Letters

Meanwhile, up in Waltham, Mass., Andrews Mack has become fashionably but by no means insincerely radicalized. Having disappointed his parents in the first place by choosing Hopkins and Brandeis as his soul mothers rather than Princeton and Harvard, he now quite exasperates them by dropping his doctoral studies in ’63 to assist in the Cambridge (Maryland) civil rights demonstrations — quite as his father had picketed his own father’s pickle factories back in the thirties. When the July 4th fireworks were canceled that year on account of the race riots, Harrison followed the family tradition of disowning his son, though not by formal legal action. Drew responded by promptly marrying one of his ex-classmates, a black girl from Cambridge.

I do not suggest that he married her solely as a gesture of protest: Yvonne Miner Mack is a striking young woman, Brandeis-bright, less radical than her husband but well to the left of Bobby Kennedy, for example, in whose office in the Justice Department the Cambridge riots were temporarily adjudicated; Drew loved her and had been living with her for some time. But unlike his friend and apparent mentor “H. C. Burlingame VII” (don’t ask), young Mack is simplistic by policy as well as ingenuous and sincere by nature, and lives largely in ardent symbols. Moreover, he’d been opposed to marriage thitherto on the usual radicalist grounds. They have two sons now: bright, handsome little chaps whom Drew instructs in their African heritage and Yvonne takes to hear Leonard Bernstein’s children’s concerts. Sinistral but nowise sinister, long-haired and ascetic, Drew Mack looks to me less a hippie than a Massachusetts Minuteman in his denims, boots, and homespun shirts, his hair tied neatly back with a rubber band. I would bet my life on his integrity; not a nickel on his subtlety or diplomacy — and I think the Established Order has more to fear from him than from all the H. C. Burlingames and A. B. Cooks together, for he lives his beliefs down to the finest print he can understand.

In 1966 he made an impassioned but cogent appeal to the Tidewater Foundation to underwrite the Black Power movement on the Eastern Shore, for Our Own Ultimate Good. Jane and Harrison were indignant, the other conservative trustees scornful, the “liberals” opposed on principle to committing the foundation politically. All were concerned for the delicate negotiations, then in progress, for annexing Tidewater Tech to the state university system. The vote, but for Drew’s own, was unanimously negative, the executive director abstaining. Drew thereupon abandoned his efforts to Work Within the System and urged his most militant colleagues to burn Whitey down. The following summer, as you will recall, a modest attempt was mounted to do just that, and Yours Truly (who this time did not abstain) came near to being blown up for the second time in his life. One day I shall tell you the story.

Better, I’ll tell you it now, and so wind up this calliope music. I belong to that nearly extinct species, famously discredited by history, contemned alike by the Harrison Macks from the right and by the Drew Macks from the left: I mean the Stock Liberal, whom I persist in believing to be the best stock in the store. He is the breed most easily baited for half-measures and most easily caught in self-contradiction, for he affirms the complexity of most social-economic problems and the ambivalence of his own approaches to their solution. If he is in addition (as I have been since 1937) inclined to the Tragic View of history and human institutions, he is even easier to scoff at, for he has no final faith that all the problems he addresses admit of political solutions — in some cases, of any solution whatever — any more than the problems of evil and death; yet he sets about them as if they did. He sees the attendant virtues of every vice, and vice versa. He is impressed by the fallibility of people and programs: it surprises him when anything works, merely disappoints him when it fails. He is in short a perfect skeptic in his opinions, an incorrigible optimist in his actions, for he believes that many injustices which can’t be remedied may yet be mitigated, and that many things famously fragile — Reason, Tolerance, Law, Democracy, Humanism — are nonetheless precious and infinitely preferable to their contraries. He is ever for Reform as against revolution or reaction: in his eyes, the Harrison Macks and A. B. Cooks live in the past, the Drew Macks and H. C. Burlingames perhaps in the future, his kind alone in the present. Yet, as a connoisseur of paradoxes, he understands to the bone that one of St. Augustine’s concerning time: that while the Present does not exist (it being the merely conceptual razor’s edge between the Past and the Future), at the same time it’s all there is: the Everlasting Now between a Past existing only in memory and a Future existing only in anticipation.