Letters

In 1966 he made an impassioned but cogent appeal to the Tidewater Foundation to underwrite the Black Power movement on the Eastern Shore, for Our Own Ultimate Good. Jane and Harrison were indignant, the other conservative trustees scornful, the “liberals” opposed on principle to committing the foundation politically. All were concerned for the delicate negotiations, then in progress, for a

Better, I’ll tell you it now, and so wind up this calliope music. I belong to that nearly extinct species, famously discredited by history, contemned alike by the Harrison Macks from the right and by the Drew Macks from the left: I mean the Stock Liberal, whom I persist in believing to be the best stock in the store. He is the breed most easily baited for half-measures and most easily caught in self-contradiction, for he affirms the complexity of most social-economic problems and the ambivalence of his own approaches to their solution. If he is in addition (as I have been since 1937) inclined to the Tragic View of history and human institutions, he is even easier to scoff at, for he has no final faith that all the problems he addresses admit of political solutions — in some cases, of any solution whatever — any more than the problems of evil and death; yet he sets about them as if they did. He sees the attendant virtues of every vice, and vice versa. He is impressed by the fallibility of people and programs: it surprises him when anything works, merely disappoints him when it fails. He is in short a perfect skeptic in his opinions, an incorrigible optimist in his actions, for he believes that many injustices which can’t be remedied may yet be mitigated, and that many things famously fragile — Reason, Tolerance, Law, Democracy, Humanism — are nonetheless precious and infinitely preferable to their contraries. He is ever for Reform as against revolution or reaction: in his eyes, the Harrison Macks and A. B. Cooks live in the past, the Drew Macks and H. C. Burlingames perhaps in the future, his kind alone in the present. Yet, as a co

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 Argo

Join to these vascular tide-rips and crosscurrents the thunderous pulse of anticipatory excitement — a Bay of Fundy colliding with a Gulf Stream! — such as might be felt by a 67-year-old man who, having learned from sources in the Second Ward that the Pontiac hearse, Drew Mack at the wheel, is preparing to head for East Cambridge and the Choptank Bridge en route to the Big One over the Chesapeake, and from other sources close to “George III” that the red-necks plan to station themselves on the Talbot County shore of that same bridge and bazooka that same Pontiac to Kingdom Come — who having learned this, I say, in the forenoon, has made several fast phone calls from his office, left instructions for other such calls, snatched up said spi

Where was I? At the conjunction of all these currents, with the oldest case of subacute bacterial endocarditis in the county, a myocardium supposed to have been on the brink of infarction since 1919: no “ticker” now, but an Anvil Chorus in double-time…