that Trotsky is telling the truth, but you think that nobody is good enough to hear it except a select little circle of intellectuals and Liberal readers. What snobbism! Naturally,” she went on, “you have to be careful about how you write the article. You have to write it so that anybody who reads it with the minimum of attention will see that what you are saying to them about the Soviet Union is quite a different thing from what the editors of Liberty have been saying to them. You know, you might not think so, but it’s quite as possible for a revolutionist to make use of Hearst as it is for Hearst to make use of a revolutionist. Lenin went through Germany in a sealed train: the Germans thought they were using him, but he knew he was using the Germans. This Liberty business is the same thing on a smaller scale. The reactionaries have furnished Trotsky with a vehicle by which he can reach the masses. What would you have him do? Hold up his hands like a girl, and say, ‘Oh no! Think of my reputation! I can’t accept presents from strange gentlemen!’ ” Jim laughed out loud, and one or two of the older men snickered. “Besides,” she continued, dropping her voice a little, “there’s the problem of survival. The liberal magazines haven’t shown any desire to stake Trotsky to an orgy of free speech; his organization is poor; would you like it better if he starved?”
She had finished, and she let her breath out in a tired exhalation, as if she had reached the top of a long flight of stairs. Nobody answered her, and after a moment she picked up her tea cup and began to drink with an air of intense concentration. This ostrich maneuver was classically unsuccessful, for everyone in the room continued to watch her, knowing, just as Jim did, that the tea must be stone-cold. At last, one of the older men spoke.
“Well,” he said, with a sort of emaciated heartiness, “Trotsky must be a better man than I gave him credit for, to have such a pretty advocate.” The remark dropped like a stone into the pool of silence, setting up echoes of itself, little ripples of sound that spread and spread and finally died away.
Jim stopped her on her way out of the office.
“Ride down in the elevator with me,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking,” he began as they stood waiting for the car, “you were absolutely right this afternoon. But you won’t last long here.”
“I know it,” she said wryly, getting into the elevator. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Is it true,” he asked, “that you’re a Trotskyite?”
The girl shook her head.
“I’m not even political,” she said.
“But why—?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I do admire Trotsky. He’s the most romantic man in modern times. And you all sounded so smug.” She paused to think. They were standing on the street in the autumn twilight now. “Working on a magazine like the Liberal does make you smug. You keep patting yourself on the back because you’re not working for Hearst. It’s like a lot of kept women feeling virtuous because they’re not streetwalkers. Oh yes, you’re being true to your ideals; and the kept women are being true to Daddy. But what if Daddy went broke, or the ideals ceased to pay a hundred and a quarter a week? What then? You don’t know and you’d rather not think about it. So when something like Trotsky’s writing for Liberty comes up, it makes you nervous, because it reminds you of the whole problem, and you are all awfully quick to say that never, under any circumstances, would you do that.”
“Yes,” Jim said, “I see what you mean. But aren’t you being a little romantic? Aren’t you trying to say that we all ought to starve for our convictions?”
Miss Sargent smiled.
“I won’t say that, because if I said it, then I ought to go and do it, and I don’t want to. But I do think, somehow, that it ought to be a little bit harder than it is for you Liberal editors. It generally is, for people who are really independent. Society makes them scramble in one way or another. The thing is, Mr. Wendell did scramble, not financially, because he inherited money, but morally and probably socially, a long time ago. And you people are living off the moral income of that fight, just as you are living off his money income.”
“What about you?” said Jim.
“Oh, me, too,” said the girl. “But as you say, I won’t last long. Neither will you, I hope. The Liberal is all right as a stopgap, or as a job to support you while you’re writing a book; but the Liberal is not a way of life. If you begin to think that, you’re finished.”
“What about Mr. Wendell?” said Jim. “It’s a way of life for him.”
“Oh, Mr. Wendell! Mr. Wendell is a crusader. Of course, it’s a way of life for him. An honorable one. But the Liberal puts him in the red every year, while it puts you and me in the black. That’s one reason he’s managed to be serious for seventy years—every word costs him something. The good things in life are not free.”
“Public opinion is against you there,” said Jim.
“Maybe. Well, I must go.” She hesitated a moment. “How does the old man feel about the paper?”
“Worried.”
“Yes,” she said. “Like a self-made man who’s tried to give his children all the advantages he didn’t have. And then they turn out badly, and he can’t understand it. You prove my point for me. Well, good-bye.”
He walked to the subway with her, and all the way home he thought about the conversation. He was very much excited and disturbed. At home he told Nancy what had happened.
“She is going to stir up a lot of trouble,” said Nancy calmly.
“Yes,” Jim answered, smiling, “that’s the kind of girl she is. A troublemaker.”
“There must be something wrong with her.”
“Yes,” said Jim. “I suppose there is.”
It was queer, he thought, lying in bed that night (for he still did his thinking, like a boy, with the lights out), it was queer that Nancy had hit on it instantly. There must be something wrong with her. On the surface, it might appear that she had everything—looks and brains and health and youth and taste—and yet in a strange way she went against the grain. She was too tense, for one thing. It was as if she lived on excitement, situations, crises, trouble, as Nancy said. And she was not one of those happy trouble-makers who toss the apple of discord around as though it were a child’s ball. On the contrary, this afternoon in the library, she had been scared stiff. In one way, he was sure, she had not wanted to speak up for Trotsky at all; she had had to force herself to it, and the effort had left her white. You had to admire her courage for undertaking something that cost her so much; but then, he thought, why do it, why drive yourself if it doesn’t come easy? Nothing had been gained; Trotsky was no better off for her having spoken; and she herself, if she went on that way, would lose her job. For the spectator there had been something horrible about the scene; it was like watching a nervous trapeze artist performing on the high bars without a net: if the performer did not have iron nerves, he ought to get out of the business. “The coward dies a thousand deaths,” he murmured. “The brave but one.”
“What did you say, dear?” asked Nancy from the other bed.
“I didn’t know you were awake.”
“I’ve got those cramps in my legs again.”
She was seven months pregnant.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“About that girl, I bet,” she said cheerfully.
“Yes.”
“Watch out!” said Nancy in a bantering voice.
“Hell,” Jim answered, and his reply had more distaste in it than he had intended to put there. “I wouldn’t have her for anybody’s money. Besides,” he went on, “she’s supposed to be engaged. She divorced her husband to marry some other guy. Though when I left her this evening, she looked to me like a girl who didn’t have a date. She lingered, you know . . .”
“Yes,” said Nancy. “Well, I guess you’re safe.”
Two months later, en route between a cocktail party and a political dinner, he kissed Miss Sargent in a taxi. Nancy was in the hospital with a new baby girl, and as he leaned down toward his companion, it seemed to him that this fact justified the kiss, lent it indeed the stamp of orthodoxy—young husbands were supposed to go slightly on the loose when their wives were in the hospital having babies; it was the Yale thing, the manly thing, to do. Yet he had hardly framed the excuse to himself when he heard his own voice speaking, a little thick with Martinis and emotion.
“I love you,” he said, and listened to the words with surprise, for this was not on the cards at all, and he did not even know if it were true.
“I know,” she whispered, and as soon as he heard her say this he was convinced that it was true, and he began to feel joyfully unhappy.
“Ever since that Shef dance,” he continued. “You wore a red dress.” Now he believed (for he was a little tight and every love must have its legend) that he had been fatefully in love with her for years, but that there had been some barrier between them; yet at the same time, kept, as it were, in the cold-storage compartment of his heart, was the certainty that the only barrier that had ever existed was the faint distaste he felt for what was extreme and headstrong and somehow unladylike in her nature.
“I didn’t think you remembered,” she said. “Why didn’t you cut in on me again?”
“You terrified me,” he said, knowing, all at once, that this too was true.
The taxi had drawn up to the door of a third-rate hotel that was frequently used for left-wing, money-raising evenings.
“Do you want to go in?” he said.
“Of course,” she answered, and raised her head for him to kiss her.
He was disappointed. He had half-expected her to say something foolish and passionate like, “Let’s keep on driving around all night,” or something sultry like, “Come home with me.” Her equanimity angered him, for what good was a girl like this unless she was foolish and passionate and sultry? He did not kiss her again, but gave her shoulder a slight, friendly push toward the doorman who was waiting to open the cab door. She evaded the doorman’s hand and jumped out. By the time Jim had finished paying the cab, she had disappeared into the hotel.
