“You know I met Rennie in New York while I was at Columbia. What attracted me to her was that she was the most self-sufficient girl I’d ever met; maybe the only one—our culture doesn’t turn them out too generously. She was popular enough, but she didn’t seem to need popularity or even friendship at all. If she ever felt lonely back then, I believe it was because she didn’t always understand her own self-sufficiency—certainly she didn’t feel lonely very often. That’s what attracted me. I had been in the Army before Columbia, and in a college fraternity before that, and I’d done plenty enough horsing around with women not to confuse one kind of attraction with another. Have you laid very many women, Jake?”
“Not very many,” I replied modestly.
“I only asked because I wonder if that mixing-up of attractions might not be involved in your part of this business. Possibly it was in Rennie’s: she’d never slept with any man but me before.”
I squirmed with contrition.
“It was because of this self-sufficiency I thought I saw in her that I was able to imagine having the kind of relationship with her that she described to you—a more or less permanent relationship. It would only be possible between two pretty independent people who had a complete respect for each other’s self-sufficiency. The fact that we didn’t need each other in any of the ordinary ‘basic’ ways seemed to me to mean that we could be damned good for each other in all kinds of other ways. But I think you’ve heard all this. It explains, incidentally, why Rennie’s telling you all that stuff in the pine grove surprised me and bothered me—not that privacy is so important in itself, but it’s an indication of the kind of independence we thought we had.
“Now you must realize that I don’t have any theories about sexual morality, for Christ’s sake. Rennie and I never talked about it at all. But I believe we both tacitly assumed that any kmd of extramarital sex was out of the question for us in the same way that lying or homosexuality was out of the question: we hadn’t the slightest need for it. Not only don’t I have any philosophy about sexual morals—I don’t seem to have any automatic feelings about them, either. But Rennie did. Very strong ones. I’m sure she couldn’t have defended them rationally—no ethical program can be defended rationally clear down the line. Probably it was a carryover from her home life. But the fact that she felt strongly about marital fidelity was enough to make it our way of operating: her feeling didn’t conflict with any private notions of my own, and for that matter it kind of suited the relationship we wanted, because it kept everything intramural.
“So that was my ideal of Rennie: self-sufficiency, strength (I could tell you a lot about her strength), and privacy. And there’s our problem. According to my version of Rennie, what happened couldn’t have happened. According to her version of herself, it couldn’t have happened. And yet it happened. That’s why even now we have a hard time believing it really did happen: we not only have to accept the fact that she did what she did, but also the fact that she wanted to do it—don’t think I’m accusing you of rape. Accepting those facts makes it necessary to correct our version of Rennie, and right now we can’t see how any version that allows for what happened would also allow for the kind of relationship we thought we had. And that relationship was the orientation post that gave every other part of our lives—everything we did—its values. It’s more important to me than being a great scholar or a great anything else. If we have to scrap it, all these other things lose their point. There’s nothing emotional about all this—it’s as coherent a picture as I can make of the way I see what Rennie and I were doing, and why everything’s got to be held in suspension now until we decide the significance of what happened. Rennie feels the same way. It’s what we’ve been talking about for the last three days, and it’s what we’ll talk about for a long time to come, if she doesn’t do away with herself while I’m up here with you.”
My heart went out to him.
“I’m sorry, Joe.”
“But that’s beside the point!” he laughed, not humorously. “The only reason I’m interested in your share of this—the reason I keep asking you why you did it and what you thought of Rennie and me to give you the idea of trying her out—is that I have to know to what extent your actions influenced her actions.”
“Joe, I swear, I take full responsibility for everything that happened.”
“But I see you’re not willing to help me. Do you take full responsibility for the fact that she was on top the first time? Was it you that bit yourself on your own left shoulder? Damn it, I told you Rennie wasn’t playing innocent! What she and I want out of each other isn’t possible unless we assume that we’re free agents—pretend we are even when we suspect we aren’t. Why do you insist on playing games like this, Jake? I’m obviously being as honest as I can. Just once, for God’s sake, drop all the acting and be straight with me!”
“I’m doing my best, Joe,” I declared uncomfortably.
“But you refuse to forget about yourself even for a minute! What do you want? If you’re trying to make me feel good about you, I swear this isn’t the way. I don’t know whether anything you say will work that way, but the only chance at all is to be absolutely honest now.”
“Well, it seems to me that you won’t accept anything as honest except whatever it is that you want to hear, and I’m not sure what that is or I’d say it. Ask me questions, and I’ll answer them.”
“Why’d you screw Rennie?”
“I don’t know!”
“What reasons do you think you might have had?”
“I couldn’t give any reason that I think would be true.”
“Hell, Horner, you don’t just do things. What was on your mind?”
“Nothing was on my mind.”
Joe began to show anger.
