Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (5 page)

“ ‘When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing . . .' ”

“Wait a minute!” said the Senator. “Now d'ya see what I mean? This man was Communist-inspired. That accounts for his sour attitude about housing—those cracks about not wanting larger and more splendid houses, more food, finer clothing. Every good American wants a bigger house, that's for sure.”

“What about the small ranch-type dwelling so popular today?” I asked, timidly. “The ranch-type house is an American manifestation, a concession to the compact-living school of which Thoreau was a founder. Thoreau was simply ahead of his time.”

McCarthy uttered something unintelligible. He seemed unimpressed. I was unimpressed myself, but I felt that I had met the challenge adroitly and in a manly fashion. I turned back to the book, but my companion interrupted.

“Was this fellow ever in jail?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I thought so,” said the Senator. “Why was he in?”

“Nonpayment of taxes,” I said. This cheered the Senator and we were able to return to the text.

“ ‘For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lots routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.' ”

“ ‘The public heel?' ” repeated the Senator. “The Acheson
*
of his day, I reckon.” I responded to the weak joke and we laughed together. A loon on the far side of the pond heard us and laughed back, mocking us across the water. McCarthy's face clouded at the unearthly sound. A look of anger furrowed his brow. “Nobody mocks McCarthy!” he growled. He shook his fist angrily at the bird, and tension mounted darkly in the woods. I hastily retreated to the text, wondering vaguely how this strange excursion of ours was helping the United States Information Service, which now seemed incredibly remote.

“ ‘I have thought that Waiden Pond would be a good place for business,'” I read, “ ‘not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.' ”

“That does it,” said McCarthy, quietly. “He's hung himself right there in a single paragraph. First he admits that his lonely hangout has advantages he's unwilling to divulge, then he be-wails the loss of a Russian city. What more do I want? I can get the book yanked from overseas libraries on that one paragraph alone. The taxpayers won't have to foot the bill any longer for this kind of fruitcake. The lousy jailbird!”

“Not so fast, Senator!” I put in, and rose to my full height. “When you cast aspersions on Henry David Thoreau you are impeaching a great American institution.”

“What institution?”

“The motel,” I replied with quiet desperation. “It is well known that the man who conceived the motel got his inspiration from Thoreau's pondside hut. In fact, you might say that the tiny Waiden house was America's first motel.”

I was grasping at a straw. Actually, I found myself grasping at the stalk of a smooth sumac
(Rhus glabra);
it gave way and I swayed into the bushes, fell, and buried my teeth in leafmold. McCarthy smelled a ruse and didn't even dignify my motel story with a reply. “Skip the rest of Economy,” he ordered, “and get on to Solitude! On second thought, skip Solitude, too. I've had enough of this bilge. We'll go back to town.”

“Along the railroad tracks?” I pleaded, sitting up and spitting leafmold.

“Along Route 126,” replied the Senator. He had his way, as usual, and we trudged wearily into Concord along the highway and put up at the Inn, where we spent a restless night in a double room.

 

On the plane carrying us back next morning—I to New York, McCarthy to Washington—the Senator was in a thoughtful mood. He kept steering the conversation back to Thoreau.

“Frankly, what would you say was eating the guy up?” he asked. “Just what
ivas
on his mind?”

“A fair question,” I said, stalling. “Let's see, now—what was on Henry's mind? Goodness! What
wasn't?
Well, for one thing, he was on the defensive; he felt at home in nature as well as in society, and to that extent was freakish. He had a good opinion of wildness. He liked to test ideas on his tongue before swallowing them, and was more than half convinced that a great many enterprises men commonly take for granted are merely desperate. He distrusted complexity and impedimenta as being the great thieves of time, and he believed that behind every man there rises and falls a tide that can float the British Empire like a chip.”

“What the hell has the British Empire got to do with this?” asked my companion. “Was Thoreau an Anglophobe?”

“Not at all,” I said. “He paid very little heed to governments—was preoccupied with the individual. He was particularly preoccupied with himself.”

“I can see that. What else was eating him?”

“Well, he was suffering from the loss of a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove.”

“That sounds like sheer carelessness,” replied the Senator. “Go ahead, what else was eating him?”

“He was a writer trying not to act like a writer,” I continued. “He was a man possessed. He believed that the natural day was very calm; that if you followed your genius closely enough, it would not fail to show you a new prospect every hour. One of his friends described him as the captain of a huckleberry party—which I have always felt was a patronizing remark and not a very accurate one. It would be truer to say that Henry was the captain of a boarding party: he wanted to board men's minds, not to sell them a bill of goods, merely to assure them that the spirit is capable of elevation. The note he sounded was like the white-throat's—pure, wavering, full of the ecstasy of loneliness. He also advocated wearing old clothes when you had anything important to do.”

