The Naked and the Dead (52 page)

            Should we lose the war in Spain, then?

            What if it is won by the wrong elements on our side who will be unaffiliated with Russia? How long do you assume they would last with the Fascist pressures present in Europe today?

            That's a little too farsighted for me. He stares around the dormitory room, at the seven members spread out over the couch, the floor, and the two worn chairs. It seems to me you just do the thing that seems best at the moment, and worry about the rest of it later.

            That's bourgeois morality, Hearn, harmless enough in the middle classes outside of its capacity for inertia, but the representatives of morality in a capitalist state employ the same morality toward other ends.

            Later, after the meeting, the president talks to him over a beer in McBride's, his serious owlish face rather sad. Hearn, I welcomed you as a member, I must admit, I've searched myself and I understand it's a remnant of bourgeois aspirations, you come from a class which I envy still to the extent that I'm not wholly educated, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave, because you're not at the stage in your development where we can teach you anything.

            I'm a bourgeois intellectual, huh, Al.

            There's great truth in that, Robert. You've reacted against the lies of the system, but it's a nebulous rebellion. You want perfection, you're a bourgeois idealist, and therefore you're undependable.

            Isn't this distrust of the bourgeois intellectual a little old-hat?

            No, Robert. It's founded on Marx's perception, and the experience of the past century proves his wisdom. If a man moves to the party because of spiritual or intellectual reasons, he's bound to move away again once the particular psychological climate that moved him there in the first place is changed. It's the man who comes to the party because economic inequities humiliate him every day of his life who makes a good Communist. You're independent of economic considerations, and so you're without fear, without the proper understanding.

            I guess I will get out, Al. We're friends then, though.

            Certainly. They shake rather self-consciously and leave each other.
I've searched myself and I understand it's a remnant of bourgeois aspirations.
What a meatball, Hearn thinks. He is amused, a little contemptuous. As he passes a store front, he stares at himself for a moment, regarding his dark hair and hooked blunted nose. I look more like a Jew-boy than a midwestern scion. Now if I'd had blond hair, Al really would have searched himself.

            But there are other elements.
You want perfection.
Perhaps, or was it something else, something less definable?

            His senior year he branches out, plays house football with a surprising and furious satisfaction. One play he never quite forgets. A ball carrier on the opposing team breaks through a hole in the line, is checked momentarily, and is standing there stock upright, helpless, when Hearn tackles him. He has charged with all his strength and the player is taken off the field with a wrenched knee while Hearn patters after him.

            You all right, Ronnie?

            Yeah, fine.

            Good tackle, Hearn.

            I'm sorry. Only he knows he isn't. There has been an instant of complete startling gratification when he knew the ball carrier was helpless, waiting to be hit. There is not even any cynical pleasure in making the All-House football team.

            And other fields too. He attains a grudged notoriety by seducing a DeWolfe Street deb. He even ties up with some of the men he has met through his freshman roommate, now in Speakers, receives after four years a belated invitation to one of the Brattle Hall dances.

            The stags line up against the wall, chat cursorily with one another, and cut in to dance with either a girl they know or the girl of a man they know. Hearn smokes a cigarette or two, quite bored, and then cuts in on a little blonde girl dancing with a tall blond clubman.

            The gesture toward conversation:

            And your name is Betty Carreton, eh, where do you go to school?

            Oh, to Miss Lucy's.

            I see. And then the barbarity he cannot forswear. And does Miss Lucy tell you girls how to keep it until marriage?

            What did you say?

            More and more often this inexplicable humor. Somewhere in the cavernous and undoubtedly rotten tissues of the collective brain of Al, of Jansen, of the magazine men, the college literary critics, in the aesthetes' salons, in the modern living rooms on the quiet back streets of Cambridge, there would be the unadmitted hunger to be bored and superior at a Brattle Hall dance, either that or go to Spain.

