Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (52 page)

“My dear Jimmy! What a very strange reason for going to college!”

“I learnt it from Max. I forget
how,
exactly. Oh, what the hell!”

His mother was very puzzled, but she soon resumed her papers, saying: ‘Well, the main thing is that you
are
going, and the past is the past … But time is short, so I must ask you to say quickly if you find any inaccuracies in the Divver issue.”

“I am sure it will all be O.K. I don’t have any desire to interfere any more. So long as I can remember the surface truth of the matter, you can do what you like with the basic and social.”

“Here are the union tributes, and the State Department piece. After what you said yesterday, we have had to modify our attack but we have still left it as a kind of
challenge.
The fact that they just happen to be in the clear, for once, does not, we decided yesterday, mean that they usually
are,
or that we should seem to approve their
general
conduct of foreign relations. I think we have written something which shows that although we don’t insist on the question of how poor Max
died,
it is our duty to ask how our bureaucrats feel in regard to the principles for which he
lived.
In short, I think we have retained our integrity in
all
directions; and, what’s more, have not lost the human touch. A lot of hard work and careful thought have gone into it; poor Untermeyer spent all last night re-working it.”

“Didn’t he ask
why
it had to be re-worked?”

“No, dear. Untermeyer always takes my word.”

She rose, a tall, impressive figure, and handed him the manuscript. “Supper in fifteen minutes,” she said. “How very nice is it to have you back, dear Jimmy!”; and kissing him on the forehead she passed out to the staircase. Alone, in the warm, rosy firelight, he took up the manuscript and read

September 15, 1939

Forward,
                    

2,
Rockefeller
Avenue,

New
York,
N.Y.
           

My dear Mr. Hull,

I know that in these desperately critical days, you are overburdened with international problems and decisions and have little time to spare for lesser matters. Furthermore, I am sure that you find it just as irritating to hear my opinions on State Department matters as I would find it to hear yours on the editing of a weekly magazine. But perhaps we can agree that each of us shows, precisely in his irritation, a characteristic common to human beings? I hope so, because it is about a human being that I am writing this letter.

I doubt if you ever heard of my friend Max Divver. Probably you are wondering why, with half the world in flames,
Forward
should be devoting two-thirds of this issue to a nonentity. If you will give me fifteen minutes of your time and patience I shall do my best to give you an explanation.

Max Divver is no longer alive; he died in the Polish Corridor two weeks ago. Neither you nor I, Mr. Hull, knows how, specifically, he met his death. However, your Polish diplomats are only too content to set the matter aside as an unfortunate accident. Will you take offence, Mr. Hull, if I say frankly that I would expect them to take just that attitude? I trust not. You are a bigger man than that.

But what I most want to talk to you about is not Max Divver’s death but something more important—his life. I think you will understand, because your own life, Mr. Hull, has been long, and full of creative experiences. Like most of us Americans, like Max Divver, you are not the pampered scion of some established lineage. You have rubbed shoulders
with all sorts of men. From 1893 to 1897 you served in
the Spanish-American War, in which you rose to the rank of captain. Later, you became a judge of the Circuit Court in your native Tennessee. After that, you served your state and your nation for thirty years, first as Representative, then as Senator. Between 1913 and 1916 you were engaged, despite reactionary opposition, in revising the outmoded Federal tax laws respecting income, estate and inheritance. You also devoted twenty full years to the House Ways and Means Committee. Largely through your efforts the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act became law in 1934—permitting you, when you assumed your present crucial office, to conclude valuable commercial treaties with more than a score of nations. Meanwhile, you have done your utmost to make the name of this country sound less odious in Latin-American ears; and last May you requested the Congress you had so recently left to permit the sale of arms to non-aggressor nations.

All this is of great interest to me, because I do not believe that in the course of your ascent to broad international objectives you have ever lost sight of the individual human beings without whom, of course, there would be no need for trade-agreements and, in fact, no nations with which to conclude them. But I wonder if I am able—or, for that matter, if
you
are able—to feel the same trust in your subordinates, in members of the State Department at home and abroad? I wonder, for example, if any one of those polished gentlemen of Yale and Harvard entered your office when Max Divver died, and tried to explain to you the nature of his life and fate? I doubt that anyone did so do; and so, Mr. Hull, with your permission I will try to make a brief explanation myself.

Let me begin with a certain winter day about ten years ago. There was a strike in New York. It was not any big, important strike—just a handful of men and girls asking their employer for a few more dollars, and perhaps a little more
justice. Max Divver had no business being there; the strike wasn’t “news.” An icy wind was driving up Sixth Avenue: he was an editor with plenty of work on his hands, and a steam-heated office where no one would have thought him wrong for being. Nonetheless, it was on Sixth Avenue that he had taken up his stand, and when I asked him why, he hung his head, raised it to look at the shivering pickets and their crude signs, and replied: “Oh, I just wondered what it was all about. So I stopped.”

Max Divver always stopped, Mr. Hull. He stopped because he was always ready to be halted by injustice—while others, for whom oppression existed more in theory than in practice, “advanced” to more abstract, better-heated horizons, leaving the winds of Sixth Avenue to worriers and zealots. But any one of his co-workers, from editors to typists, could tell you, Mr. Hull, that fancy notions of progress were not in Max Divver’s philosophy. He had a brain, and a finely-tuned brain, as readers of this magazine well know; but he thought of himself primarily as a responsible person, one who independently must stop, examine, and act.

I do not suggest that his beliefs were individualistic. On the contrary, his singularity sprang specifically from his conviction of being part of a social entity, universal in scope. He was the first American to enter the lair of Fascism and meet the dictator face to face (that was before your day as Secretary, Mr. Hull); he has become the first American to lay down his life in the face of an even more savage reign of terror (that is in your day as Secretary, Mr. Hull.)

