The Unpossessed (23 page)

“If there's any such thing,” Bruno was aware of the heavy sentimental sincerity of his words, “as intellectual integrity, if art was ever valid, then it still is. It would be a fine thing if intellectuals altered their philosophic concepts according to the headlines in the papers or stock market reports. . . . Being an intellectual,” he brought this out with care, “surely implies something else, to some extent the power of rising above individual or immediate circumstances . . . the privilege of bringing to the conflict something abstract, something resembling a universal truth—something else beyond the status of his private person and his bank account. . . . Why must a depression put an end to art?”

“Art can't make a revolution,” cried the Black Sheep.

“Revolution,” murmured Merle. She held her hands to Jeffrey as though she implored him to tear the rings from her suffering fingers. He caught her hands and kissed them whimsically.

“What makes you think,” said the little Vambery slowly in his patient, foreign delivery, “that revolution is superior to war? Are they not both killing? Are they not both fruit of the same psychological germ?”

“Oh my God,” said Cornelia. “The revolution,” she patiently explained, as one addressing the very young or the very old, “will be the last war, the end of bloodshed.” Of them all, thought Bruno, Cornelia was the only one in whose mouth the word rang clear and simple, like any other word, as though she were neither afraid of it nor in awe of it, but quietly accepted it as one of the inevitable facts in her vocabulary.

“War,” the little Vambery intoned prophetically, “will be on the earth for as long as men are born of mothers. War is an enlargement, so to speak, of the inner, basic struggle. It is blood to avenge blood; sin to avenge guilt. . . .”

“Fascinating, the different points of view,” Merle clasped her hands before her. “Are you a Freudian, Jeffrey?”

“I am a Marxist intellectual,” said Jeffrey simply. “I am a gentleman farmer,” cried Miles in disgust; “I tell the hired man where to shovel the manure. If you're a Marxist intellectual I'll eat my shirt—last week you were in favor of something else, like nature it sounded to me. . . .” “I'm in pretty close contact with the left wing, Miles—” Jeffrey's fingers wove self-consciously. “Why don't you join the party and get in closer then,” said Firman irresistibly. “Because,” explained Jeffrey kindly to the Sheep, “my job is on the outside, I've got to keep my finger on the bourgeois pulse.” “I'm a little fed up with compromise,” Miles started coldly—and there was Norah standing sweetly by her husband, docile but persistent, pulling at his sleeve. Hold out your arm, dear, she was murmuring, stretching her knitting around Jeffrey's wrist; and Bruno understood that she was saving him.

“Comrades, a little autonomy!” said Bruno as the peaceful interlude closed and Norah with a reassuring nod resumed her seat. “Is this a united front?” He permitted himself to grow serious: “A little trust, a little tolerance . . .”

“You sound like a Goddamn Christian Socialist,” cried Firman fervently.

“It's my Jewish inferiority complex,” said Bruno coldly; and looked his fellow-Jew ironically in the eye. “But look here, Firman, you are the strongest against my manifesto, suppose you tell us all how you would draw one up.”

Firman had his way of commanding silence. He spoke like one admitting no doubts. “I'd cut out all the pseudo-claptrap. I'd take a definite stand, the only stand: Revolution; no more dialectic humbug. A Magazine's for propaganda. A revolution is for a full belly. There isn't anything else. You've got a full belly or you haven't. You're in favor of them for everybody or you're not.” (He remembered Firman a spindly freshman, borrowing Veblen and borrowing Marx from Professor Leonard's shelves. Something struck him now about the Black Sheep; it was not merely their youth that set them off, that blinded as it fired them, it was their poverty. Perhaps poverty, undercutting everything else, removed them a priori from the class of intellectuals.)

“Man's desires,” the Vambery stated with a complicated smile, “are unfortunately not so simple.”
Say, did you have anything to eat tonight, Cornelia? you look damn white
. “Man's wishes have gone beyond the need for food alone. . . .”