            He thinks it out one night. He can be genuinely indifferent to the Brattle Hall thing because it is the Class AA minor league affair which all his training on the green lawns, at the dancing school, or riding at night in convertibles on the highways back of Cholive-oil, has satisfied. It is for the others, the salon men, to be tortured and attracted by the extra quotient of wealth, the elaboration of social fences.

            And about Spain he knows he is never serious. That war is in its last spring, and there is nothing in himself he wants to satisfy by going there, no over-all understanding or compassion which he cares to satisfy. The graduation and class week is upon him, and he is cool and friendly to his parents, bored with them too.

            What are you gonna do, Bob, don't you want any help? Bill Hearn asks.

            No, I'm going to head for New York, Ellison's father promised me a job there.

            This is quite a place, Bob, Bill Hearn says.

            Yes, a funny four years. And inside himself he is straining.
Go away, leave me alone. All of you.
Only he has learned not to say that out loud any longer.

            For his thesis he has been given a magna:
A Study of the Cosmic Urge in Herman Melville.

            He functions easily through the next two years, sees himself consciously, amusedly as The Young Man in New York. He is first a reader and then a junior editor at Ellison and Co.: Harvard, New York Extension, as he terms it, and a room and kitchenette in the East Sixties. Oh, I'm just a literary con man, he will say.

            I can't tell you how I've slaved over the thing, the lady historical novelist says to him. I was so worried about the motivations of Julia, such an
elusive
bitch, but I think I achieved the effect I hungered for in her, the one who worries me, however, is Randall Clandeborn.

            Yes, Miss Helledell, two more of the same, waiter. He lights a cigarette, revolving slowly in the leather arc of their round booth.. You were saying, Miss Helledell?

            Do you think Randall comes across?

            Randall Clandeborn, mmm. (Now which one was he?) Ay, yes, I think he's successful on the whole, but perhaps you need a little sharper definition on him. We can discuss that when we get back to the office. (After the drinks he will have a headache.) To be frank, Miss Helledell, I'm not really worried about your characters, I know they'll come across.

            Do you think so, Mr. Hearn? Your opinion means an awful lot to me.

            Oh, yes, it's a very successful job.

            And George Andrew Johannesson, how is he?

            Well, to tell you the truth, Miss Helledell, I should prefer to discuss it when we've got the manuscript between us. I remember the characters perfectly but I'm awfully bad on names. It's one of my faults for which you'll have to forgive me.

            And there is always the game of mentally plucking, one by one, all the feathers in her hat.

            Or the young serious novelist, not quite good enough, he has decided.

            Well, now, Mr. Godfrey, I think you've got a damn good book there and it's a damn shame that publishing exigencies being what they are, this is not quite the season, perhaps in thirty-six, it would have been a classic if it had come out in the twenties, George, for example, liked it a hell of a lot.

            Yeah, I understand, but still it seems to me you could take a chance, after all, that crap you put out, I understand, bread and butter, but a serious book is a publisher's only excuse for being.

            Sure, it's a damn shame. Sipping his drink mournfully. You know if you intend to do another book we're awfully interested in it.

            The weekends in the summer:

            You have to talk to Carnes, what a delicious humor. I don't mean he's quaint or anything like that, he's a man in his own right of course that's perfectly apparent, but as a gardener he's a find. Even the natives consider him one apart, with that Lancashire accent of his -- If i' twere rainin' soup, there Ay'd be stahndin' with a fork in me hand, his hostess says, putting down her drink.

            And across the porch the gossip is easily overheard. I can't tell you what a bitch she is, the woman is
incredible.
When she went out on tour she hand-picked her leading man, purely by the genital heft, so to speak, and when he started fooling around with poor little Judy, damn if Beroma didn't give a party to which she invited
everyone
but little Judy and the corpus delicti.

            In the office in the middle of the afternoon: He's coming up today, Hearn, he would, we're all invited. Ellison has suggested that our attendance is requested.