“That's bad for business,” mused the Senator. “The thing to do is keep producing more and better goods, and that includes clothing and accessories. What would happen if everybody just decided to wear their old clothes? There would be a slump.”

“I know,” I replied. “It's awfully confusing, and I sometimes wonder. Thoreau never bothered to systematize his philosophy—probably because he knew it had bugs in it; but you were asking about him, Senator, and I'm just filling you in. Henry was careful never to confuse the standard of living with the standard of furnishing. I mean, he foresaw Macy's basement, both its strength and its weakness, its bounty and its deception.”

“Are you trying to tell me,” roared McCarthy, “that the R. H. Macy Company is a fraud?”

“Quiet, Senator!” I said. “Nothing could be further from my intention or my belief. And let's not stray from the subject of this so interesting discussion. Thoreau felt that the ruts of tradition and conformity are deep; he spent a good deal of his life skirting them, for the pleasure of the sensation and the glory of man. He perceived that the life in us is like the water in a river—at any time it may rise to extravagant heights and drown out all our muskrats.”

“I haven't
got
any muskrats!” yelled the Senator, who by this time was thoroughly exasperated by the quality of my interpretation, as well as by the eccentricity of the author. With no attempt at concealing his irritation, he made a few notes, then put the notebook away and allowed his eyelids to droop. When I thought he wasn't looking; I pulled a bottle from my pocket, drew the stopper, and took a drink.

“Whuzzat?” asked the Senator.

“That,” I said, “is a draught of undiluted morning air. You can find it on page 123.” I offered him the bottle. He examined the label carefully.

“I never take a drink till after twelve o'clock.”

“Then you're out of luck,” I replied. “This stuff will not keep quite till noonday.”

I could see that the Senator's curiosity was aroused. “Well,” he said, grumblingly, “I might relax and try a little if it's non-alcoholic. Understand, I never take anything that makes me tipsy.” He held the bottle to his lips and drained off a deep slug. The effect was immediate and terrible. McCarthy's eyes dilated. He stiffened. Perspiration broke from neck and fore-head. The hostess of the plane, noticing his distress, came alongside to offer help. She took the bottle gently from his hand. When he spoke, the words came huskily.

“Throw awayl” he croaked. “Poison!”

The hostess disappeared, carrying the fateful bottle.

When the plane reached New York, my companion was still in pain. He was barely able to thank me for my services as guide. The morning air, taken neat, had been overpowering: when one's system is long deprived of that elixir, which alone has the power to cure the general sickness, the shock of the first drink is great. The truth is, the journey had been almost too much for both of us. I think it may well be my last trip to the pond. Perhaps it was just because of the presence of the Senator, but the frogs sounded all the same as I listened—no variation in their voices. It didn't used to be that way, and I don't like such ponds.

4

Liberty

ANYTHING LIKE THAT

11/26/32

A YOUNG LADY
, born in Russia, confided to us that she was about to become an American citizen, and would we be her witness, for she needed someone to testify to her good character and good intentions. Greatly touched, we dressed in a semiformal manner and accompanied her to a sort of barn over on the North River. Here we were tossed about from one United States naturalization clerk to another United States naturalization clerk, and eventually wound up before a bench, an American flag, and a grim, chilly examiner. After a few routine questions, the man suddenly speeded up his voice and inquired: “Do you believe in Communism, anarchism, polygamy—or anything like that?” And before we could pry into the phrase “anything like that”—which we felt it our duty to do—our young friend had blithely answered no, and it was all over. She is now an American citizen, a very pretty one, sworn never to believe in Anything Like That.

THE CONSTITUTION

2/8/36

THAT WAS A GOOD LETTER
of Thomas Jefferson's which F. P. A.
*
published in his column, in which Jefferson pointed out that there was nothing sacred about constitutions, and that they were useful only if changed frequently to fit the changing needs of the people. Reverence for our Constitution is going to reach droll new heights this year; yet the Constitution, far from being a sacred document, isn't even a grammatical one. “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” has turned many a grammarian's stomach, perfection being a state which does not admit of degree. A meticulous draughtsman would have written simply “in order to form a perfect union”—a thing our forefathers didn't dare predict, even for the sake of grammar.