Certainly, thought Bruno, if one conceded the necessity of the full-belly fight to the exclusion of everything else (of philosophies, of tolerances, of poetry and concerts at Carnegie Hall) then argument of the kind they were indulging in was forever ended; then dispute, except in matters of strategy, of “tactics,” was ruled out; then the mind (like Firman's) would narrow to a single course, pursue a single aim, ruthlessly shove overboard whatever interfered. It was unfortunate that all sides held truth, that sanity to him consisted in a constant balancing. For he agreed with Miles, agreed with Jeffrey, agreed with the Black Sheep; and weighing their opinions, he agreed with none of them. It was most unfortunate that at the moment he agreed with Vambery; and that his sentimental wartime notions of free speech compelled him now to admit it.

“You heard the Herr Doktor, boys—man does not live by bread alone.” He grew reluctantly serious again. “But the fight for full bellies—that can't mean everything to
us
; we come of a long and honorable line of full bellies—most of us,” he added; “and we know damn well it's not enough; it's not the final object of the game.” He thought with repugnance and pain of his father; reared in poverty and piety, his father had come to America to fight for a full belly for his family—and in the fight had dropped the piety along with poverty, in favor of a paunch: for himself, to pass on generously to his son. His father had turned from Jehovah to Mammon; and on his face for the rest of his life he wore the pitiful sign of his sacrifice—something left out, something wistful, defiant, something that undercut the growing ugliness of his fat and prosperous jeweller's jaws. “The intellectual,” he continued, “is a scientist; whatever field he's in, he's looking for the truth—it's the eternal values he's after. The full belly—we've got our eye on something higher, granted the full belly must come first. . . .”

“Those higher things,” interjected Firman, “are going to fall pretty flat if they fall on empty bellies” “or on half the world dead of starvation” said Cornelia.

“I said the full belly must come first,” said Bruno impatiently. For that all bellies, being created equal, should be equally full, was an axiom; it needed no more thought. Someone should see to it—economists, efficiency experts, agriculturists; but it was a small and specialized, almost esoteric, realm of life. “Don't you see,” he said confidently, “someone's got to take the long view, someone's got to keep his eye on what comes after . . . Once all the bellies are full, what then? We—the intellectuals—have to step in and show them what else there is; keep them from aiming at a fuller and fuller belly to the exclusion of everything else.” And he thought how he had turned in disgust from his father's full-belly pursuits; had reached (dragging Elizabeth with him) for a world in which only the intangibles were goals. He grew strong again with the memory. “There's danger in this war; there's danger that the new god may become efficiency, that though the aim is different, the results may resemble a sort of belt system, even under communism. . . . The intellectual has to climb the sign-posts, ask himself at every step of the way, What is the object of the game? are we achieving the proper object? or are we being carried away, destroying, and forgetting what we mean to build. . . .”

“Now that,” said Firman, “is a specious, bourgeois argument” “and sentimental” “because obviously your ‘higher things' can't happen” “until efficiency is so far along” “that the business of canning for instance is mechanical”

Firman's fight, he thought, was not (except in some inevitable underlying realm, some inescapable Freudian sphere), like Bruno's father's, for himself; not even restricted to the full bellies of his race; ostensibly it included all the world. Grant the necessity (he ruminated, while the talk burst out again around him). Grant the justice (which sometimes, in a mood of scepticism, one could doubt) of keeping a world alive, of nourishing every single individual in it, the underdog Chinese, the starving Armenian, the slaves in French Guiana; the living dead scattered now on the redlines, the deadlines, of America. Let us grant (he thought, observing the angry Firman, the pallid Cornelia, pressing their arguments upon their seniors' ears) that all these aching bellies must be filled, blood pumped upward to the brain even if that brain be so much sterile gray stuff. And then suppose the feat to be accomplished. The world populated with fat people sitting on complacent backsides—the world with a paunch, in short, with a sad fat face like his father's. He knew the dialectic rebuttals, that efficiency, materialism, were the means and not the end; recalled a paragraph that ended Trotzky's book, in which the future's average man, having mastered canning, building, mining, rose head and shoulders above the Goethes of the past. But (his mind as ever restless till it provided not only the rebuttal to itself, but furnished also the subsequent rebuttal
to
the rebuttal) had not his father promised as each year added to the lines in his face and the thousands in his bank, to retire next year and live, as he timidly put it, “the life of Riley”? And had he not been carried home at last, forced to retire (having grown too old to enjoy the life of Riley earned him by his bank account) by nothing short of death? Despite his careful reading of the communistic bibles, Bruno's inevitable scepticism rose to point a world in which trees were torn down for bigger factories, other trees planted in organized rows for factories of the future. . . .