Jim was at the speakers’ table, though he was not scheduled to give a formal talk. From where he sat he could see the girl, eating with some people he did not know. He counted them carefully; the number was uneven; unquestionably, she was the extra girl. The discovery gave him a strange kind of satisfaction: she was free, and the evening was not over; anything could still happen; on the other hand, the fact that she was so patently free, dangling there at her table under his eyes, made it easy for him to relinquish her in his mind. He had already decided to go home early and call Nancy the first thing in the morning to tell her how much he loved her, when he looked down at the girl’s table and found that she was gone. Her friends were still there; there was only a single empty chair pushed back from the table, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. He was filled with despair. His prudent, saving self told him that at least he could still call Nancy with a clear conscience—that much had been salvaged from the evening—but the notion no longer pleased him; there is something savorless about a profit that has not been made at somebody else’s expense. He began to move about restlessly on his chair, and at the first break between the speeches, he went out to the bar.
She was there, standing beside a fat, middle-aged radical who had his arm around her waist. She was drinking a Scotch and soda and laughing at what the man was saying. The man reached out and tapped Jim on the shoulder as he passed by.
“Hello,” he said, with a slight German accent. “The speeches are terrible.”
The girl turned and saw Jim.
“Now I know,” she said, “why you wanted to pass this up. Can you imagine,” she added to the man, “I thought it was my personal charm.”
Jim smiled uncomfortably. This Dorothy Parker act rubbed him the wrong way. Especially after what had happened.
“Would you like to go somewhere and dance?” he said.
The girl looked inquiringly at her companion.
“What about it?” she asked.
“I didn’t invite Leo,” Jim said, trying to make his voice sound light, knowing that he was behaving foolishly, that Leo was a gossip, and that Nancy would probably hear of this.
“Oh, but I invite him,” said the girl.
“I don’t dance,” Leo said. “You young bourgeois go along.”
In the end, Leo went with them. The two men bought the girl gardenias on a street corner, and there was a great deal of joking competition as to whose gardenia was the biggest and most perfect. They went to a French place on the West Side that had a small orchestra and was not too capitalistic. Jim and the girl danced, and Leo sat at the table like a German papa and made Marxist witticisms about them. The girl did not dance so well as Nancy, but she carried herself as if she were the belle of the evening. When it was time to go home, there was more joking about who should be dropped first, but it was finally agreed that Leo’s place was obviously the first stop. As soon as the cab door closed on Leo’s stout figure, Jim kissed the girl again.
“I love you,” he said.
“It was better to bring Leo along,” she murmured as if in answer. “I’m an expert conspirator. I know.”
Jim felt a slight chill run through him.
“I don’t like conspiracies,” he said.
“Oh, neither do I,” she said quickly. “But sometimes they’re necessary.”
Her tone, he thought, was precisely that of an army officer who professes to hate war.
“This time,” he said, “they won’t be necessary, Margaret.”
She looked up at him. As they passed a street light, he thought he could see her lips quiver slightly.
“It’s funny,” she said, “whenever a man starts to tell you he’s going to break with you, he uses your first name, even if he’s never used it before.”
“I wasn’t . . .” said Jim.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Yes, you were. Well, I’m going to be nice. I’m going to help you out. I’m going to say all the proper things.” She took a breath and began to recite. “There is no future in this, it can’t lead anywhere, it would only hurt us both, it wouldn’t be any good unless it were serious and under the circumstances it can’t be serious; if we once loved each other, we might not be able to stop, so we had better stop now. Or I could say,” her voice dropped, “if we once loved each other, we would be able to stop, so let’s stop before we find that out.”
The taxi drew up in front of her apartment, which was on a street with a quaint name, in the Village.
“Good night,” she said. “Please don’t see me to the door.” She jumped out of the taxi with a kind of exaggerated lightness, just as she had done at the hotel. She ran up the steps and opened the outer door.
“Where to?” said the driver.
Jim could still see her in the entryway, searching in her purse for the key.
“Go on across Seventh Avenue,” he said.
The next afternoon he took her home from work on the subway. They went up to her apartment, where they made love. After dinner, he had to leave her to go to see Nancy in the hospital. He stopped and bought some flowers on the way.
It was fortunate, all things considered, that he was called to Washington the following morning. When he got back, Nancy was ready to come home with the baby. Naturally, under the circumstances, there could be no thought of continuing the affair. Miss Sargent, he told himself, was an intelligent girl; she would surely understand . . . the impossibility, et cetera, better to kill the thing quickly . . . more painless in the long run . . . no need to talk about it . . . why stir up the embers? These serviceable phrases rose readily to his mind; it was as if he had memorized them long ago for just such an occasion. The only difficulty was that he could not imagine looking Miss Sargent in the eye and uttering a single one of them.
From her demeanor he could make out whether she was suffering. It seemed to him sometimes that she was waiting, waiting with a kind of maddening self-control for the word of explanation, the final phrase with which to write off the affair. But it was quite possible that this notion was purely subjective with him, that it arose from his own sense of owing her an explanation and had no basis in fact. It was possible that she had already written off the affair, that she had never expected anything of him, that he was just a guy she had gone to bed with one afternoon, when she had no other engagement. After all, she had never said she loved him. It was he, he thought with a groan, who had said all those things; she had merely said “I know” in a sweet, wise voice. Recalling his declarations in the taxi that night, he ground his teeth in shame and anger.
“Why the hell did I do it?” he muttered to himself. He considered what alternatives there had been. If he had not let her run away that night? If he had followed her and taken the key from her hand and opened her door? He could imagine himself climbing the stairs behind her. He could see them coming into her small room and turning to face each other, bulky and absurd in their winter coats. Her face would have had that strange, white look, as if she were going to faint. They would have clung to each other just as they were, and he would have pushed her gently down on the couch. He could not see clearly what would have happened afterwards, when they would have begun to talk again; but it would have been something desperately serious. He would have promised to leave Nancy. Suddenly he felt utterly sure that that was what he would have done; and even now, in his office, his mind turned a somersault of terror at the very idea. It was a premonition of this that had made him, in the taxi, acquiesce in her dismissal of him, accept her formulation of why it could not be. He had ridden home in a mood of mournful exaltation, in which a sense of heroic resignation had mingled with relief and joy, as if he had come out of some terrible catastrophe alive.
But when he woke up the next morning, this peculiar happiness, half-elegiac, half-prudent, had vanished, and he was on fire with lust. He knew that he had had a narrow escape, but he knew also that he could not leave the thing as it was. He had an implacable conviction that the affair must be finished off somehow, and he had not been at the office half an hour before he had decided that it was absolutely essential to his peace of mind for him to sleep with the girl. He could not read a manuscript or write a letter; he could not listen when anyone spoke to him; later, when he went out to lunch, he could eat nothing but the quartered pickle that lay beside the sandwich he had ordered. There was no longer any question of love or high tragedy; he had given the girl up the night before; and he saw no reason now to change his mind. He was going to give her up, of course, but he must have her first, and indeed it seemed to him that if he did not have her he could not give her up. All his feelings about her had hardened into a physical need which he endured like a pain, believing from moment to moment that he could not stand it any longer. He said to himself that if he could only bear it for a day or two, it would diminish and finally be dissipated altogether; but, though he knew from observation and experience that this was true, he did not believe it, or rather it seemed irrelevant to him, for, like all sufferers, he had lost the sense of time.
Shortly after lunch, he knew that he had passed the threshold of tolerance, and just as a desperate patient will reach up and deflect the surgeon’s arm, no longer caring what the surgeon or the nurse or the attendants think of him, he leapt up from his desk and strode into the literary editor’s office. “I’ll take you home at five,” he said in a grim voice. Both of the women stared at him. “You sound as if you were going to murder her,” exclaimed the literary editor, but Jim had already turned and was on his way out.
Immediately, he felt better. His excitement was succeeded by a frozen calm. He was able to go on with his work, able to think about the girl with detachment, able even to feel a premature remorse, as if he had already committed the adultery, and were now doing penance for it. The girl no longer appeared to him so desirable; he could toy with the notion of not sleeping with her; in fact, he nearly persuaded himself that he was going to sleep with her somehow against his inclination and only because he had told her he would take her home. It was as if he had made a contract with her which he would be glad to wriggle out of, but which seemed, alas, binding.
