Tom Fool Read online

  Nor had Tom much patience with this modern habit of teasing out the constituent neutral ganglia of the body politic, mounting and staining the isolated system, and calling the result a social science, and not only that, but the one all-important science, as though the ganglia, or economics, meant anything at all, without the bones, the muscles, the innards, and the blood. It was as though the sciences had returned to the old days when everything was separate, anatomy was taught from a corpse, physiology was unheard of, and so nobody could tell what was wrong or right with anything, until the body politic was dead enough to dissect.

  It was the same with poetry. He could recite yards of poetry, and why not? It had been his father’s amiable habit when they lived at home, to wake the family in the morning by coming to the foot of the stairs and shouting up a quotation, usually some such half-humorous thing as “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” (a graceful allusion to the presence of crisp bacon), or it might be anything, say a quotation from Randolph Bourne he had just read in the paper, or a dash of Shakespeare, or a counterblast from Oliver Wendell Holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes might not have been an earth-shattering poet, but it had to be admitted that he shouted up the stairs well.

  God, sometimes he missed his father. All the brothers did. That’s why they’d put on his tombstone, “He lived for his children.” He had lived for his children. And he’d been no slouch either. Once, when Tom was arguing a case in Akron and made a mistake in procedure, the judge had asked him if he was old Tom’s son, and when Tom said yes, the judge had said, “Your father would never have made that mistake. You may proceed.”

  And that, when you came right down to it, was what Father had done for the whole lot of them. Having someone like that to live up to, made it easier to live. He had made it possible for them to proceed.

  Tom did the best he could in his turn, but he was afraid he wasn’t the father to Philip, Father had been to him. But Philip would be okay. He was just young, that was all.

  Meanwhile, here was Bühl. Tom knew he was no writer at all. But that didn’t mean he didn’t go to great pains to write carefully, exactly, and as plainly as possible, which was the best a man without talent could do, since it was all a man with talent did, and indeed a duty to the language and his auditors, if nothing else. What’s more, when he had something to say, he wanted to say it himself, and he was damned if he was going to put his name to something he hadn’t even seen. He’d had this trouble with Bühl before. Of course, he couldn’t churn out speeches day and night. There wasn’t time. But he could revise them, and if he had something to add, add it.

  “You get that article back, and you get it back right now,” Tom told Bühl.

  *

  Bühl shrugged and went away. But he didn’t look happy. Ghost writers, like interior decorators, hate any sign of individual preference on the part of their clients, almost as much as decorators hate real pictures in a room. Real pictures don’t go with good décor.

  The Pattersons were furious. They didn’t have any traditions, or any parents either, they’d acknowledge. Pattersons seldom have. Having nothing to live up to, they have much to live down, and no doubt that is why their rise is so rapid, for having much to get away from, they kick like a frog, to get out of the pool before the water-snake gets them. And then, once safe, they go right on kicking, out of terror, even if only in their sleep.

  It made them feel like fools, that retraction. From now on, it was either Tom or themselves. They weren’t responsible to him. They were responsible to the Party Committee. They decided not even to bother to tell him about it, the next time something like that came up. Bühl should have realized what he was up against by now, in the first place.

  A Radio Station

  He spoke over the Blue Network, on the dangers of centralized power. He explained what any economist knew, that laissez-faire capitalism was dead; that the corporation had replaced the individual as the basic unit of enterprise. He did not perhaps yet fully understand that the individual had also been replaced in the body politic by a timid creature afraid of all initiative, particularly initiative on the part of anybody else.

  The commentators were disappointed in the speech. They felt he had talked around his subject. Of course he had. How else, except by an astute perambulation, could one expect to see all of it?

  The speech was effective in some quarters, though. Ex-President Hoover wrote to Chief Justice Hughes, asking that Hughes resign, as a protest against the iniquities of the Democratic Party and its Present Incumbent. Unless the country could be shamed into behaving better by some such dramatic gesture, all was over, he said. Please do it.

  It is possible that ex-President Hoover was being more cautious than clear-headed. Tom had had to see him in Colorado, though he had not wanted to. It is a name forever associated in the American mind, by an eponymous accident, with the old-fashioned bag of an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner, and with a tower at Stanford University, in California, irreverently known to the student body as Hoover’s Last Erection, a library within whose submarine depths librarians move as sedately as goldfish, in an atmosphere like that of a small family bank, too inconspicuous to be robbed, but rich enough to worry about it.

  Indeed, there is something anomalous about the recent tendency on the part of American Presidents to leave well-guarded libraries behind them. One cannot help but feel that Cheops managed these matters better.

  The Supreme Court was another matter. As a lawyer, Tom had seen a good deal of the Supreme Court. No doubt, as a constituted body, they were impressive beyond their appearance. The setting was certainly impressive. In fact, it was too impressive. It was out of scale, so that sitting up there on their rostrum, the judges looked more like a row of Queen Anne cherries than remote and unassailable jurists. One could not forget, whatever they were now, that one of them had spent his salad days waltzing round in a bed sheet in an effort to demonstrate the existence of White supremacy, and that though it was undoubtedly true that they embodied the law, their squeamishness in time of crisis about actually coming out and saying firmly what the law was, though proof of their cunning, did little to enhance their reputation for probity.