POLITICAL SPEECHMAKING

7/8/44

THE THING WE REMEMBER
of the Republican keynote speech, as it came in over the air, is the summer heat in the long grasses of the June night outside the window, and our own feeling of sin and of futility. It was the same feeling a boy has at the county fair, on the hot midway in the suggestive summertime, as he pauses before a barker outside a girl-show tent, with the smell of fried food in his nostrils and the enticements of girls in his mind, lost in the immemorial sheepishness of humanity and its deliberate exploitation by the ancient devices of oratory. The keynoter in Chicago indicated that the Republicans were against aggression, New Dealism, and the man-eating shark. There was to be no more aggression because Republicans do not tolerate any evil thing like aggression. The speaker gave no indication that the reorganization of a shattered world would require anything more than a mere extension of American culture and habits, as exemplified by past and present Republicans. In the summer night, we felt that we were a million boys, armed, bloody, and tired, standing and listening to this slick spiel, outside this gaudy and unlikely tent—listening and knowing all the while that we were about to be taken.

LIBERALISM

1/17/48

“THERE IS NO LIBERAL VIEW,”
sighed the
Herald Tribune
as the old year died, “no really self-consistent and logical body of principle and policy.” It was a doleful thought, and the old year drew a few more tortured breaths and expired.

Ever since Thanksgiving, the
Herald Tribune
has been rassling with the theme of liberalism, and there have been mornings when the struggle resembled an old-fashioned rassling match with the Devil. The
Tribune's
feeling about the independent liberal seems to be that he comes from a good family but has taken to hanging around pool halls. His instability, his shallow charm, his unpredictable movements, his dissolute companions, all have been the subject of speculation recently in the
Tribune's
pages, and the word that was finally trotted out to describe his fate was the word “bankrupt.” Even this word, however, seemed vaguely to trouble the
Tribune,
which does not in theory approve of any sort of American insolvency, even liberal insolvency. Clearly, a dilemma. The
Tribune
met it boldly by explaining that the liberal's work was done, his victory complete, and that henceforth the “conventional party structure” would be happy to carry the whole load and take care of the situation without any help. Its editorial paid tribute to the deep moral roots of nineteenth-century liberalism and the classic insurgencies, and traced the course of liberal history from the Jefferson revolt right down to the year 1933, at which point the editorialist gulped, hawked, and spat out.

 

The
Tribune's
estimate of the independent liberal sounds to us a bit on the romantic side, a bit too full of the great tradition, not quite catching the essence of liberalism. The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive. At the moment, the liberal's desperate position and his dead life seem to us neither as desperate nor as dead as the Ç. T. has been making out. There are still a good many free men around who don't think that the liberal's work is done. (They would like to, but it isn't that easy.) The independent liberal, whether walking by his wild lone or running with a pack, is an essential ingredient in the two-party system in America—as strange and as vital as the trace elements in our soil. He gives the system its fluidity, its benign inconsistency, and (in cahoots with the major political organizations) its indisputable grace. We have never believed that the independent liberal had a priority on liberal thought, or a corner on the market; he merely lives in a semi-detached house and goes out without his rubbers. The
Tribune
itself has turned in such a good liberal performance lately in its news columns that its editorial shudders have seemed all the more strange. After all, it was the
Trib
that handed over ten columns last Sunday to William Z. Foster, who has seldom needed more than twenty-five words to hang himself in and this time did it in two flat, when he described legislative debates as “ridiculous talkfests.”

 

The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way, too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk. The dog often influences the course the man takes, on his long walk; for sometimes a dog runs into something in nature so arresting that not even a man can quite ignore it, and the man deviates—a clear victim of the liberal intent in his dumb companion. When the two of them get home and flop down, it is the liberal—the wide-ranging dog—who is covered with bur-docks and with information of a special sort on out-of-the-way places. Often ineffective in direct political action, he is the opposite of the professional revolutionary, for, unlike the latter, he never feels he knows where the truth lies, but is full of rich memories of places he has glimpsed it in. He is, on the whole, more optimistic than the revolutionary, or even than the Republican in a good year.

 

The
Tribune
may be right that there is no liberal “view.” But the question is whether there is still a liberal spirit. In these melancholy days of Hooper and Gallup, when it is the vogue to belittle the thought in the individual and to glorify the thought in the crowd, one can only wonder. We think the spirit is there all right but it is taking a beating from all sides. Where
does
a liberal look these days? Mr. Truman has just suggested a forty-dollar bonus for all good taxpayers, Mr. Wallace has started calling people “ordinary” and man “common,” and the
Herald Tribune
has liberalism on the mat, squeezing it in the kidneys. Your true liberal is on a spot, but it isn't the first time. Two dollars says it isn't going to be the last time. We'd make it five dollars except for all this talk of bankruptcy.

