THE FOR-GOD'S-SAKERS

...Are these the prices to be paid if man is to be redeemed from war...

...The penalty is higher where they are...

...So it was in the adolescent days of Nazism, when the Nixons and the Kennedys were still in office, and, as the liberals here swarmed to Kennedy to stop Johnson, the liberals there swarmed (at a more advanced stage) to Hindenburg to stop Hitler and got them both, and only those who said No at the beginning went on saying No to the end...

...Instead of saying that I had prior commitments of a pressing nature, daughters to marry, sons to let into the house after midnight, wives to warm when the heat goes down, sick to visit, and books to write, I said that my time was wholly occupied with chess, the fiddle, and ancient Greek...

...I have traveled widely, but Socrates would not leave Athens, nor Kant Koenigsberg...

...Now the air raid drill is doomed, but if there are going to be a million, there have to be four or five, or one...

...Most likely to succeed, say you...

...Have I got to stop laughing...

...Cleo Blackburn used to call the Young Murgatroyds "the For-God's-Sakers" because they are always saying, "For God's sake, what are we waiting for...

...Young Murgatroyd—I call him young...

...I ran out of good, gray alibis long ago and saw that the choice is black and white...

...A rara, young Murgatroyd, lofty, thoughtful, skilled, and, on top of it all, well-favored of face and frame...

...Must I see life steady, like him, but, like him, in part...

...All penal institutions have bands...

...I am a writer and I want (I say "ought") to write...

...But the well-balanced men who want personal security (they call it national security) are more frightening because they lend themselves to the more frightening alternative...

...as indeed it is...

...He wouldn't know whether the prison band has violins or only clavichords and carillons...

...But it isn't...

...These statesmen, and these editors, and these preachers, if they went and did like Murgatroyd would lose their influence...

...But they began by facing prison...

...I resisted the temptation...

...I can see how studying Russian could help create a peaceful world, hence I study Russian...

...What are we waiting for, for God's sake...

...My best to the family, "Murgatroyd" Murgatroyd wades in wide open and throws his gloves all over the ring...

...And thus might I evade the issue, which isn't Murgatroyd at all...

...If it were with me (as Geo...

...Young Murgatroyd has the habit of prison...

...Then there's Grandma, who lives in lifelong terror, not of what I will do next but of what Mrs...

...Have I lived...

...You will be a better man with less effort than any other way...

...Murgatroyd, the red-eyed recidivist, is right...

...The Germans were able in both, and knew it, and perhaps their ability and their joy in their ability and efficiency in chess, violin playing, automobile manufacturing, and other things account for their philosophic mistakes...

...Carefully planned action at New London can bring you up to five years and a fifty thousand dollar fine...

...If it were with me...

...Forget Mutti and the kids and Grandma...

...His eye is single, mine myriad...

...You will not make international peace...

...Why, he may ask himself, has something so good become associated with things which are so evil...

...he must be pushing thirty-five by now—rejects the non-verbal communication of chess and the effect of the fiddle on the savage breast the way he rejects Paris in the spring...

...Rome burning holds Mutti and the kids and Grandma hostage for my peaceable behavior—that is, for my connivance in war—and I keep the peace which does not in the least pass understanding...

...I have got to compound the evil or resist it and not wag my head over it and go on living like a country-club pig in a world that is dying of starvation enforced (as Murgatroyd says) by H-bombs...

...if it had been followed by a Russian RB-47 within a few miles of our coast, they would have set the world's ashes on fire...

...He writes of desires, but he does not know their conflict in his own members...

...Let's get out of this rathole and go for a walk...

...Most likely, say I. He has served eleven prison terms in the past ten years and, by the time these unkind words are published, if I mistake me not, he will be serving his twelfth, this time for having boarded the missile-launching submarine Polaris, at New London, Connecticut, for the purpose of persuading the crew to resign...

...He did: "Dear Milton: "American life is, usually: complex, rich, entertaining, breathtaking, expensive, colorful, tuneful, passionate, secure, stimulating, clever, all, indeed, that life should be for all men...