Riding uptown on the subway beside her, he began to dislike her. If only she would flirt or be demure or pretend that she did not know what was going to happen! Then he could feel free to choose her all over again. But she did not speak, and when he looked into her face, he saw there an expression that was like a tracing made with fine tissue paper of his own feelings, an expression of suffering, of resignation, of stoical endurance. It was as if she were his sister, his twin, his tormented Electra; it was as if they were cursed, both together, with a wretched, unquenchable, sterile lust that “ran in the family.” Once she turned her head and smiled at him disconsolately, but though he felt a touch of pity, he could not smile back; he had lost the ability to make any human gesture toward her.
In the apartment, he took her twice with a zeal that was somehow both business-like and insane, and then rolled over on his back and sighed deeply, like a man who has completed some disagreeable but salutary task. He no longer wanted her; he knew he would never want her again. As if she, too, knew that it was finished, she got up at once, with an air of apology for being naked in unsuitable circumstances. She picked her clothes off the floor where he had tossed them, and went into the bathroom. When she came out, she was dressed. Without a word, he took his own clothes off the chair and went on into the bathroom.
Why the hell, he said to himself now, had he not at least taken her to a decent restaurant for dinner and bought her cocktails and a bottle of wine? “I could have taken her to Charles,” he murmured once. “It was right around the corner.” He banged his fist on the desk until it hurt him. Instead, they had gone to a Japanese tearoom, where they had eaten the seventy-five-cent dinner and talked lamely of office politics. He had called for the check before she had quite finished her chocolate sundae.
Much later, when his career had been achieved, that afternoon assumed for Jim an allegorical significance. Here, surely, had been the turning-point; here the hero had been chastened and nearly laid low; here had been the pit, the mouth of hell, the threat of oblivion, the gleam of redemption. Or, to put it more vaguely, as he did himself, this unfortunate love affair had somehow been “necessary”: he had had to go through it in order to pass on to the next stage of his development. It was like one of those critical episodes in the autobiographies of great businessmen, as ghostwritten for The Saturday Evening Post—the moment of destiny when the future R. W. Sears or Frank Woolworth is fired by his employer for daydreaming or incompetence, and thus awakened to the necessity of carving his own niche, a moment the elderly tycoon reverts to in print with tireless gratitude: “If he had not fired me, I would be a clerk today.” In later years, Jim came to have this same kind of feeling about Miss Sargent, and, once, when he was tight at a party, he tried to tell her about it. “Oh, thank you,” she had exclaimed, widening her eyes. “I’ll have a brass plaque made to hang around my neck, saying, ‘Jim Barnett slept here.’ ” And he had burst out laughing at once, saying, “Ouch” loudly, because there was no real vanity in him.
It was a long time, however, before he took this view of the affair, a long time, indeed, before he could think of it without the most excruciating remorse. The odd thing was that this remorse seemed to have no connection with Nancy. He did not feel that he had betrayed Nancy with the girl in the office; he saw it, in fact, the other way around. He could almost believe that with Nancy and the new baby he was enjoying an idyllic and respectable liaison, while Miss Sargent was the neglected wife. He found that he was avoiding her around the office, fearing a showdown in an empty corridor, fearing equally a kiss or a snub. He came in softly, at odd hours, like a married man in a comic strip creeping up the dark stairs with his shoes in his hand. At the same time, he found that he was trying to appease her politically. At editorial conferences, he began to reveal certain ultra-leftist tendencies; he would make long, earnest speeches, stuttering slightly in the Yale style, and then raise his eyes furtively for her approval. But still she gave no sign, and as time passed and she continued to behave with impenetrable self-possession, as they never met in the elevator or the library, he began to desire the showdown as greatly as he had feared it. Now he arranged occasions to be alone with her; and he was startled to discover, after several failures, that she was avoiding him. She came to the office late and left early; the telephone operator reported that she was engaged to a new man. Late that summer she went away, out West somewhere, where she came from; it was understood in the office that she was to get up some articles for the paper and at the same time secure her father’s blessing for her second marriage.
As soon as she was gone, Jim felt light and happy again, and the other women in the office told him that he was “more like himself.” He threw himself into the job of getting out a special election supplement. This was the sort of work he was well suited to, for he took the election with intense seriousness, regarding his vote as a sum of money which was not to be invested lightly. Unlike the other members of the staff, who were hysterically predisposed in Roosevelt’s favor, Jim could look at the array of candidates with the impartial sobriety of the ideal consumer attempting to choose between different brands of soap. He was not deceived by labels, and he saw at once that Landon was not a tory, Lemke was not a fascist, Browder was not a communist, and Roosevelt was not a socialist. He was sent to interview each of the candidates, and he wrote a series of informal character sketches that astonished everyone with their perspicacity and good humor. In the end, he decided to vote for Roosevelt, though he had an uneasy feeling about Norman Thomas, whom Mr. Wendell, alone on the paper, was supporting. The war in Spain, however, seemed to clinch the matter; in times like these, a protest vote was a luxury, and that was enough to outlaw it in Jim’s eyes.
He was never sure, afterwards, whether or not it was Miss Sargent’s letter that changed his mind. This was a reply to an election questionnaire the paper had sent out to its contributors; Jim came upon it one afternoon in August. She would vote, she wrote, for the Socialist-Labor candidate, whose name she could not remember—would someone in the office please find out for her? Jim stared at the familiar angular handwriting, and felt himself flush with anger. It must be a joke, he said to himself; it was something she had thought up to annoy the managing editor; in fact she could not even have thought it up for herself; her friend Leo must have egged her on to it. “What a damn silly thing to do!” he exclaimed out loud, and he was tempted to destroy the letter to save the girl’s face. Then suddenly a large sense of chivalry displaced his annoyance: he was determined to protect her from the consequences of her frivolity. He could announce that he was supporting the Socialist-Labor candidate himself, write an article on that tiny, fierce, incorruptible sect. Something might be done about De Leon and the American socialist movement. But almost immediately he realized that the idea was too outlandish; he could not bring himself to cut so fantastic a figure. Why, for God’s sake, couldn’t she vote for Thomas, he muttered, and then it came to him as a happy thought that he could vote for Thomas: in some indefinable way this would cover her, make a bridge between her and the rest of the staff.
A fine exhilaration quickly took possession of him, and he perceived that he had wanted to vote for Thomas all along. The Roosevelt bandwagon had been far too comfortable—that fact alone should have been a warning to him. He could predict for himself a long talk with Nancy and a short wrangle with the managing editor, but already he could see the article that would appear in next week’s issue, “Why I Think I’ll Vote for Thomas,” by James Barnett. It would be an honest, dogged, tentative, puzzled article that would invite the reader into the author’s mind, apologize for the furniture, and beg him to make himself quite at home. In the end, the reader might not be persuaded, but he would be able to leave with the assurance that, however he voted, there would be no hard feelings. With each of Jim Barnett’s articles, that, somehow, became the main object. He was like a happy-go-lucky, well-mannered salesman who seems to the prospect delightfully different from other salesmen—as, indeed, he is, since in his eagerness to please he loses sight of his purpose and sells nothing but himself. The born political pamphleteer, like the born salesman, is usually a slightly obnoxious person. Inescapably, Jim had noticed that the two qualities often went together, but it did not appear to him in the light of a general law, but rather as an unhappy accident, a temporary disagreeable state of things which could, with patience, be remedied. And, for a long time, he considered himself the exception which disproved the rule. When it came to him at last that he was not exceptional but irrelevant, when he was, so to speak, ruled out as immaterial, having no bearing, incompetent in the legal sense, the shock was terrific.