“Listen, Joe,” I pleaded. “Granted that everything people do is probably psychologically determined. Granted that I might have had any kind of unconscious motive for doing it—pick any motive you want. But two things are true: if I had any motive, it was unconscious, so only a psychoanalyst could find out what it was—if it was unconscious, then by definition I’m not conscious of it. I’m perfectly willing to allow psychic determinism, but we can never know which way we’re predetermined to act, so in effect we’re not predetermined at all. In the second place, even if an analyst could tell me why I did it, my unconscious motives would be beside the point as far as we’re concerned. If you’re going to talk ethics, then you have to discount everything but conscious motivations, since they’re the only ones that can be argued from an ethical point of view. There’s no reason not to do this—it’s perfectly possible to believe in psychic determinism and still talk ethics—but you’ve got to allow for the fact that people—maybe yourself excluded—aren’t going to have conscious motives for everything they do. There’ll always be a few things in their autobiography that they can’t account for. Now when that happens the person could still make up conscious reasons—maybe in your case they’d spring to mind the first time you thought about an act after you did it—but they’d always be rationalizations after the fact.”
“That’s all right,” Joe insisted. “If I went along with everything you just said, I’d still have to say that even the rationalizing after the fact has to be done, and the person has to be held responsible—has to hold himself responsible—for his rationalizings, if he wants to be a moral actor.”
“Then you’ll have to go further still and allow that sometimes a man won’t even be able to rationalize. Nothing comes to mind. You don’t accept it when I take full responsibility for everything that happened, and you won’t accept it if I don’t take any responsibility. But in this business I don’t see what’s in between.”
I lit a cigarette. I was nervous, and happy and unhappy at the same time about the fact that despite my nervousness I felt pretty good, pretty sure of my mind, pretty satisfied at my ability to play a role that struck me as being at once somewhat abhorrent and yet apparently ineluctable. That is, I felt it to
be a role, but I wasn’t sure that anything else wouldn’t also be a role, and I couldn’t think of any other possible roles for me anyhow. If, as may be, this is the best anyone can do—at least the best I could do—why, then, it’s as much as can ever be signified by the term sincerity.
“That’s all beside the point,” Joe said. “I’m not interested in how much responsibility you’re willing to assume. What I want to know is what happened, so I’ll know how much responsibility to hand out all around, whether you accept it or not. When did you get the idea you could make out with Rennie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not till we were in bed, maybe as soon as I met you all, maybe sometime in between. I wasn’t aware of getting the idea.”
“What did she do or say that gave you the idea?”
“I’m not sure I had the idea. The afternoon and evening I was out there, while you were gone, I could interpret everything she said and didn’t say as evidence that she was prepared to make love with me, or I could interpret none of it as evidence. At the time I don’t believe I was interpreting at all.”
“What was said?”
“God, I can’t remember conversations! Didn’t Rennie tell you?”
“Sure she did. Can’t you remember, or are you playing obtuse again?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Well, what the hell am I going to do?” Joe cried. “You claim you didn’t have any conscious motives.. You aren’t aware of any unconscious motives. You won’t rationalize. You didn’t make any conscious interpretations of anything Rennie did. And you can’t remember any conversations. Have I got to agree with Rennie that you don’t even exist? What else makes a man a human being except these things?”
“I could add some more things to the list of my inabilities.” I shrugged.
“Don’t bother. Don’t you see, Horner, if you could convince me that very much of what Rennie did was under your influence, it wouldn’t be good, because she shouldn’t have been in a position to be influenced very much. And if you convinced me that very little if any of it was your influence it still wouldn’t be good, because by our picture of her she couldn’t have chosen to do it. So it’s not that I’m trying to solve the problem by passing the buck. The thing is, I can’t be sure just what the problem is that has to be solved until I know just what happened and why each thing happened.”
I felt strong enough by this time to say, “I don’t think you’d have as much of a problem if you had more respect for the answer ‘I don’t know.’ It can be an awfully honest answer, Joe. When somebody close to you injures you unaccountably, and you say, ‘Why in the world did you do that?’ and they say, ‘I don’t know,’ it seems to me that that answer can be worthy of respect. And if it’s somebody you love or trust who says it, and they say it contritely, I think it could even be acceptable.”
“But once they’ve said it,” Joe said, “once they’re in a position to have to say it, how do you tell whether the love and trust that make it acceptable were justified?”
How indeed? All I could have replied is that I personally couldn’t imagine ever having to reach that question, but I could certainly imagine Joe reaching it.
“Well, that could never do, Jake,” Joe said, getting ready to go. “If that has to be your answer, I can’t see how to deal with you, and if it’s got to be Rennie’s I can’t see how to deal with her either. That answer simply doesn’t come up in the Morgan cosmos. Maybe I’m in the wrong cosmos, but it’s the only one I can see setting up serious relationships in. You ought to know, boy, that Rennie blames you for nearly everything that happened.”
I was a little surprised, but I simply wrinkled my forehead and made a quick tch in the left corner of my mouth.
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe her,” I declared.
“But you think it’s pretty ordinary of her, don’t you? The kind of thing you’d expect a woman to do?”
“I don’t have any opinion,” I said. “Or rather, I have both opinions at once.”
