“Iris and Cave both told me about you and I’m particularly glad to get a chance to meet you ... to see you too, Clarissa ... will you be long in the East?” Conscious perhaps that I would need more work than a perfunctory prelude, he shifted his attention to Clarissa, saving me for later.
“I never have plans, Paul, but I’ve got one or two chores I’ve got to do. Anyway I’ve decided that Eugene is just the one to give the enterprise its tone ... a quality concerning which you, dear Paul, so often have so much to say.”
“Why yes,” said the publicist genially, obviously not understanding. “Always use more tone. You’re quite right.”
Clarissa’s eyes met mine for a brief amused instant. She was on to everything ... doubtless on to me too in that way one can never be about oneself; I always felt at a disadvantage with her.
“What we’re going to need for the big New York opening is a firm historical and intellectual base. Cave hasn’t got it and of course doesn’t need it. We are going to need commentary and explanation and though you happen to be a genius in publicity you must admit that that group which has been characterized as intellectual, the literate few who, in their weakness, often exert enormous influence, are not apt to be much moved by your publicity: in fact, they will be put off by it.”
“Well, now I’m not so sure my methods are that crude. Of course I never....”
“They are superbly, triumphantly, providentially crude and you know it. Eugene must lend dignity to the enterprise. He has a solemn and highly respectable misunderstanding of philosophy which will appeal to his fellow intellectuals. He and they are quite alike: liberal, ineffectual, scrupulous, unsuperstitious, irresolute and lonely. When he addresses them they will get immediately his range, you might say, pick up his frequency, realizing he is one of them, a man to be trusted. Once they are reached the game is over, or begun.” Clarissa paused and looked at me expectantly, the exuberant malice veiled by excitement.
I didn’t answer immediately. Hastings, as a former writer, felt that he too had been addressed and he worried the subject of “tone” while Paul gravely added a comment or two. Clarissa watched me, however, conscious perhaps of the wound she had dealt.
Was it all really so simple? was I so simple? so typical? Vanity said not, but self-doubt, the shadow which darkens even those triumphs held at noon, prevailed for a sick moment or two: I was no different from the others, from the little pedagogues and analysts, the self-obsessed and spiritless company who endured shame and a sense of alienation without even that conviction of virtue which can dispel guilt and apathy for the simple, for all those who have accepted without question one of the systems of absolutes which it has amused both mystics and tyrants to construct for man’s guidance.
I had less baggage to rid myself of than the others: I was confident of that. Neither Christianity nor Marxism nor the ugly certainties of the mental therapists had ever engaged my loyalty or suspended my judgment. I had looked at them all, deploring their admirers and servants, interested though by their separate views of society and of the potentialities of a heaven on earth (the medieval conception of a world beyond life was always interesting to contemplate even if the evidence in its favor was whimsical at best ... conceived either as a system of rewards and punishments to control living man or else as lovely visions of what might be were man indeed consubstantial with a creation which so often resembled the personal aspirations of gifted divines rather more closely than that universe the rest of us can only observe with mortal eyes). No, I had had to dispose of relatively little baggage and, I like to think, less than my more thoughtful contemporaries who were forever analyzing themselves, offering their psyches to doctors for analysis or, worse, giving their immortal souls into the hands of priests who would then assume much of their weltschmerz, providing them with a set of grown-up games every bit as appealing as the ones of childhood which had involved make-believe or, finally, worst of all, the soft acceptance of the idea of man the mass, of man the citizen, of society the organic whole for whose greater good all individuality must be surrendered.