In real life, his concerns were of a different order. The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of Das Kapital and was going around telling people about how he felt afterwards. He would buttonhole a classmate after a few sets of tennis down at the old Fourteenth Street Armory. “You know, Al,” he would say, twisting his head upwards and to one side in the characteristic American gesture of a man who is giving a problem serious thought (the old salt or the grizzled Yankee farmer scanning the sky for weather indications), “you know, Al, I never thought so at college, but the Communists have something. Their methods over here are a little operatic, but you can’t get around their analysis of capitalism. I think the system is finished, and it’s up to us to be ready for the new thing when it comes.” And Al, or whoever it was, would be doubtful but impressed. He might even go home with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in his pocket—in that period, the little socialist classic enjoyed something of the popularity of the Reader’s Digest: it put the whole thing in a nutshell, let a fellow like Al know just what he was up against. Later that evening Al might remark to his wife that maybe it would be a good idea (didn’t she think?) to lay in a stock of durable consumers’ goods—in case, oh, in case of inflation, or revolution, or anything like that. His wife would interpret this in terms of cans and leave a big order for Heinz’s baked beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, and somebody else’s chicken à la king with the grocer the next day. This was the phenomenon known as the dissemination of ideas.

[...] Most men had come to socialism by some all-too-human compulsion: they were out of work or lonely or sexually unsatisfied or foreign-born or queer in one of a hundred bitter, irremediable ways. They resembled the original twelve apostles in the New Testament; there was no real merit in their adherence, and no hope either. But Jim was like the Roman centurion or Saint Paul; he came to socialism freely, from the happy center of things, by a pure act of perception which could only have been brought about by grace; and his conversion might be interpreted as a prelude to the conversion of the world.

It did not occur to him, or, indeed, to anyone else, that he was taking the line of least resistance. This state of being unresolved, on call, as it were, was painful to him, and he used to envy his friends who, as he said, were “sure.” The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thoughts troubled him a good deal. He found, for example, that he liked to drink and dance and go to medium-smart night clubs with medium-pretty girls. Yet he believed with Veblen that there was no greater folly than conspicuous consumption, and his eyes and ears told him that people were hungry while he had money in his pocket. This was a problem all well-to-do radicals had to face, and there were any number of ways of dealing with it. You could stop being a radical, or you could give your money away. Or you could give a little of it away and say, “I owe something to myself,” or give none of it away, and say, “I’m not a saint, and besides I have something more important than money to contribute.” The Communist Party in those years did its best to settle this delicate question gracefully for prosperous fellow-travelers. It was reported that Browder had declared that there was nothing worse for the movement than what he called “a tired radical,” and that men and women would be better workers for the cause if they let themselves go and enjoyed life once in a while. This pronouncement was widely quoted—over cocktails in the Rainbow Room, and sometimes (even) over a bottle of champagne in more intimate boîtes; it was believed that this showed “the human side” of the Party leader, and gave the lie to those perpetual carpers (tired radicals, undoubtedly) who kept talking about Communist inflexibility. The example of Marx and Engels was also cited: they had had great Christmas parties and had called the young Kautsky a mollycoddle because he would not drink beer. (And how right their judgment had been! Forty years later Kautsky had betrayed the revolution by voting war credits in the German Reichstag, and Lenin had called him, among other things, an old woman.) Jim Barnett tried all these formulas on his conscience, but stretch them as he would, he could not make them cover the abyss between the theory and the practice. He decided, at last, to let the abyss yawn, and in the course of time he fell into it.

[...] The result was that the people who came to their cocktail parties, at which Nancy served good hors d’oeuvres and rather poor cocktails, were presentable radicals and unpresentable conservatives—men in radio, men in advertising, lawyers with liberal ideas, publishers, magazine editors, writers of a certain status who lived in the country. Every social assertion Nancy and Jim made carried its own negation with it, like the Hegelian thesis. Thus it was always being said by Nancy that someone was a Communist but a terribly nice man, while Jim was remarking that somebody else worked for Young and Rubicam but was astonishingly liberal. [...]

“It’s a delicate problem,” she began, speaking slowly, as if she were trying to control her feelings and, at the same time in that stilted way that the Trotskyists had, as if they all, like the Old Man, spoke English with an accent, “and it’s a problem that none of you, or I, have had to face, because none of us are serious about revolution. You talk,” she turned to Jim, “as if it were a matter between you and God, or you and your individual, puritan conscience. You people worry all the time about your integrity, like a debutante worrying about her virginity. Just how far can she go and still be a good girl? Trotsky doesn’t look at it that way. For Trotsky it’s a relation between himself and the masses. How can he get the truth to the masses, and how can he keep himself alive in order to do that? You say that it would have been all right if he had brought the piece out in the Liberal. It would have been all among friends, like a family scandal. But who are these friends? Do you imagine that the Liberal is read by the masses? On the contrary, Liberty is read by the masses, and the Liberal is read by a lot of self-appointed delegates for the masses whose principal contact with the working class is a colored maid.”