It was the Moscow trials that made him know, for the first time, that he did not really “belong.” Miss Sargent came into his office one day in the fall with a paper for him to sign. (She was back from the Coast and—mysteriously—no longer engaged to be married.) Clearly, the document in her hand was of deep significance for her, and as Jim read it over, his heart swelled with magnanimity, for he saw that he was going to be able to grant her the first request she had ever made of him, and grant it easily, largely, without a second thought, like a millionaire signing a check for a sister of Charity. The statement demanded a hearing for Leon Trotsky, who had been accused in the trials in Moscow of numberless crimes against the Soviet state. It demanded, also, what it called (rather pompously, he thought) the right of asylum for him. Jim had never believed for a moment that Trotsky was guilty of the charges, and this disbelief remained to the bitter end profound and unshakable. Other people wavered, were frightened or coaxed or bribed to resign from the Trotsky Committee; Trotskyites of long standing would wake sweating in the night to ask, “What if Stalin were right?” but Jim was serene and jocular through it all, and the strength of his skepticism came, not from a knowledge of the evidence, nor a sense of Trotsky’s integrity, nor an historical view of the Soviet Union, but simply from a deficiency of imagination. Jim did not believe that Trotsky could have plotted to murder Stalin, or to give the Ukraine to Hitler, because he could not imagine himself or anybody he knew behaving in such a melodramatic and improbable manner. People did not act like that; it was all like a bad spy picture that you hissed and booed and applauded (ironically) from the gallery of the Hype in New Haven. And indeed the whole Russian scene appeared to Jim at bottom to be the invention of a movie writer; his skepticism included not only the confessions of the defendants but the fact of the defendants’ existence. How could there be such people as Romm and Piatakov and the GPU agent, Holtzman? How indeed could there be such a dark and terrible organization as the GPU? It was all so very unlikely. And, in some strange way, Europe itself was unlikely. Jim always had the greatest difficulty in making himself see that Hitler was real, and one reason he had never subscribed to the Popular Front was that whenever he tried to conjure up the menace of fascism, somewhere deep down inside him a Yale undergraduate snickered.
So that it was no problem at all for him to put his signature below Miss Sargent’s. Aside from everything else, there was a purely sporting question involved: you don’t accuse a man without giving him a chance to answer for himself. Of course Trotsky should be heard. He said as much to Miss Sargent and she smiled at him, and their Anglo-Saxon sense of fair play was warm for a moment between them—he could feel it in his stomach like a shot of whisky. All the shame of that other afternoon was gone suddenly, and he thought what a hell of a nice, straight, clear-eyed girl she was, after all.
This sense of recognition, this spiritual handclasp, lasted only an instant, however, for as soon as she began to speak, her words tripped over each other, and he saw, with disappointment, that she was being intense about the matter. She said something about his “courage,” and he reddened and blinked his eyes and twisted his head from side to side, disavowing the virtue. Why, he thought impatiently, was it necessary for Marxists to talk in this high-flown way? There was no question of courage here; it was just a matter of common sense. And he anticipated no trouble. There was never any trouble if you handled these controversies in the right way, kept your head, took it easy, did not let the personal note intrude. It was unfortunate, he had been saying for years, that the radical movement had inherited Karl Marx’s cantankerous disposition together with his world-view. The “polemical” side of Marxism was its most serious handicap; here in America, especially, it went against the grain. He was not so simple as to subscribe to the mythology of the conference table (the class struggle was basic, inadjudicable), but surely on the left itself, there could be a little more friendliness, a little more co-operativeness, a little more give-and-take, live-and-let-live and let-sleeping-dogs-lie. And it was really so easy. Take his own case: he had friends of every shade of opinion, argued with them freely, pulled no punches, but never had a quarrel. There had been the time when he had been obliged to throw a classmate out of his apartment for telling an anti-Semitic story, but the guy had come back the next day, sober, and apologized, and they had shaken hands on it, and the incident was forgotten. It only went to show. Unfortunately, however, the bad side of Marxism was precisely what attracted warped personalities of the type of Miss Sargent, who had long lists of people she did not speak to, and who delighted in grievance committees, boycotts, and letters to the editor. So that the evil multiplied a thousandfold. It was like an hereditary insanity that is perpetuated not only through the genes but by a process of selection in which emotional instability tends to marry emotional instability and you end up with the Jukes family. Or you begin with Marx’s carbuncles and you end with the Moscow trials.
“Take it easy,” he said to the girl, patting her shoulder in token of dismissal.
“I’ll try,” she answered, lightly enough, but as she turned to go, she flung at him that same sad, desperate smile that she had given him on the subway just before— He closed the door hastily behind her. For an instant it was as if he, too, had heard the chord that announces the return of a major theme, a sound heavy with dread and expectation. It was all going to begin again, the same thing, disguised, augmented, in a different key, but irrefragably the same thing. His stomach executed a peculiar drop, and this sensation, also, he remembered. It was the feeling you have on a roller-coaster at Coney Island, when the car has just started and you are sitting in the front seat, and you know for sure (you have been wondering up to this moment) that you do not want to ride on it. After the first dip, you lose this certainty (you would unquestionably die if you kept it), you may even enjoy the ride or suggest a second trip, become an aficionado of roller-coasters, discriminate nicely between the Cyclone at Palisades Park and the Thunderbolt at Revere Beach. You are, after all, a human being, with a hundred tricks up your sleeve. But at the very beginning you knew.
However, there seemed at first no cause for alarm. The whole affaire Trotsky, as somebody called it, was going off according to schedule. Miss Sargent would come to the office every morning in a fever of indignation: mysterious strangers telephoned her at midnight, she received anonymous letters and marked copies of the Daily Worker, a publisher went back on a verbal agreement he had made with her, people cut her on the street, an invitation to a summer writers’ conference had been withdrawn. Jim listened to these stories with a tolerant smile: this was the usual sectarian hysteria. No doubt some of these things had actually happened to her (he would not go so far as to say she had made them up), but certainly she exaggerated, colored, dramatized, interpreted, with very little regard for probability. Nothing of the sort was happening to him. He was on the best of terms with his Stalinist friends, who even kidded him a little about his association with Trotsky; several publishers were after him to do a book; and he got an offer to join the staff of a well-known news magazine. If anything, his open break with the Party had enhanced his value.
Moreover, he was enjoying himself enormously. He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural, since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard. The Moscow trials seemed admirably suited to the medium, and at any cocktail party that season, Jim could be found in a corner, wrangling pleasantly over Piatakov and Romm, the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen and the landing field at Oslo.
However, here, as in the other arts, there were certain conventions to be observed: statistics were virtually de rigueur, but rhetoric was unseemly; heat was allowed, but not rancor. Jim himself obeyed all the rules with a natural, unconscious decorum, and in his own circle he felt perfectly secure in advocating Trotsky’s cause. It was at the Trotsky committee meetings that he had misgivings. An ill-assorted group of nervous people would sit in a bare classroom in the New School or lounge on studio couches in somebody’s apartment, listening to Schachtman, a little dark lawyer, demolish the evidence against the Old Man in Mexico. Schachtman’s reasoning Jim took no exception to (though it was, perhaps, almost too close); what bothered him was the tone of these gatherings. It seemed to him that every committee member wore an expression of injury, of self-justification, a funny, feminine, “put-upon” look, just as if they were all, individually, on trial. They nodded with emphasis at every telling point, with an air of being able to corroborate it from their own experience; ironical smiles of vindication kept flitting from face to face. And not only, Jim thought, did they behave like accused persons; they also behaved like guilty persons; the very anxiety of their demeanor would have convicted them before any jury. Watching them all, Jim would wish that he was the only guy in the world who took Trotsky’s side, and he would feel a strong sympathy with Leibowitz, who, at Decatur during the Scottsboro case, was supposed to have told the Communists to get the hell out of town. Sometimes, even, listening to Novack read aloud a fiery letter from the Old Man, he would wish that Trotsky himself could be eliminated, or at least held incommunicado, till the investigation was over. The Old Man did not understand Americans.
And after the meeting had broken up, over coffee or highballs, the committee members would exchange anecdotes of persecution, of broken contracts, broken love affairs, isolation, slander, and betrayal. Jim listened with an astonished, impatient incredulity, and he and Nancy used to laugh late at night in their living room over the tales he brought home of Trotskyist suggestibility. They laughed kindly and softly—so as not to wake the baby—over their Ritz crackers and snappy cheese, and Nancy, full-bosomed, a little matronly already in her flowered house coat, seemed to Jim, by contrast with the people he had just left, a kind of American Athena, a true presiding deity of common sense.
