Letters

Harrison and Drew delight in pointing out his inconsistencies: he values private property, even affluence; savors elitist culture; prizes maximum personal liberty and freedom from exterior restraints; yet he argues for public ownership of anything big enough to threaten the public weal, an ever more equitable distribution of wealth and privilege, and government regulation, for the public interest, of nearly everything except free speech, assembly, and the rest. He readily acknowledges this inconsistency, yields to none in his distaste for bureaucratic inefficiency, officiousness, and self-serving mediocrity — but will not be dissuaded from his conviction that these apparent inconsistencies in part reflect the complexity and ambiguity of the real world, and affirm the indispensability of good judgment, good will, and good humor. Drew and Harrison agree, if on nothing else, that either the Father kills the Son or the Son emasculates the Father. The Bourgeois-Liberal Tragic-Viewing Humanist tisks his tongue at that and plaintively inquires (knowing but not accepting the reply): “Why can they not do neither, but simply shake hands, like Praeteritas and Futuras on the Mack Enterprises letterhead, and reason together?”

What a creature, your Stock Liberal: little wonder his stock declines! Especially if he makes bold to act out his Reasonability between the fell incensed points of mighty opposites: in this corner (the black Second Ward of Cambridge), a Pontiac hearse bearing a casket packed to the Plimsoll with boxes of dynamite, plastic TNT, blasting caps, and black incendiaries bent on blowing up the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, to cut Whitey off from his pleasures at Ocean City and to dramatize the Fascist Insularity of the Eastern Shore; in this corner (somewhere suspiciously near Tidewater Farms), a platoon of paramilitary red-neck gun-nuts armed with a pickup truckload of automatic weapons filched from the National Guard Armory and bent on wiping out that Pontiac hearse in particular if not the Second Ward in general. In the background, a detachment of the Maryland National Guard itself, with less firepower by half. And in the center (the second lamppost south of the trusses on the Choptank River Bridge, as shall be shown), your Bourgeois-Liberal TVH aforedescribed: fishing tackle in one hand, picnic basket in the other (in which are two corned beef sandwiches, two Molson’s Ales, a bullhorn, a portable Freon airhorn, and a voice-operated tape recorder); the sweat of fear in his palms and of July in his armpits; the smile of Sweet Reasonableness nervously lighting his countenance.

I have never been an especially brave or an especially emotional man, sir. The Todd Andrews of your story had by his 54th year felt powerful emotions on just five occasions: mirth in 1917, when he lost his virginity in front of a mirror; fear in 1918, in an artillery barrage in the Argonne Forest; frustration in 1930, at his father’s suicide, which prompted his Inquiry; surprise in 1932, when Jane Mack came naked to him in his bed in her summer cottage (the same I now own, and sleep and dream in); despair in 1937, when impotence, endocarditis, and other raisons de ne pas être met in plenary session on a certain June night in his Dorset Hotel room. To these was added, this humid airless early-Leo afternoon, courage, which I had admired as a quality but not thitherto known as an emotion. On the contrary, I had imagined it (I mean physical courage, not mere moral courage, a different fish entirely) to be a sort of clench-jawed resolution in the face of such emotions as fear, and surely that it often is. But it can be an emotion itself, a flavor distinct from that of the fear it overvails and the adrenaline-powered exaltation that garnishes it. If fear feels like a draining of the heart, I report that the emotion of courage feels like a cardiac countersurge, and that not for nothing are heartened and disheartened synonyms for encouraged and discouraged.