  Their chamber had the atmosphere of a bank vault close to closing time, and stood, he was afraid, for much the same values. The trouble with living in a totally secular society, is that we are denied an ultimate court of appeal. As for Chief Justice Hughes, one had to admire him. What he thought of Hoover’s letter, the Lord alone knows. But what he did about it showed excellent sense. He did nothing about it.

  Springfield, Illinois

  Lincoln’s home town. Where he walks at midnight, according to Vachel Lindsay. Well, if he does, he must have difficulty in finding his way about. Why is it, that almost without exception, the City Halls and Capitols of American states are surrounded by cheap bars, cheap hotels, loan parlours, and other slum manifestations? Is it because we have put our ward-heelers and rake-off artists in a setting which shows them off at their best? Perhaps there is something to be said for the zeitgeist, after all.

  Here Tom spoke on long-term issues only. A practical political education has unexpected results, and he seemed to be shifting from a political candidate into something resembling a statesman. The process was involuntary, but he had the habit of following his mind where it led him.

  That visit to Senator Hiram Johnson, in San Bernardino, a month before, had also produced some unexpected results. He came on the air that night. He was seventy-four, but there was nothing infirm about his manner.

  “This is a greater crisis and perhaps is more far-reaching than any other, for it may mean the preservation of the earth’s last fortress of Democracy,” he said. “Power is a heady wine. Few human brains can resist it…. Some love it so much that power is never voluntarily surrendered…. It is this sort of sweet music that is the curse of kings.

  “If your imagination will permit you, go back to the first beginnings of this country. Can you see Washington and Jefferson and Ma
dison and Monroe and Jackson and all the remaining galaxy of the great safeguarding our precious liberties? We’re the last country on earth to possess them. Shall one of our own jeopardize them, or shall one of our own be permitted to violate the sacred tradition built up by these great men of the past for the preservation and for the perpetuity of our institutions?”

  Then he said he was for Tom.

  “Thrice armed is he whose cause is just,” he said. “Fear not. Fight on. Truth will prevail.”

  It was a noble speech, one of the few noble speeches of the campaign. It was like a funeral oration by Demosthenes. Strangely enough, Johnson had spoken from Washington.

  But then, Johnson’s, as the commentators were quick to point out, was a voice from the past. It might as well have been that of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, or John C. Calhoun.

  It might better have been.

  Bull Run, Virginia

  The third-term issue was the best one to fight on. Unfortunately, though even the President was worried about its weight at the polls, it turned out that nobody cared much. However, at Bull Run, where some of the nastiest fighting of the Civil War had taken place, in a large open meadow, fringed with mixed trees, a group of the local gentry stood on the bank, while a young woman, a man in an Uncle Sam hat sitting behind her, disposed of Mary Pickford, Dorothy Thompson, and others, to her own satisfaction, by sitting on a white plough horse in midstream and changing over to a bay on her right side. The plough horse held its head down, but the bay had that sheepish, at-a-loss look in its eyes bays get sometimes. It was watching the photographer.

  The cars parked in the background were the usual abused muddle owned by the indigenous Virginia gentry, not at all up to the sleek massive machines favoured by Texas or Kansas. But the horse-trailer in which the horses had been brought was, as is also usual among such people, everywhere, of the best, latest, and most comfortable design.

  On the Train

  Yes, by God, he was getting them back again. But not fast enough. He had to hurry. And it was not himself he had them back to. Somehow this train had produced an image that was unlike him, and it was to that they were returning. He found the process eerie. In the act of becoming a public figure, one loses one’s own. Well, he’d have to put the two halves together again, somehow, for schizophrenia is only another form of hypocrisy, and he wouldn’t have that.

  The occasion for that thought, was a profile of him Miss Janet Flanner had just published in The New Yorker. She was only trying to make him acceptable to her peers, but he did not thank her for that. Still, it was a most skilful job.

  She said his mind was virile. That reassured everybody. So many minds are not. She pointed out that it was extensive rather than intensive, which was also a big relief to everybody, though commentators pointed out that profundity was not necessarily an asset in a President, a thesis which, if reasonable, was not, for want of the necessary test controls, susceptible of proof. Whereas most people meditate, his staff said, he thought. Since IBM machines also think, as their founder assures us, and none of them has ever been known to meditate, this was also reassuring. But perhaps Miss Flanner’s greatest service to the cause, was to assure her readers that their candidate was not a wit. He wasn’t. Americans do not care for wit, which requires skill and effort and is therefore presumably un-democratic. He was a josher, she said, with a razor-sharp, rather than rapier mind. Nothing wrong there. A razor-sharp mind is useful in business, so they say, though again, the thesis cannot be proved for want of sufficient evidence.

  His memory, she said, was something like a boy’s pocket, stored not only with what he prizes, but also with choice oddments that come in handy. That adequately described it, all right, but a boy stuffs in his pocket only what happens to interest him or what he thinks he may have a use for later. Those on the train were often embarrassed that he forgot the names of minor precinct bosses, ward-heelers, emancipated presidents of women’s clubs, and indistinguishable towns.