Yet occasionally, when he was alone, when an engagement had fallen through and he was left unoccupied, when Nancy was late getting home in the afternoon, he wondered. What if all these stories were true? What if even some of them were true? How did it happen that he was exempt from this campaign of terror? He had not compromised; he had spoken his mind. Did the others, the Stalinists, hope that he would “come around”? Or did they believe that terroristic methods would not work with him? This thought was pleasing and he would hold it at arm’s length for a moment, contemplating it, in a kind of Boy Scout daydream of torture and manly defiance, of Indians and the Inquisition, and the boy with his finger in the dike. But humor inevitably challenged this view; the dream dissolved; he was left puzzled. Sometimes, a sort of mild panic would follow. He would be overwhelmed by a sense of trespassing on the Trotsky case. It was as if he had come to dinner at the wrong address and the people were very polite and behaved as if he were expected; out of good breeding they would not allow him to explain his mistake, nor would they set him on his way to the right house. Or it was as if he were an extra who had got onto the stage in the wrong scene: the actors went on acting as if he were not there, and nobody furnished him with a pretext for an exit.
Before long, he began to notice in himself a desire to compete, to have some hair-raising experience of his own and vie in martyrdom with the other members. He was ashamed of this wish; at the same time, it confirmed his skepticism. Here, he felt, was the key to the whole business; nobody wanted to be left out of a thing like this; it was the phenomenon that had been noted again and again at spiritualistic séances: people unconsciously began to co-operate with the medium and with each other, so that no one should seem to be deficient in psychic powers.
This shrewd explanation might have satisfied him—if it had not been for John Dewey. . . . The adherence of the dean of American philosophy, which ought to have reassured Jim, worried him profoundly. It never failed to violate Jim’s sense of fitness to see this old man, the very apotheosis of the cracker-barrel spirit, deep in conversation with Schachtman or Stolberg, nodding his white head from time to time in acquiescence to some extravagant statement, smiling, agreeing, accepting, supporting. It was like finding your father in bed with a woman. And the most painful thing about it was that the old man should be so at home here, so much more at home than Jim could ever be. He takes to it like a duck to water, committee members would say, proudly and affectionately to each other, and Jim could not deny that this was so. Dewey truly appeared to have no reservations; you could not call that mild irony a reservation, for it was a mere habit, like his Yankee drawl, that was so ingrained, so natural, that it seemed to have no specific relation to the outside world, but only to his own, interior life. Whenever Jim heard that dry voice swell out at a mass meeting in anger and eloquence, he squirmed in his seat, not knowing whether to feel embarrassed for Dewey or for himself. The very kinship he felt with the old man served to deepen and define his own sense of alienation, as in a family the very resemblance that exists between the members serves to make more salient the individual differences. It was impossible, moreover, to doubt Dewey’s judgment, and when Jim saw that Dewey believed the stories of persecution (he had indeed been a little bit persecuted—“annoyed,” Dewey put it, himself), Jim, unwillingly, began to believe too.
Now the ground was cut from under him. This was perhaps the first time in his life that he was subscribing to something which he could not check against his own experience or psychology, which his own experience and psychology seemed, in fact, to contradict. There was no subjective correlative; he was no longer his own man. Yet once he had conceded the point, the evidence began rushing in at him. A hundred incidents that he had forgotten or ignored or discounted marshaled themselves before his eyes. He remembered the prominent names that had dropped off the committee’s letterhead, the queer, defamatory stories he had encountered everywhere about members of the committee, the books unaccountably rejected by publishers. What was more devastating, he saw now (a thing he had denied a month before) that the Stalinist campaign of intimidation had already had its effect on the Liberal’s policy.
He read down the contributors’ column one day and found it a roster of new names—youngsters just out of college, professors from obscure universities, elderly, non-political writers who had been boasting for years that they did not “take sides” and who were now receiving their reward. It was hard to know exactly when they had come in, but suddenly they were all there. The whole complexion of the magazine had unobtrusively changed. It was not, precisely, that it had become Stalinist; rather, like some timid and adaptive bird, it was endeavoring to make itself as neutral-colored as possible and fade discreetly into the surrounding landscape. The whole process, he saw, had been a negative one. A few months earlier, Mr. Wendell had resigned—on account of his age, it was said officially. The paper had been made two pages shorter, there were more cartoons, more straight reportage. Shorter articles in larger type, not so much political and aesthetic theory. Articles had been limited to two thousand words apiece; the book-review section had been cut in half and a humorous column had been added. Nothing you could put your finger on, yet by these innocent measures the paper had effectively purged itself of Trotskyism, for the fact was that the Trotskyists, anarchists, and other dissidents did run to political and aesthetic theory, to articles more than two thousand words long, to book reviews of unpopular novelists and poets.
That same afternoon, he observed for the first time the machinery of exclusion. He came into the literary editor’s office; it was her day for seeing book reviewers. A young anti-Stalinist reviewer was standing despondently in front of the shelves, which usually overflowed with books (for the literary editor was rather inefficient about getting things reviewed on time), but which were now unwontedly, desolately empty. Eight or nine popular novels with garish jackets leaned against each other in one corner. The young man had been asking for a new book—Jim did not catch the name. The literary editor shook her head; unfortunately the book had just gone out to a professor at Northwestern. He mentioned another title; that, too, had been assigned—to an instructor at Berkeley. He mumbled something about an article on Silone; the literary editor was not encouraging; she wondered whether you could do justice to Silone in fifteen hundred words; the paper was not printing many general articles; she could not promise anything.
She got up from her desk and wandered toward the shelves, gesturing vaguely at the popular novels. “Do us a note of a hundred words on one of these—if you feel like it,” she said negligently. The young man shook his head and shambled out of the office; it was perfectly clear that he would not return. The literary editor murmured something pettish about the insularity of New York intellectuals, and Miss Sargent, who had been sitting all the while with averted head, looked up.
“On Broadway they call that the brush-off,” she said.
The literary editor affected not to hear.
Miss Sargent continued, looking straight at Jim, speaking in a louder voice.
“Have you heard? I’m being transferred to Labor and Industry. On account of the curtailment of the book-review section—which we all deplore—my duties are being assumed by a stenographer.”
“Oh, Margaret,” said the literary editor, “you’re becoming perfectly impossible. I should think you’d be glad to be out of this. I know I would.”
The girl did not answer, but kept on looking at Jim. It was impossible to misread her gaze, which held in it something challenging and at the same time something feminine and suppliant. He met her eyes for an instant, then shook his head hopelessly.
“You girls,” he began, intending to say something humorous and pacific, but he could not finish his sentence. He shook his head again, and retreated from the office. As soon as he got into the corridor, however, the truncated conversation continued in his mind. That book reviewer, said a firm light soprano, that unfortunate boy, with his bad complexion, his blue mesh shirt open at the throat, was Stalin’s victim just as surely as the silicosis sufferers who had recently been displayed at a Congressional investigation were the victims of industrial capitalism. What the hell, his own voice answered, the young man was probably no great shakes as a writer (he looked like a punk); it was not a question of life and death; the kid was on the WPA and the Liberal’s check could do no more than buy him a few beers at the Jumble Shop. Ah yes, the first voice resumed, martyrs are usually unappetizing personally; that is why people treat them so badly; for every noble public man, like Trotsky, you must expect a thousand miserable little followers, but there is really more honor in defending them than in defending the great man, who can speak for himself. His own voice did not reply, and a visual illusion succeeded the auditory one. He saw the figure of the book reviewer splashed on a poster, like the undernourished child in the old Belgian relief stickers; underneath a caption thundered: WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
That was the first time. Soon it became a regular thing with Jim to talk to Miss Sargent in his mind. The moment the lights were out at night, the cool, light voice would begin its indictment, and his own voice, grumbling, expostulating, denying, would take up the defense. And in the daytime, Jim would find himself thinking up arguments, saving them, telling himself, “I must be sure to mention this,” just as if it were a real conversation he was going home to. He remembered enough of his psychology courses to know that he was not having hallucinations. Though the voice sounded perfectly natural, he did not hear it with his physical ear, but only with his mind. Moreover, the conversations were, in some sense, voluntary; that is, he did not like them, he did not want to have them, yet they did not precisely impose themselves on him, for it was he, unwillingly, of his own free will, who was making them up.
