The Company She Keeps (17 page)

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 artistocratic 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.