Riding uptown on the subway beside her, he began to dislike her. If only she would flirt or be demure or pretend that she did not know what was going to happen! Then he could feel free to choose her all over again. But she did not speak, and when he looked into her face, he saw there an expression that was like a tracing made with fine tissue paper of his own feelings, an expression of suffering, of resignation, of stoical endurance. It was as if she were his sister, his twin, his tormented Electra; it was as if they were cursed, both together, with a wretched, unquenchable, sterile lust that “ran in the family.” Once she turned her head and smiled at him disconsolately, but though he felt a touch of pity, he could not smile back; he had lost the ability to make any human gesture toward her.

In the apartment, he took her twice with a zeal that was somehow both business-like and insane, and then rolled over on his back and sighed deeply, like a man who has completed some disagreeable but salutary task

“Oh, Jim,” she burst out at length. “I wish you would break it to her. Explain it to her. She’d take it all right coming from you, since you agree with each other politically. You could make her understand …”

“You go to hell, Helen,” Jim said. The words came as naturally as a reflex and even in his first joy, Jim found time to tell himself that it had been morbid to worry about the matter beforehand. You waited until the right time came and then you acted, without thought, without plan, and your character—your character that you had suspected so unjustly—did not betray you.

He went back to wait for her at his table, and suddenly he found himself thinking of a book he would like to write. It would deal with the transportation industries and their relation to the Marxist idea of the class struggle. He thought of the filling stations strung out over America, like beads on the arterial highways, and of the station attendants he had seen in the Southwest, each man lonely as a lighthouse keeper in his Socony or his Shell castle: how were you going to organize them as you could organize workers in a factory? He thought also of the chain-store employees as the frontiersmen of a new kind of empire: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company—the name had the ring of the age of exploration; it brought to mind the Great South Sea Bubble. Monopoly capitalism was deploying its forces, or, rather, it was obliging its historic enemy, the workers, to deploy theirs. As financial and political power became more concentrated, industry was imperceptibly being decentralized. The CIO might find the answer; on the other hand, perhaps the principle of industrial unionism was already superannuated. There was a great book here somewhere, an important contribution, and now he would have the time to write it. It would have been out of the question of course, had he stayed on the Liberal….

“That’s wonderful,” she said with her first touch of sharpness. “I would like to feel the same way about you (I really would), but I can’t. I don’t seem to be able to bank my fires. That’s a man’s job, I suppose.”

He frowned. There was some ugly implication in that metaphor of hers, something he did not want to examine at the moment.

With a dim idea of being masterful, he strode across the room and half-lifted her to her feet. He attempted a long close kiss, pressing her body firmly against his. In a moment, however, he let her go, for, though she kissed him back, he could feel no response at all. It was not that she was deliberately stifling her feelings (if he could have believed that, he would have been encouraged to go on); rather, she seemed preoccupied, bored, polite. It was like kissing Nancy when she had toast in the toaster.

He closed the door behind him, feeling slightly annoyed. In some way, he thought, he had been given the run-around. When you came right down to it, he had quit his job for her sake. What more did she want? “The hell with her,” he said, dismissing her from his mind. “After all, she knew I was married.” The thought of Nancy brought him up short. Under a street lamp he drew out his watch. If he took a taxi, he would still be in time for dinner. And after dinner, he promised himself, he would make love to Nancy. He would have her put on her blue transparent nightgown, the one he had given her for Christmas and she had only worn once. Making love to her would be more fun than usual because he was still steamed up about that girl. He sensed at once, as he raised his hand for a taxi, that this sexual project of his was distinctly off-color; yet his resolution hardly wavered. In the first place, Nancy would never know; in the second place, he was entitled to some recompense for the moral ordeal he had been through that day. Later on, in bed, his scruples served him well; where a thicker-skinned man would have known that he was simply sleeping with his wife, Jim’s active conscience permitted him to see the conjugal act as a perverse and glamorous adultery, an adultery which, moreover, would never land him in a divorce court or an abortionist’s waiting room.