Nevertheless, he was alarmed. It was screwy, he told himself, to spend your time talking to someone who was not there. At the very least, it showed that the person had a hold on you—a disagreeable, unnerving idea. In Jim’s world, nobody had a “hold” on anybody else. Yet the fact was (and he had to face it) he was not in the driver’s seat any more. For almost as long as he could remember there had been two selves, a critical principled self, and an easy-going, follow-the-crowd, self-indulgent, adaptable self. These two characters had debated comfortably in bed, had “taken stock,” defined their differences, maintained an equilibrium. But it was as if, during the Moscow trials, the critical principled self had thrown up the sponge; it had abdicated, and a girl’s voice had intruded to take over its function. At some point in those recent months, Jim had ceased to be his own severest critic, but criticism, far from being stilled, had grown more obdurate. When we pass from “I ought to do this” to “You think I ought to do this,” it seems to us at first that we have weakened the imperative; actually, by externalizing it, we have made it unanswerable, for it is only ourselves that we can come to terms with. And where Jim had once had to meet specific objections from his better nature, he was now confronted with what he imagined to be a general, undiscriminating hostility, a spirit of criticism embodied in the girl that was capricious, feminine, and absolutely inscrutable, so that he went about feeling continually guilty without knowing just what it was he had done. It haunted him that if he could anticipate every objection, he would be safe, but there was no telling what this strange girl might find fault with, and the very limitation of his knowledge of her made the number of possible objections limitless.
He longed to act, he told himself, yet the vague enormity of his situation furnished an apparently permanent excuse for inaction. He believed that he was waiting for an issue big enough to take a stand on, but now all issues seemed flimsy, incapable of supporting his increasing weight. In a curious way, his ego had become both shrunken and enlarged; his sense of inadequacy had made him self-important. He began to talk a good deal about “petty” squabbles, tempests in teapots, molehills and mountains. If he were to resign from the Liberal, he said to himself, he would have to do so in his own way, for his own reasons. To resign on behalf of some Eighth Street intellectual would be to accept that intellectual as his ally, to step off the high ground of the Liberal into the noisome marsh of sectarian politics. And, above all, Jim feared that terrible quicksand, which would surely, he thought, swallow him up alive, if he so much as set a foot over the edge. Here was the paradox: though his immunity from the Stalinist attacks was the immediate cause of his sense of shame (to be spared, ostentatiously, in a general massacre is a distinction reserved for spies, old men, children, and imbeciles), Jim nevertheless found it temperamentally impossible to venture directly into the melee. What he sought was some formula by which he could demonstrate his political seriousness without embroiling himself in any way—a formula which would, in fact, perpetuate his anomalous situation. It was an irony that Jim did not perceive. He only knew that he must postpone action (for the moment, at least), while he yearned at the same time to be acted upon.
If the managing editor would only fire him, for example, he would be free, and nothing he did afterwards could be held against him. He might get a job in an advertising agency, or on one of the news magazines; he would be quit at last of leftist politics, and no one could blame him. “Jim Barnett lost his job over that Trotsky business,” they would say. “The poor guy is working for Newsreel now.” The picture of himself as a victim of circumstances, an object of public sympathy, did not displease him; in fact what his heart cried for was some such outcome for his dilemma, an outcome in which his own helplessness should be underlined.
The managing editor, however, seemed not at all disposed to give him this friendly push, and his self-regard would not permit him simply to disengage himself from the struggle as he might have done from a street brawl. In some way, he felt, he was condemned to “stick it out,” perhaps indefinitely, and to pay for his non-intervention by sleeplessness, indigestion, and outbursts of irritability with Nancy.
Nevertheless, when the moment came, Jim found it perfectly simple to quit. The managing editor came into his office one afternoon and told him that in accordance with the magazine’s new budget, Miss Sargent would have to go. It was purely a matter of seniority; she was the newest employee; it was only fair that she should be the first, et cetera.
“I wish it hadn’t worked out that way,” she continued, biting her lips and speaking in a confidential tone. “You know how excitable she is, Jim. She’ll be sure to think that it has something to do with politics. That letter, you know . . .”
Jim smiled grimly. The Liberal, after months of silence, had endorsed the Moscow trials, and “that letter” was a denunciation of the magazine. It had been signed by Miss Sargent, by a number of ex-contributors to the Liberal, and by Jim himself.
“But, of course,” the managing editor went on, “I forgot! You signed it too. So that shows . . .” She spread out her hands, leaving the sentence unfinished. “You know I would never deny anybody the right of criticism. I’m glad you spoke out if you felt that way. And Miss Sargent, of course, too. And the fact that you’re continuing on the paper speaks for itself. Still . . .” She paused. “It’s the effect on her I’m worried about. She’s too bitter already. There’s too much bitterness in the radical movement. I think we agree about that.”
She was silent for a moment. Jim waited.
“Oh, Jim,” she burst out at length. “I wish you would break it to her. Explain it to her. She’d take it all right coming from you, since you agree with each other politically. You could make her understand . . .”
“You go to hell, Helen,” Jim said. The words came as naturally as a reflex and even in his first joy, Jim found time to tell himself that it had been morbid to worry about the matter beforehand. You waited until the right time came and then you acted, without thought, without plan, and your character—your character that you had suspected so unjustly—did not betray you.
The managing editor gasped. Jim took his brown coat and hat from the stand and walked deliberately out of the office. He went down the street to a bar he knew and ordered a Scotch and soda. When he was halfway through the drink, he stepped into the phone booth and called up Miss Sargent at the office.
“Come on down here,” he said, “and help me write a letter of resignation.”
He went back to wait for her at his table, and suddenly he found himself thinking of a book he would like to write. It would deal with the transportation industries and their relation to the Marxist idea of the class struggle. He thought of the filling stations strung out over America, like beads on the arterial highways, and of the station attendants he had seen in the Southwest, each man lonely as a lighthouse keeper in his Socony or his Shell castle: how were you going to organize them as you could organize workers in a factory? He thought also of the chain-store employees as the frontiersmen of a new kind of empire: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company—the name had the ring of the age of exploration; it brought to mind the Great South Sea Bubble. Monopoly capitalism was deploying its forces, or, rather, it was obliging its historic enemy, the workers, to deploy theirs. As financial and political power became more concentrated, industry was imperceptibly being decentralized. The CIO might find the answer; on the other hand, perhaps the principle of industrial unionism was already superannuated. There was a great book here somewhere, an important contribution, and now he would have the time to write it. It would have been out of the question of course, had he stayed on the Liberal. . . .
“Oh boy!” he said to himself, revolving the book in his mind, marveling at it, accepting it as a sort of heavenly tip for services rendered. He clacked his tongue appreciatively against the roof of his mouth. The bartender looked over at him in surprise, and Jim chuckled to himself. He was tremendously elated. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Nancy, and at the same time, he felt a large tenderness toward the girl who was even now making her way toward him through the snowy streets. He owed it all to her, of course. Hadn’t she told him from the very beginning that the Liberal was a dead end, that if he wanted to make anything of himself, he would have to get off it? And it was on account of her, in the end, that he had been able to do it. If they had not decided to fire her, he might never have . . . He stopped short in his reverie, momentarily sobered. In his excitement he had almost forgotten that she had lost her job. Here he was, ready to begin his real work, but for her the prospect was not bright. No doubt she would be glad to hear that she had made such a nuisance of herself that the managing editor could brook it no longer; there would be the surge of leftist piety, the joy of self-immolation. But, practically speaking, it was going to be hard on her. He himself had money saved, and, with Nancy’s income, he could get along well enough. The girl was not so fortunately equipped: he could guess without asking that she had not saved a cent (she was probably in debt), and it would not be easy for her to find another job. She is going to have a tough time, he said to himself. And she was not going to like it. She would dramatize her position for a week or so, but when it came down to it, she was not going to enjoy being poor, for Trotsky or anybody else. The thought of the discomfort she would have to endure bit into his happiness; it annoyed him that she should behave with such irresponsibility. She had no right, he told himself, to play for high stakes when she could not afford to lose; it was not ethical; it made the other players at the table uncomfortable. Already, in absentia, she had robbed him of a little of his joy.
With a slight effort he brought himself back to the projected book. The excitement revived as he imagined the gray winter afternoons in the public library, the notes on white cards in the varnished yellow box, the olive-green filing cabinet he would install in the spare room. “A second Das Kapital,” a voice within him murmured, but though he stilled it peremptorily, he could not help but grin in an awkward, lopsided way, as though someone had paid him an absurd, delicious compliment. The strange thing was, it was the girl’s voice that had spoken; perhaps, he thought, in years to come, she would read the book and would say that to him. By the time the door swung open and she stepped quickly into the bar, he felt very much pleased with her.