            Oh, Gawd.

            Get up near him when he's had five or six. He says the most amazing things. And talk to his wife, the new one, she's fantastic.

            In a bar with a Harvard contemporary:

            Hearn, you have no idea what it's like working on
Space.
That man! He's hideous, he's a Fascist. The writers he's got up there, the talent, all grubbing away, afraid to leave 'cause it's two hundred a week, and they don't know what they can do on their own. I tell you my stomach turns every time I see them grind out the particular brand of swill at which he's so tricky. Jabbing out a cigarette. What are you in this racket for?

            I'm playing it for the laughs.

            Sure you're not trying to be a writer from the wrong end?

            No, I'm not writer, I don't have a deep enough itch.

            Jesus, there's a million who have. I don't know anybody who's worth a goddam.

            Who does?

            Get potted, get screwed, and get up in the morning, somehow.

            Sure.

            And the women:

            Hearn, she says, in her deep husky voice, you're a shell, you're nothing but a goddam shell. After you've had fifty thousand of us up here, you'll probably cut it off and hang it up to dry. You learned an acceptable wiggle somewhere along the line and you think that's all you need to get by. You've got a faeces complex, haven't you, you can't stand being touched. You get me so goddam mad, a million miles away, aren't you, nothing ever hits you. Nothing's worth touching.

            Oh, the girl says quietly in her childish breathless voice, you're really good, there's such goodness in you, but you're wrong, you see, because true compassion is evil, when I was in the hospital there were a few minutes when I loved a doctor, and then I didn't care about him any more, and when I was in the shock treatment I kept thinking contact was evil, and it's only freedom that's worth while, it's why you don't want me because you're free and good.

            Her voice is reedy, well modulated. Oh, well, darling, what could I do, it was perfectly preposterous, all those silly apprentices just
loathing
my guts, all of them perfectly convinced of course they could do the thing better than I could, and my God you should have seen some of the interpretations they had, they were just
bound
to make trouble, and they creamed everything, everything, between Eddie and me, I could have had the ingénue in Sing at Breakfast, I don't know why I hang around with you, I'm just wasting my time.

            Still there are moments. Different women, different nights, when he lies in embrace, steeped in a woman's flesh until the brew is intolerably joyous. There are love harvestings, sometimes months in a row when there is one woman, one affair, and a proud secret knowledge of each other's loins, admirable matings, sensitive and various, lewd or fierce or dallying gently, sometimes sweet and innocent like young lovers.

            Only it never lasts.

            I can't tell you why, he says one night to a friend. It's just every time I start an affair, I know how it's going to end. The end of everything is in the beginnings for me. It's going through the motions. If you saw my analyst. . .

            The hell with that. If I'm afraid of having my dick cut off or something like that I don't care to know it. That's not a cure, it's a humiliation, it's a deus ex machina. I find out what's wrong and bango I'm happy and go back to Chicago and spawn children and terrorize ten thousand people in whatever factory my father decides to give me. Listen, if you're cured, everything you've gone through, everything you've learned is pointless.

            And if you don't go you're just going to get sicker.

            Only I don't feel sick. I just feel blank. . . superior, I don't give a damn, I'm just waiting around.

            Perhaps. He doesn't know the answer himself, hardly cares. For months there is very little in his head beyond the surface reactions, the amusement and the boredom.

            When the war in Europe starts, he decides to get into the Canadian Air Force but his night vision is not quite good enough. He has been thinking in terms of leaving New York, and he finds he cannot bear to remain in it. There are nights when he goes off by himself, and wanders through Brooklyn or the Bronx, taking buses or elevated trains to the end of the route, exploring along the quiet streets. More often he walks through the slums at night, savoring the particular melancholy of watching an old woman sitting on her concrete stoop, her dull eyes reflecting on the sixty, seventy years of houses like this and streets like this, the flat sad echo of children's voices rebounding from the unyielding asphalt.