No one could ever understand, afterwards, what happened about that book. When his resignation from the Liberal was made public, all sorts of people congratulated Jim. Literary columns in the newspapers reported that he was at work on a study of the transportation industries which promised to revise some of the classical conceptions of Marxism. Several publishers wrote him letters, hoping that he would allow them to be the first to see … It was felt in general that he was coming into his manhood, that his undeniable talents were at last to be employed in a work of real scope. Jim himself began the task with enthusiasm. He did six months of research in the public library, and amassed a quantity of notes. Then he wrote two chapters. He worked over them diligently, but somehow from the very first sentence, everything was wrong. The stuff lacked punch. Jim saw it at once, and the publishers he sent the chapters to saw it also. It did not sound, they wrote him reluctantly, like the real Barnett. On the other hand, it did not sound (as he had hoped it would) like a major work. It was solemn enough but it was not momentous. What was missing was the thing Jim had found in Marx and Veblen and Adam Smith and Darwin, the dignified sound of a great calm bell tolling the morning of a new age. Jim reread these masters and tried to reproduce the tone by ear, but he could not do it. He became frightened and went back to the public library; perhaps, as someone had suggested, the material was under-researched. He could not bring himself to go on with the writing, for that would be sending good money after bad. When he got an offer from the illustrated magazine Destiny, the businessman’s Vogue, as someone called it, to do an article on rural electrification, he accepted at once. Traveling with a photographer all over America, he would have the chance, he thought, to see his own subject at first hand. He could do the piece for Destiny, and then return to his own work, refreshed from his contact with living reality. However, when the article was done he took a job with Destiny, promising himself that he would work on his book over the week ends. He started at ten thousand a year.

The truth was that Jim had changed, though the outward signs of it were still so faint as to pass undetected by his intimates. He got drunk oftener, there was no denying it, but, as Nancy said, the strain of being a writer for Destiny had made alcohol “an absolute necessity” for him. His boyish features were now slightly blurred; his awkward, loose-jointed figure was fatter than it had been, and his habitual sprawl was not so becoming to it. Imperceptibly, he had passed from looking pleasantly unkempt to looking seedy. The puzzled frown had become chronic with him; he was, in fact, professionally bewildered. And yet there was something dimly spurious about all this: his gait, his posture, his easy way of talking, half-belied the wrinkles on his forehead. In his young days he had been as lively and nervous as a squirrel; women had been fond of comparing him to some woodland creature. Today that alertness, that wariness, was gone. The sentry slept, relaxed, at his post, knowing that an armistice had been arranged with the enemy. In some subtle way, Jim had turned into a comfortable man, a man incapable of surprising or being surprised. The hairshirt he wore fitted him snugly now; old and well used, it no longer prickled him; it was only from the outside that it appeared to be formidable.

The truth was that Jim had changed, though the outward signs of it were still so faint as to pass undetected by his intimates. He got drunk oftener, there was no denying it, but, as Nancy said, the strain of being a writer for Destiny had made alcohol “an absolute necessity” for him. His boyish features were now slightly blurred; his awkward, loose-jointed figure was fatter than it had been, and his habitual sprawl was not so becoming to it. Imperceptibly, he had passed from looking pleasantly unkempt to looking seedy. The puzzled frown had become chronic with him; he was, in fact, professionally bewildered. And yet there was something dimly spurious about all this: his gait, his posture, his easy way of talking, half-belied the wrinkles on his forehead. In his young days he had been as lively and nervous as a squirrel; women had been fond of comparing him to some woodland creature. Today that alertness, that wariness, was gone. The sentry slept, relaxed, at his post, knowing that an armistice had been arranged with the enemy. In some subtle way, Jim had turned into a comfortable man, a man incapable of surprising or being surprised. The hairshirt he wore fitted him snugly now; old and well used, it no longer prickled him; it was only from the outside that it appeared to be formidable.

Margaret Sargent belonged to this tiresome class. In memory of old times, he always talked to her a few minutes when he met her at parties, but her sarcasms bored him, and, unless he were tight, he would contrive to break away from her as quickly as possible. It irritated him to hear one day that she had applied for a job on Destiny; he was perfectly justified, he said to himself, in telling the publisher that she would not fit in. It would be intolerable to have her in the office. He owed her no debt; all that had been canceled long ago. And yet … He sat musing at his desk. Why was it that she, only she, had the power to make him feel, feel honestly, unsentimentally, that his life was a failure, not a tragedy exactly, but a comedy with pathos? That single night and day when he had been almost in love with her had taught him everything. He had learned that he must keep down his spiritual expenses—or else go under. There was no doubt at all of the wisdom of his choice. He did not envy her; her hands were empty: she was unhappy, she was poor, she had achieved nothing, even by her own standards. Yet she exasperated him, as the spendthrift will always exasperate the miser who feels obliged to live like a pauper, lest his wealth be suspected and a robber plunder him. But there was more than that. What did he regret, he asked himself. If he had it to do over again, he would make the same decision. What he yearned for perhaps was the possibility of decision, the instant of choice, when a man stands at a crossroads and knows he is free. Still, even that had been illusory. He had never been free, but until he had tried to love the girl, he had not known he was bound. It was self-knowledge she had taught him; she had showed him the cage of his own nature. He had accommodated himself to it, but he could never forgive her. Through her he had lost his primeval innocence, and he would hate her forever as Adam hates Eve.