“The point is,” Jeffrey said complacently stilling the Black Sheep, “that even though you're right, we've got to step easy; you can't knock the bourgeois intellectual on the head with a blackjack and expect him to like it; we've got to approach him warily. As a matter of tactics,” he said, and drew the fingers of one hand down the hand of the other as though he whittled the revolution into shape.

“What a dinner with Comrade Fisher,” said Bruno. “Everything from soup to tactics. Go on.”

“As a matter of tactics we don't want to come out—in the beginning—too frankly as left-wingers; we're sympathizers” “camouflage, sounds dangerous to me,” said Firmin. “compromise, sounds lousy to me,” said Miles. “Only for the beginning,” Jeffrey said; “we'll be fellow-travellers.”

“Fellow-trav-ell-ers,” said Merle ecstatically. “Oh I never knew that politics could be so
beautiful
” “P-p-please for God's sake, Mother,” burst from Emmett.

“Fellow-travellers,” continued Jeffrey calmly, “is what they call intellectuals, you know, who aren't joined up exactly. . . .”

“Yes, we've all been to dinner with party emissaries,” said Miles dryly. “And it's nearly twelve o'clock,” said Bruno.

“Anyway, I discussed our policy,” said Jeffrey patiently—

“We had no policy at eight o'clock this evening,” said Miles. “And we still haven't any,” Firman pointed out.
God kid, can you hold out, are you terribly hungry? My stomach's upset so badly by all this tripe, Cornelia said, it wouldn't hold a meal—do you s'pose we'll be like that when we're old? We'll never be old, baby, don't be dumb
. “Nor is it precisely,” Miles said crisply, “your place to discuss without consulting us.”

“I acted,” said Jeffrey quietly, “under advisement.”

“Visions from Moscow, comrade?” Miles asked him coldly.

“There are circumstances,” Jeffrey said, “you may not be aware; currents; cross-currents; certain repercussions . . .”

“Oh it all sounds like a play,” said Merle softly, “a fascinating Russian drama.”

“Are you by any chance suffering from repercussions of the brain?” said Bruno wearily at last.

“The party wants to establish relations with the intellectuals.” “A marriage of convenience,” Bruno said, “surely you won't assist at such sordid opportunism?” “support them from the outside, don't you see,” Jeffrey pleaded with the bored Black Sheep. “sounds like compromise to me,” said Miles uneasily. “sounds like flying buttresses,” said Bruno grimly—for his own tribe must not be seduced into alien territory.

If this keeps up, Cornelia, I'm going to ask for something for my girl to eat. Ask them to borrow from the bird-cage, Cornelia whispered back, my legs are stronger than the Dickie-bird's
.

“and don't you see,” Jeffrey went on, nervous, his fingers interlacing, “the Magazine can be a useful weapon—”

“A weapon,” said Bruno elaborately. “Ah yes. But what war are we fellow-travellers off to?” The thing was getting out of shape; he wished the triumvirate were as single-tracked on their own level as the young Black Sheep.

Jeffrey's hands went carefully over his sentence. “Why the class war, of course,” he said, puzzled with himself.

“Ah yes, the class war.” Bruno scratched his head. “But it's hardly our war,” he said calmly. “You don't fancy yourself a capitalist, Jeffrey. And as for being a proletarian, I'll bet your Norah changes your typewriter ribbons . . . No, I'm sorry, Jeffrey; it's not our war; we're not eligible. We're neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Just lousy intellectuals.” He was aware that he was sentimental, that he drew a gold line around the intellectuals and put them in some holy place beyond the economic; but each man for his class; each man for the preservation of his own kind, his own fraternity; and intellectuals engaged in a property war would lose their identity as intellectuals.

“It's everybody's war,” burst from Firman.