He rose to meet her; she extended her hands. He seized them both; they were very cold.
“I lost my gloves,” she said.
How feminine of her, he thought, how ungrammatical, how charming! In the last few weeks he had been very unfair to her. This was no Zetkin, no Luxemburg. If the truth were known, she was probably as much out of her depth in sectarian politics as he was. He squeezed her hands.
She sat down.
“Well,” he said. “You’ve lost your job.”
“Oh,” she murmured, looking grave for an instant. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose it was about time. But you—” He watched her get the idea. “Did you——?”
“I walked out,” he said.
He stared into his glass and hoped that she was not going to be effusive. When he finally looked up at her, however, he saw that she was blushing slightly.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “I suppose I ought to tell you that you shouldn’t have done it.”
“Never mind,” he said. “It was a good thing to do, anyway. I feel wonderful. I’m going to write a book. It all just came to me while I’ve been sitting here, though I guess the idea must have been in the back of my mind for quite a while.”
He told her about the book.
“It’s a very good idea,” she said at last.
“You ought to write a book yourself.”
She shook her head.
“A fortune teller told me I was born to fritter away my talents. I wouldn’t want to go against my destiny.”
He grinned at her. It was a silly remark, and characteristic, too, but it was no longer within her power to make him angry. He could barely recall a time when he had wrestled with her all night in a terrible ideological embrace, though it was not yet twenty-four hours since Nancy had spoken from the next bed and begged him to go into the living room if he could not stop tossing.
She went on talking excitedly and he ordered two more drinks. He had forgotten about the letter of resignation, and he did not want her to go. He had gradually become aware that he would like to sleep with her, but he did not know how to broach the suggestion. The fact that it would not be the first time made it more difficult. All those months in which he had not wanted to sleep with her would have to be wiped out with some brief, tactful sentence, but no satisfactory one occurred to him, partly because he was puzzled as to why, on the one hand, he should want to sleep with her now, and why, on the other, he should not have been sleeping with her all along, since she was undoubtedly an attractive girl.
“I was not free . . .” he muttered, experimentally, to himself. But it would not do. She might want to know in what sense he was free now, and had not been before. In relation to Nancy, he was still tied. Did he mean that his time was now his own, that an afternoon of love could—without too much difficulty—be occasionally slipped into his new schedule? No, he thought decidedly, he did not mean that. The idea of a systematic infidelity was offensive to him; the very notion of assignations, trysts, affected him in much the same way that the notion of crop rotation affects the American farmer. It would not be right, he told himself. You oughtn’t to plan a thing like that. Besides, he would be too busy. The new book would need all his energies. It was just this once that he wanted her. “I was not free,” he repeated, troubled by these words that had risen to his mind, feeling that they were true in some way that he had not put his finger on. It was as if he had paid off a nagging creditor, a creditor whom for months he had not dared to face, but to whom he could now open the door with the utmost geniality, knowing that there was nothing the man could do to him, knowing that his former fears had been groundless, that the creditor was just a human being like himself.
“You really are a sweet girl,” he said, “even if you do act like a Trotskyite dragon.”
After the third drink he took her home in a taxi. He decided not to say anything but merely followed her up the stairs and kissed her as she stood in the doorway. She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back with a look of astonishment; for a moment, he thought she was going to bar the way to him. She dropped her hands, however, and went on into the apartment. She sank into a chair. He shut the door behind him and waited.
“I’m sorry, Jim,” she said. “I’d like to celebrate your resigning and the book and everything, but I just can’t.”
“It’s not a question of a celebration,” he said stiffly.
“Well . . .” she conceded, as if not disposed to argue. Her whole aspect was vague and weary. There was a look of strained kindness about her, as she sat in the chair, her coat falling loosely about her; she might have been a schoolteacher kept after hours.
“Margaret,” he said, “I can’t explain, but the set-up wasn’t right before. Working in the same office . . .”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It would have been a terrible mess.” She smiled.
“It hasn’t been any picnic for me, Margaret,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I still feel the same way about you.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said with her first touch of sharpness. “I would like to feel the same way about you (I really would), but I can’t. I don’t seem to be able to bank my fires. That’s a man’s job, I suppose.”
He frowned. There was some ugly implication in that metaphor of hers, something he did not want to examine at the moment.
With a dim idea of being masterful, he strode across the room and half-lifted her to her feet. He attempted a long close kiss, pressing her body firmly against his. In a moment, however, he let her go, for, though she kissed him back, he could feel no response at all. It was not that she was deliberately stifling her feelings (if he could have believed that, he would have been encouraged to go on); rather, she seemed preoccupied, bored, polite. It was like kissing Nancy when she had toast in the toaster.
She walked to the door with him.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Good luck with your book. And don’t think I don’t appreciate . . .”
“Forget it,” he said.
He closed the door behind him, feeling slightly annoyed. In some way, he thought, he had been given the run-around. When you came right down to it, he had quit his job for her sake. What more did she want? “The hell with her,” he said, dismissing her from his mind. “After all, she knew I was married.” The thought of Nancy brought him up short. Under a street lamp he drew out his watch. If he took a taxi, he would still be in time for dinner. And after dinner, he promised himself, he would make love to Nancy. He would have her put on her blue transparent nightgown, the one he had given her for Christmas and she had only worn once. Making love to her would be more fun than usual because he was still steamed up about that girl. He sensed at once, as he raised his hand for a taxi, that this sexual project of his was distinctly off-color; yet his resolution hardly wavered. In the first place, Nancy would never know; in the second place, he was entitled to some recompense for the moral ordeal he had been through that day. Later on, in bed, his scruples served him well; where a thicker-skinned man would have known that he was simply sleeping with his wife, Jim’s active conscience permitted him to see the conjugal act as a perverse and glamorous adultery, an adultery which, moreover, would never land him in a divorce court or an abortionist’s waiting room.
No one could ever understand, afterwards, what happened about that book. When his resignation from the Liberal was made public, all sorts of people congratulated Jim. Literary columns in the newspapers reported that he was at work on a study of the transportation industries which promised to revise some of the classical conceptions of Marxism. Several publishers wrote him letters, hoping that he would allow them to be the first to see . . . It was felt in general that he was coming into his manhood, that his undeniable talents were at last to be employed in a work of real scope. Jim himself began the task with enthusiasm. He did six months of research in the public library, and amassed a quantity of notes. Then he wrote two chapters. He worked over them diligently, but somehow from the very first sentence, everything was wrong. The stuff lacked punch. Jim saw it at once, and the publishers he sent the chapters to saw it also. It did not sound, they wrote him reluctantly, like the real Barnett. On the other hand, it did not sound (as he had hoped it would) like a major work. It was solemn enough but it was not momentous. What was missing was the thing Jim had found in Marx and Veblen and Adam Smith and Darwin, the dignified sound of a great calm bell tolling the morning of a new age. Jim reread these masters and tried to reproduce the tone by ear, but he could not do it. He became frightened and went back to the public library; perhaps, as someone had suggested, the material was under-researched. He could not bring himself to go on with the writing, for that would be sending good money after bad. When he got an offer from the illustrated magazine Destiny, the businessman’s Vogue, as someone called it, to do an article on rural electrification, he accepted at once. Traveling with a photographer all over America, he would have the chance, he thought, to see his own subject at first hand. He could do the piece for Destiny, and then return to his own work, refreshed from his contact with living reality. However, when the article was done he took a job with Destiny, promising himself that he would work on his book over the week ends. He started at ten thousand a year.
The job took more of his time than he had expected, and his friends eventually stopped asking him about his book. Once in a while someone would question Nancy, and she would contract her brows in a little worried frown. He was working much too hard, she would say. He had counted on a vacation to get back to the book, but when the time came, he was on the verge of nervous exhaustion and she had had to take him to Havana for a rest. “You have no idea,” she was fond of exclaiming, “what a terrific toll Destiny takes of its writers. It burns them right out. If Jim didn’t keep up his tennis, and get away to the country every possible week end, he’d be in the hospital right now.”