He did so in the act of saving a friend’s life. That too was typical of Max Divver, Mr. Hull. He had gone to Poland at his own request because he could not endure to be in safekeeping while thousands suffered. He believed he had to go there—to stop, to see for himself, and to report. It was not by your order, or by ours for that matter, that he reached,
alone, the conclusion that it was his human, social and cultural duty to join the Polish army. And, on that grim September day, it was not part of his assignment to leave the relative safety of the port of Tutin and scour an abandoned village in the Polish Corridor for a missing friend. But he
knew
that friend, Mr. Hull. He knew that that friend was of special concern to the democratic world. He considered that man’s work more important than his own safety. That was all.

We, who are left behind, may believe that Divver was probably too generous. Modesty was as much a part of him as fearlessness. Max Divver’s courage, Mr. Hull, was the rarest kind —a readiness to stop and identify himself with human situations that were below the dignity of men with a position to keep up. Max Divver recognized only one position; namely, a position based upon social principles, and activated.

He became a New Yorker and a respected editor. But his birthplace was an Iowa suburb. This meant, in his case, a natural affinity with, and equal understanding for, the problems of farmer and factory-hand alike. Similarly, he both was and was not a product of the prevalent forces of his era. He imbibed and retained the independent
questioning
nature of the Middle-West, even as he socially shook off those of its values that were suffocating, outworn or rotten. He brought to New York a mind already eager for new intellectual avenues but still retentive of a sturdy native skepticism. The nature of his death might lead you, Mr. Hull, to envision him as an eccentric Don Quixote of the machine-age. I beg you not to do so! His death, like his life, was a decision based on the facts at issue, a last stop in a life of stopping, a voluntary tribute to the human and intellectual demands of his time.

He was a vigorous and healthy man, Mr. Hull, capable of travelling great distances with much discomfort and little rest. Like all progressive Mid-Westerners, he abhorred a nationalistic provincialism which, while it might at odd moments produce
here and there an eccentric gleam of culture, was totally amputated from the main trunk of universality. It was for that reason Max Divver chose the widest possible geographical dimensions for the exercise of his panoramic mind. He achieved what is perhaps the most difficult psychological conversion: a respect for the womb, without a desire to set it on a pedestal. It was this specific balancing of fundamentals, this sane, unneurotic relating of life’s larger and smaller dimensions and varying expressions, that characterized Max Divver as an editor, a writer, a husband and a father. And, I think, as a man, too. How many of us would have remembered, as he remembered, at the most critical juncture of his last days in Poland, that the Jews of Palestine stood in need of his aid? A donation to those men and women was found in Max Divver’s pocket.

I doubt if later generations, Mr. Hull, will set much store by his writings. I think they will decide, perhaps rightly, that Max Divver’s
œuvre
consisted in his life, not in his letters. And yet we should reflect on these writings as a part of the man—on his anonymous, but easily-recognizable editorials; his book-length studies (most of which first appeared in this magazine) of a decaying capitalism.
Europe’
s
Bleak
House,
The
Czech
Experiment,
The
Facts
of
Fascism
—the titles bluntly speak for themselves and their time. He himself shrugged them off as being valuable only as a means of passing on information that should be known to an audience wider than himself: “I have not put in any new ideas,” he said to a friend, of one of these books: “the
facts
were as much as I could grasp.” Having written of a subject and probed its underlying menace, he was not happy until he had again sacrificed himself to a new and equally sombre theme. No one had more respect than he for the wisdom of literature, or for the right of the writer to speak his mind. But no one was more convinced that the precious individualism of much contemporary
writing was so much deadweight in the travail of society—in fact, he informed his wife in the early days of their marriage that, more than anything else in the world, he dreaded falling into what he called a “private language.” Today, you and I, Mr. Hull, know that this dread was totally unjustified; we may even marvel that he should have entertained it. No man could possibly have been less “private” in his life and language than Max Divver.

Above all, Mr. Hull, Divver was a serious man. This does not mean, as you might think, that he was incapable of being amused. He had as rich and ready sense of the enjoyable as any man I ever met—by which I mean that his humour was spontaneous and social, as well as individually subtle. He was an indefatigable worker, but no one was more ready to push aside accumulated papers and go out to talk, over a rye or a coffee. I find it hard to believe that when I enter a conference or friendly party I shall not see his husky figure—that face which could turn instantly, as the conversation turned, from dark, concentrated seriousness to glowing amusement. It is my regret that that second nature of Max’s, that gay quality without which he could not be understood as an individual, was relegated by him to the province of “private language,” and rarely showed itself in his published work.

“His death makes me feel guilty.” This remark was made to me by one of his colleagues. I believe that all who knew Max Divver understand and share that sense of guilt—that feeling that if we, in some way or other, had acted differently, he would still be alive; that there was no justification for his, rather than our, being deprived of life. At such a time, Mr. Hull, it is natural and not extraordinary for those who are left to back-track over the life of the one who is gone, to think of the many ways in which they could have made it fuller, to consider regretfully all that they failed to do for it, and to wish that they had paid it larger, more open tribute.

But of course such notions would make Max himself smile broadly, if he were here. I think he would argue vehemently that such nostalgia is no more than the private channel through which we all communicate our sense of failure as social beings. It would be like him to insist that his fate was the consequence of his own thoughts, his own faults, his own decisions—an attitude that he was far too intelligent and humane to apply to the worst criminal. I think that it is in that very paradox, that determination to take upon himself responsibilities that he would never have thought to impose upon others, that we find the motivating core of his individuality—and simultaneously recognize ourselves as individuals whose cores have somehow proved over-soft and non-creative.