This observation nearly clenched Joe’s fists in disgust, and he left my room.
I could say that this conversation left me disturbed, but it seems more accurate to say that it left me stimulated: my disturbance was the disturbance of stimulation more than of guilt, the same disturbance that a complicated argument always produces—the disturbance, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but invariably exhilarating, effected by any duel of articulations, where the duelists have things of sufficient value at stake to make the contest, if after all a game, at least a serious game.
Articulation! There, by Joe, was my absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one’s absolutes. To turn experience into speech—that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. It is therefore that, when I had cause to think about it at all, I responded to this precise falsification, this adroit, careful myth-making, with all the upsetting exhilaration of any artist at his work. When my mythoplastic razors were sharply honed, it was unparalleled sport to lay about with them, to have at reality.
In other senses, of course, I don’t believe this at all.
9
One of the Things I Did Not See Fit to Tell Joe Morgan
ONE OF THE THINGS I DID NOT SEE FIT TO TELL JOE MORGAN (for to do so would have been to testify further against myself) is that it was never very much of a chore for me, at various times, to maintain with perfectly equal unenthusiasm contradictory, or at least polarized, opinions at once on a given subject. I did so too easily, perhaps, for my own ultimate mobility. Thus it seemed to me that the Doctor was insane, and that he was profound; that Joe was brilliant and also absurd; that Rennie was strong and weak; and that Jacob Horner—owl, peacock, chameleon, donkey, and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary—was at the same time giant and dwarf, plenum and vacuum, and admirable and contemptible. Had I explained this to Joe he’d have added it to his store of evidence that I did not exist: my own feeling was that it was and was not such evidence. I explain it now in order to make as clear as I can what I mean when I say that I was shocked and not surprised, disgusted and amused, excited and bored, when, the evening after the conversation just recorded, Rennie came up to my room. I’d had a brilliant day with my students, explaining gerunds, participles, and infinitives, and my eloquence had brought me around to feeling both guilty and nonchalant about the Morgan affair.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” I said when I saw her. “Come on in! Have you been excommunicated, or what?”
“I didn’t want to come up here,” Rennie said tersely. “I didn’t want to see you again at all, Jake.”
“Oh. But people want to do the things they do.”
“Joe drove me in, Jake. He told me to come up here.”
This was intended as a bombshell, I believe, but I was not in an explodable mood.
“What the hell for?”
Rennie had started out with pretty firm, solemn control, but now she got choky and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the question.
“Has he turned you out?”
“No. Can’t you understand why he sent me up here? Please don’t make me explain it!” Tears were imminent.
“Honestly, I couldn’t guess, Rennie. Are we supposed to re-enact the crime in a more analyzable way, or what?”
Well, that finished her control; the head-whipping began. Rennie, incidentally, looked great to me. She’d obviously been suffering intensely for the past few days, and, like exhausted strength, it lent her all the sexual attractiveness that tormented women often have. Tender, lovelike feelings announced their presence in me.
“Everything that’s happened wrenches my heart,” I said to her, laying my hand on her shoulder. “You’ve no idea how
much I sympathize with Joe, and how much more with you. But he sure is making a Barnum and Bailey out of it, isn’t he? This sending you up here is the damndest thing I ever heard of. Is it supposed to be punishment?”
“It’s not ridiculous unless you’re determined to see it that way,” Rennie said, tearfully but vehemently. “Of course you’d say it was, just so you won’t have to take Joe seriously.”
“What’s it all about, for heaven’s sake?”.
“I didn’t want to see you again, Jake. I told Joe that. He told me everything you said to him last night, and at first I thought you were lying all the way. I guess you know I’ve hated you ever since we made love; when I told Joe about it, I didn’t leave out anything we did—not a single detail—but I blamed you for everything.”
“That’s okay. I don’t have any real opinion on the subject.”
“I can’t blame you any more,” Rennie went on. “It’s too easy, and it doesn’t really solve anything. I guess I don’t have any opinion either—and Joe doesn’t either.”
“He doesn’t?”
“He’s heartbroken. So am I. But he’s determined not to evade the question in any way, or take a stand just to cover up the hurt. You don’t realize what an obsession this is with him! Sometimes I’ve thought we’d both lose our minds this past week. This thing is tearing us up! But Joe would rather be torn up than falsify the trouble in any way. That’s why I’m here.”
She hung her head.
“I told him I couldn’t stand to see you again, whether you were responsible or not. He got angry and said I was being melodramatic, evading the question. I thought he was going to hit me again! But instead he calmed down and—even made love to me, and explained that if we were ever going to end our trouble we’d have to be extra careful not to make up any versions of things that would keep us from facing the facts squarely. If anything, we had to do all we could to throw ourselves as hard as possible against the facts, and as often as possible, no matter how much it hurt. He said that as it stands now we’re defeated, and the only possible chance to save anything is never to leave the problem for a minute. I told him I’d die if I had to live with it much longer the way I’ve been doing, and he said he might too, but it’s the only way. I guess you think this is ridiculous, too.”