Everyone sympathized with Nancy on this point. The research girls in the Destiny office worried a good deal about Jim, and they, too, thought it was a great pity that he did not have time to do his own writing. Jim himself took a certain pride in being overworked, especially since he was not underpaid—the original ten thousand had been raised several times and he got a handsome bonus at Christmas every year. The truth was that he enjoyed working on Destiny. Outsiders imagined that his radicalism kept him in hot water there, but this was not true. He wrote about American youth, farm security, South America, musical comedy, and nylon. He said what he pleased, and if the article seemed too “strong,” it was given to someone else to modify. He was not obliged to eat his own words. Now he was not so much a writer as a worker on an assembly line. He did his own task conscientiously, and since the finished product was always several removes away from him, it was, in a certain sense, not his concern. He would send an article down from his desk with a droll, schizophrenic, pessimistic air, as if to say, “You’re on your own now, God help you.” And as his own productions passed more and more beyond his control, he relished more and more the control of data, which was the singular achievement of the Destiny machine. Jim liked the facts that were served up to him daily by the girl research workers, liked the feeling that there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, that he could not find out by pressing a bell, sending a telegram, or taking a plane. He liked the fact-finding trips that he took with a photographer; he had only to mention the name of the magazine and he would be whisked into a farmer’s homestead, an actress’ dressing room, a Fifth Avenue mansion, a coldwater flat in an old-law tenement, a girls’ college, an army camp, a club, a great hotel. And he saw everything from the inside; he was free to examine the laundry lists, the budgets, the toilet facilities, the sleeping arrangements, of any American family he chose to visit; he could ransack a desk or peer into an icebox; nobody but a tax assessor had ever had such freedom, and where the tax assessor was detested, Jim’s subjects welcomed him into their homes, their hobbies, their businesses. It pleased them that someone should know all about them and write it down and publish it with pictures. It pleased Jim too; it gave him a great feeling of responsibility, as if he were a priest or God.
He believed—most of the time—that he was doing an important work. He still considered himself a Marxist, but he saw that the Marxists were never going to get anywhere until they took a real look at the American scene and stopped deluding themselves with theory. Occasionally, after an argument at some literary cocktail party, he felt that he would like to pick up the whole radical movement by the scruff of its neck and rub its nose hard into the good American dirt. He himself, whatever his failings, was at least setting the facts on record; in a time of confusion like the present this was a valuable thing to do. Moreover, he was playing a part, a rather significant one, in the molding of public opinion. It was true that the publisher of Destiny was a reactionary in many ways—potentially, he might even be a fascist—but on certain points he was progressive. He believed that the old-style capitalism would have to go, and now and then he would allow Jim to say so in a signed editorial that was termed by everyone in the office “astonishingly outspoken.” Jim had come, he told himself frequently, a long way from the Liberal, and he was proud of the fact. He looked back on the years he had spent there with a kind of amazed disgust. How could he have wasted his time so? The Liberal was no more revolutionary than Destiny; it published nothing but muddle-headed opinion; it paid poorly, and it had no influence. No matter what his mood, Jim never doubted for a moment that his resignation had been the most sensible act of his life.
It was not the memory of the Liberal that caused Jim, whenever he got drunk, to abuse the publisher of Destiny, to contrast his lot unfavorably with that of his radical friends, to protest with tears in his eyes that he was doing it for the wife and kiddies. This lachrymose, self-accusatory stage was usually followed by an aggressive stage in which he told anyone who was still a socialist how he had waked up to himself back in 1937 and what a fine thing it had been for him. These contradictory demonstrations puzzled his interlocutors, who did not see that in the first stage he was comparing his actual work to some imaginary lost vocation, a life of dedication and scholarship which he had in reality never been attracted to, and in the second stage he was comparing his present career on Destiny to his former job on the Liberal. The majority of Jim’s friends paid no attention to the second stage of his drunkenness, ascribing anything he might say to the effects of alcohol (“liquor hits some people that way”); it was the first stage that impressed them. Here, they thought, he spoke from the heart; here the honest, decent man revealed himself to be incorruptible; though obliged to make his living by working on Destiny, he did not deceive himself as to its true character; he rebelled, if only on Saturday nights. Actually, however, the utterances of the second stage were “real,” and the lamentations were largely histrionic.
The truth was that Jim had changed, though the outward signs of it were still so faint as to pass undetected by his intimates. He got drunk oftener, there was no denying it, but, as Nancy said, the strain of being a writer for Destiny had made alcohol “an absolute necessity” for him. His boyish features were now slightly blurred; his awkward, loose-jointed figure was fatter than it had been, and his habitual sprawl was not so becoming to it. Imperceptibly, he had passed from looking pleasantly unkempt to looking seedy. The puzzled frown had become chronic with him; he was, in fact, professionally bewildered. And yet there was something dimly spurious about all this: his gait, his posture, his easy way of talking, half-belied the wrinkles on his forehead. In his young days he had been as lively and nervous as a squirrel; women had been fond of comparing him to some woodland creature. Today that alertness, that wariness, was gone. The sentry slept, relaxed, at his post, knowing that an armistice had been arranged with the enemy. In some subtle way, Jim had turned into a comfortable man, a man incapable of surprising or being surprised. The hairshirt he wore fitted him snugly now; old and well used, it no longer prickled him; it was only from the outside that it appeared to be formidable.
Jim knew that in middle-class intellectual circles his career was regarded as a tragedy of waste. Half-unconsciously, he fostered this illusion, for it permitted him to enjoy what was really a success story, secure from the envy of the less privileged. It was commonly believed that Nancy was the villain, Nancy who had gone and had two more children, Nancy who needed a house in the country, Nancy who kept his nose to Destiny’s grindstone. And whenever they had friends in, Jim would grumble good-naturedly about expenses, the children’s new shoes, the tricycles, the nursery school. Occasionally, during one of these mock tirades someone would look over at Nancy with a touch of concern or curiosity—perhaps these complaints were a little hard on her? But Nancy would always be smiling with genuine sweetness, for Nancy knew the duties of a wife, and knew too that Jim loved the children, the garden, the new radio, just as much as if not more than she did.
Undoubtedly, Jim was still a good guy. On the magazine, he was always on the side of the underdog. He treated his subordinates with consideration, and he helped organize the Newspaper Guild chapter. He voted for Roosevelt, though Destiny was pro-Willkie, and when the Trotskyites were indicted for sedition in Minneapolis he sent them a check through the Civil Liberties Union. If he showed a certain ruthlessness—socially—to people who did not count, he had the excuse of being extremely busy, preoccupied with the great issues of the day. And he was always interested in the common man. He could spend hours talking to taxi drivers, grocers, swing musicians, real-estate agents, small lawyers or doctors who had married old school friends of Nancy’s. These people and their opinions “counted” for Jim; it was only the intellectuals, the unsuccessful, opinionated, unknown intellectuals, who had nothing, so far as he could see, to say to him.
Margaret Sargent belonged to this tiresome class. In memory of old times, he always talked to her a few minutes when he met her at parties, but her sarcasms bored him, and, unless he were tight, he would contrive to break away from her as quickly as possible. It irritated him to hear one day that she had applied for a job on Destiny; he was perfectly justified, he said to himself, in telling the publisher that she would not fit in. It would be intolerable to have her in the office. He owed her no debt; all that had been canceled long ago. And yet . . . He sat musing at his desk. Why was it that she, only she, had the power to make him feel, feel honestly, unsentimentally, that his life was a failure, not a tragedy exactly, but a comedy with pathos? That single night and day when he had been almost in love with her had taught him everything. He had learned that he must keep down his spiritual expenses—or else go under. There was no doubt at all of the wisdom of his choice. He did not envy her; her hands were empty: she was unhappy, she was poor, she had achieved nothing, even by her own standards. Yet she exasperated him, as the spendthrift will always exasperate the miser who feels obliged to live like a pauper, lest his wealth be suspected and a robber plunder him. But there was more than that. What did he regret, he asked himself. If he had it to do over again, he would make the same decision. What he yearned for perhaps was the possibility of decision, the instant of choice, when a man stands at a crossroads and knows he is free. Still, even that had been illusory. He had never been free, but until he had tried to love the girl, he had not known he was bound. It was self-knowledge she had taught him; she had showed him the cage of his own nature. He had accommodated himself to it, but he could never forgive her. Through her he had lost his primeval innocence, and he would hate her forever as Adam hates Eve.