The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [174]
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.
I guess I will get out, Al. We're friends then, though.
Certainly. They shake rather self-consciously and leave each other. I've searched myself and I understand it's a remnant of bourgeois aspirations. What a meatball, Hearn thinks. He is amused, a little contemptuous. As he passes a store front, he stares at himself for a moment, regarding his dark hair and hooked blunted nose. I look more like a Jew-boy than a midwestern scion. Now if I'd had blond hair, Al really would have searched himself.
But there are other elements. You want perfection. Perhaps, or was it something else, something less definable?
His senior year he branches out, plays house football with a surprising and furious satisfaction. One play he never quite forgets. A ball carrier on the opposing team breaks through a hole in the line, is checked momentarily, and is standing there stock upright, helpless, when Hearn tackles him. He has charged with all his strength and the player is taken off the field with a wrenched knee while Hearn patters after him.
You all right, Ronnie?
Yeah, fine.
Good tackle, Hearn.
I'm sorry. Only he knows he isn't. There has been an instant of complete startling gratification when he knew the ball carrier was helpless, waiting to be hit. There is not even any cynical pleasure in making the All-House football team.
And other fields too. He attains a grudged notoriety by seducing a DeWolfe Street deb. He even ties up with some of the men he has met through his freshman roommate, now