The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [162]
The old friends are still there, still appreciated, but their charm is lessened. In the daily grind of waiting on tables, doing library work, tutoring clubmen, a certain impatience has developed. Words and words, and there are other realities now, a schedule to hold to from necessity. He spends little time at the magazine, frets in some of his classes.
The number seven has a deep significance to Mann. Hans Castorp spends seven years on the mountain, and if you will remember the first seven days are given great emphasis. Most of the major characters have seven letters in their name, Castorp, Clavdia, Joachim, even Settembrini fulfills it in that the Latin root of his name stands for seven.
The scribbling of notes, the pious acceptance. Sir, Hearn asks, what's the importance of that? I mean frankly I found the novel a pompous bore, and I think this seven business is a perfect example of German didacticness, expanding a whim into all kinds of critical claptrap, virtuosity perhaps, but it leaves me unmoved.
His speech causes a minor stir in the class, a polite discussion which the lecturer sums up gently before continuing, but it is a significant impatience for Hearn. He would not have said that the preceding year.
There is even a political honeymoon for a month. He reads some Marx and Lenin, joins the John Reed Society, and argues stubbornly all the time with the members.
I don't see how you can say that about the syndicalists, they've done some damn good work in Spain, and if there can't be a greater co-operation of the elements involved. . .
Hearn, you don't appreciate the issues involved. There is a history of deep political antagonism between the syndicalists and ourselves, and there has never been a time when it was historically more inappropriate to divert the masses with an unattainable and uncoordinated utopia. If you would take the trouble to study the revolution, you would realize that the anarchists have a record of sensuality and political debauch in times of stress, and tend to assume a feudal discipline with terrorist leaders. Why don't you study the career of Batko Makhno in 1919? Do you realize even Kropotkin was so repelled by the anarchist excesses that he took no stand in the revolution?
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.