  His reading, she added comfortingly, was perhaps more a form of physical outlet for an over-active mind than a form of culture. We must not be suspected of an interest in culture, at any cost.

  Then came the homely details. His wife said he drank too much water and had shrunk two inches since their marriage. Still, that left him six feet. Six feet is a lot better than five feet four, which is what Bühl was.

  Miss Flanner went on to say that the reason why he never locked his New York apartment was that his father had never locked his, so that the children might have no excuse for not coming home at night. That wasn’t true. It was just that people who live in small towns and the country, having nothing to fear, habitually leave their houses unlocked, whereas people in cities, where the criminal record is higher and paranoia soars up like sunflowers in a vacant lot, don’t dare to ever.

  Tom and Edna’s apartment was old-fashioned. It had, in particular, a démodé (the word was hers) fringed lampshade, Miss Flanner reported endearingly, and—again it came out—there were fifteen hundred books in the hall, including, a saving touch of vulgarity, Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, a work which forms the ballast of many an old library, if one inherited any books at all. Also, he had four grey suits, eight blue ones, and 500,000 in the bank. And he loved puns. For instance, he owned a pig named Waterman, which was his pen name. That sort of thing.

  Then it came up still again, at the end, where she concluded by saying that more than anything else, he was just a big earthy executive who read history. It was amazing how that habit of reading stuck in everybody’s craw. They couldn’t leave it alone. And with cause. If there is one thing the American voter views with suspicion, and the American precinct politician with dread, it is any sign of being well-informed in those it has voted into office. Appointees, of course, are another matter. Appointees are specialists, a specialist is a hired hand, and you expect hired hands to be peculiar; but the public official who strays far away from the detective story is apt to find himself in agitated waters.

  Tom, who was reading a detective story at the moment, as a relief from Carson McCullers and The Nazarene and Lord David Cecil, too, for that matter, found himself slightly embarrassed. It was a good job. Janet Flanner always turned in a good job. It was also a clever one. Short of her coming right out and reassuring her readers that he was an empty-headed vulgarian, it was difficult to see how she could have made him more acceptable to her audience, considering the material she had had to work with. But it was a curious picture she drew. Indeed, all such biographies were odd documents, including Lord David Cecil’s preliminary descant on Melbourne, for they seemed to assume, particularly the American ones, that everybody supervised his life like a floor manager, a floor walker, a window dresser, or an efficiency expert, rather than just living it like a sensible human being, and seeing what turned up next.

  This was the age when young people, instead of choosing a career, went to an occupational guidance centre, took an expensive series of tests, and did whatever the form analyst told them they were suited for. He hadn’t done that, and he had a hunch that anyone who ever got anywhere wouldn’t or didn’t do it either. Couldn’t indeed, pass the test, in all probability. He had, for instance, met an advertising executive a year ago who had taken an advertising test for the fun of it, under an assumed name, only to learn that his aptitude for and use of words unsuited him for the profession, since it was so great as to cast severe doubts upon his sincerity. The man, who had been quite successfully insincere for years, had been quite indignant about that, not having realized, before he read his report, that sincerity was a limited and limiting quality, suited only to the maimed, and disqualifying the able.

  Take Margaret Fuller, for instance, in that Mason book. An absolute fool of a woman, but famous in her day, and certainly alive. Now what would her aptitude test have shown? What her Rorschach, her Stanford-Binet, and her Societal Co-Efficiency Adjustment Rating, for that matter? What aptitudes did politics require? And how did one test for them?


  It was not a line of thought he wished to pursue, for it was beginning to pursue him. Alas, he thought he knew.

  Chicago

  Politics brings some strange people out of the woodwork, their mouths still mealy from burrowing from within. He had to meet them sometimes. Politics, like the heavy layer, or plankton when it descends at night, is a paradise for meddlers, so securely hidden beneath their feeding beds, that there is no sonar to detect their dangerous manœuvres, until out they come, when they have scuttled their betters above them.

  His own predators were closer to the surface than that, though he could not help but detect something wild-eyed about their enthusiasm. They were all Jellabies in one way or another, wiping their inky hands on the nearest tow-head, and avid for distant causes while they sat in chaos at home. They didn’t care about the local bond issue, but no cocktail party was complete without at least one uncomfortable Negro “friend” (each of these people had in his or her acquaintance at least one each Negro, Jew, Gentile, or Catholic, though Greek orphans were popular just then, and a refugee central European author on his way to Brazil with his wife, particularly if the wife dressed badly, was not to be despised. Your seldom saw these people between cocktail parties, though). The trend was particularly noticeable among young couples who were sexually imbalanced and so more concerned with leading little children than having them. Their husbands were given to Christ-like moments alone in the bathroom, and the wives tended to prefer twin beds, which they said were more civilized, though just why civilization should be confused with frigidity is not altogether clear. They seldom attended church, except at Easter, but were often officials of the nearest Co-op, which did just as well, and had somewhat the same atmosphere, except that instead of a collection plate you got a yearly rebate.