VOTER SANITY

7/31/48

ONE OF OUR OVERSEAS READERS
has dropped us a line to inform us about the qualifications for voting in England. He got into a discussion with somebody in London about the matter, and they called the reference library of the House of Commons and received the following pronouncement: “In Great Britain any adult twenty-one years of age or over may register and vote except peers and lunatics. The latter, if they have a moment of lucidity, may register and vote.” Our reader passed this on to us in the hope that it might sustain us through the difficult weeks ahead. The American political scene has seldom put such a strain on the sanity of the electorate, and we have an idea that when we step up to the polls next November we will feel like one of those British voters—daft as a coot, but praying, as we draw the curtain behind us, for a moment of lucidity.

A VOICE HEARD IN THE LAND

9/11/48

WE HAVE A CORDIAL INVITATION
from the Businessmen for Wallace
*
to attend a dinner on the twenty-first,
convert
$100, and although we ordinarily try to get to political rallies, we are hesitating on this one. The invitation shows a picture of Mr. Wallace in the act of delivering a speech, and there seems to be shining around him (and coming from above) a wonderful radiance. It is probably a Consolidated Edison radiance, but there is nothing in the photograph to indicate that. This radiance looks like the real thing. Halfway down the shaft of light is a caption that says, “And a voice was heard in the land.” The question that naturally arises, of course, is whether this land wants a voice. A distinguishing political feature of America is that it has never had a voice; it has had a lot of hoopdedoo but no voice, and that's the way we like it. Frankie Sinatra can handle the country's voice requirements, and the political candidates can handle the hoopdedoo, and we'll take ours without radiance, please.

 

Mr. Wallace has had a great deal to say about the infirmities and the unfairness of the American press, and we have taken most of his remarks lying down. He keeps saying that you can't learn the truth from the papers. We agree. You can't learn the truth from the papers. You can, however, buy at any newsstand a ten-cent assortment of biassed and unbiassed facts and fancies and reports and opinions, and from them you are allowed to try to assemble something that is a reasonable facsimile of the truth. And
that's
the way we like it, too. If a “voice” should ever be heard in the land, and stay heard, an awful lot of editorial pages and news pages would take the count. We think it entirely fair to remind the Businessmen of the most recent case where a voice was heard in a land. The voice was heard, the light came straight down from above, you could learn the Truth from the papers—and the land
*
is now under a four-power military government.

POLLING

11/13/48

THE TOTAL COLLAPSE
of the public opinion polls
*
shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people's minds would be uninhabitable. Luckily, we do not face any such emergency. The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs, and although you can take a nation's blood pressure, you can't be sure that if you came back in twenty minutes you'd get the same reading. This is a damn fine thing.

Hollywood, which long ago elevated the pollster above the writer, and which invariably takes a blood count before beginning a picture, must be examining the results of the 1948 Presidential election with particular interest. Book clubs, which listen to the pitter-patter of millions of hearts before deciding whether a book is any good, must be studying the results, too. We are proud of America for clouding up the crystal ball, for telling one thing to a poll-taker, another thing to a voting machine. This is an excellent land. And we see even more clearly why the movies have advanced so slowly in the direction of art: Not only have the producers been deliberately writing down to the public but they've been getting bad information into the bargain. Who knows? Maybe the people aren't so far below them as they think.

SOCIAL SECURITY

11/20/48

PRESIDENT TRUMAN SAYS
he is going to increase social security. By this he means that a somewhat larger amount will be withheld from a worker's pay check each week and that the employer will be asked to match the amount. Mark Sullivan, in the
Tribune,
points out that with the value of money dropping the way it is, an increase in social security is only an apparent increase, not a real increase. Mr. Sullivan argues that the fifty cents that was withheld from your pay check in, say, 1937 would have bought you a square meal at that time, but that when you are sixty-five years old and get the fifty cents back, it may buy you only a small box of dried raisins. He says the way to increase social security is to see that the dollar doesn't shrink. The argument is sound enough. Perhaps the way to manage social security is to forget about dollars and withhold meat instead. Every employer could be required to maintain a deep-freeze unit and withhold one square meal each week for each employee. Then when an employee reaches sixty-five and starts digging around like a squirrel on a winter morning, he will dig up some frozen meat instead of a shrivelled dollar. Of course, withholding meat for security reasons would cause food prices to skyrocket and this, too, might be a social advantage, since many of us could normally be counted on to die of malnutrition before we ever reached sixty-five.