...But it isn't with me...

...These wretches, who had never really lived...

...He marches to a music made entirely by distant drums...

...All people say to themselves, yes, compassion and generosity are the most valuable, but first I must have mine...

...Murgatroyd's action outstrips his rhetoric...

...Perhaps the answer to this puzzle about the American way of life is that Americans have created it for themselves first, and placed the welfare of other human beings second...

...But isn't he a bit of a specialist, given to the partiality of all specialization...

...The odds are less hopeless when you stop struggling during the roll call...

...My little woman, like me, came old to this totalitarian challenge and the total response it invokes in young Murgatroyd...

...A. J. Muste goes over the fence and into the missile base, while Reinhold Niebuhr preaches Christian water-carrying on both shoulders, and the worse theologian appears the better...

...You will not be listened to, or even seen or heard...

...Is there no funnier way out than his...

...If he were worth his salt as a newspaperman, indeed he would...

...Me, I should like both to be in prison, where the lights are turned out, and at home, where I have to go around turning out the lights after a lot of darned fool kids...

...Must I burn my books and my dog and my slippers and my pipe and my wife and my children or—alternatively—not have acquired any of them in the first place, like Murgatroyd...

...He never lifted his eyes to the hills—such as Montmartre—whence cometh his strength...

...Could all men enjoy it, it would be fine, but since only the smallest fraction of mankind can enjoy it, and these have fenced it in behind H-bombs, B-58's, nuclear submarines, napalm, and myriads of other horrible devices, a thinking person may become suspicious of it...

...they need to be heartened by my absence, not by my presence...

...What is a life whose sum is a succession of philosophic errors...

...My peace I give you," the peace that passeth understanding...

...I think that wonderment is failing him...

...I would not even be gaffed by my neighbors —they're used to me—or lose a dime on the deal in the end...

...Senators Humphrey, Ful-bright, and Morse, of whom the Editor of The Progressive says, "They have been struggling against almost hopeless odds for a more affirmative and creative foreign policy," must deplore the Japanese security treaty because it is evil and then vote for it because they can not say No to the evil and remain in politics...

...and again, five years before that, when he walked into my house and took a look at the mangled parts of an ancient cuckoo clock and put them together, and in working order, in an hour...

...So fey was I being that I was tempted to mention the cultivation of my begonias along with my chess, my fiddle, and my Greek...

...does he see the stars as space-platforms to be boarded like the Polaris...

...And they are both real in time...

...In the course of my wide travels I have been in prison (overnight, like Thoreau) and Christ has not...

...The night, the dew...

...Why, then, do I make the commitments, and new commitments on top of those I long since made...

...But Rome is always burning...

...I am a poorer stick than Murgatroyd, but a wiser, because I suffer more than he does and out of suffering is wisdom born...

...Would a newspaperman go to prison for $5,000, or for $500...

...If ancient Greek helps you to perceive truth and reject error in Holy Script, then it assumes great value, but somehow I can not believe God made a world in which only scholars of ancient Greek can know His word...

...Time and goodness are closely related, are they not, Milton...

...I ought to know something about it, and the newspaperman knows that there is no way to know about anything except to get inside...

...Was it for want of temporizing that they have had none...

...And so, the man who says he must stay the course and protect his "emotional security" (as Murgatroyd says) is realistic, too...

...And what influence, pray, have they had since 1945...

...Freud...

...The rhetoric he must address to us statesmen, editors, and preachers is this: "You have many desires in conflict, but the one that takes the edge off the satisfaction of all the rest is to be a better man...

...But he who says No and does No reduces the evil by one man, while he who deplores the evil and in every new speech or editorial says what ought to be done, what "should" be done, what "must" be done, leaves the evil untouched and feeds it with his life...

...He has, and has had, no other career than the anti-martial martial...

...he neither sleeps nor tarries, and his reward will be glorious...

...Has He lived...

...And my baby buntings, for whom I go a-hunt-ing, put up a fearful howl when I come home with nothing to wrap them in...

...The trouble is that each day the short course is shorter, each day my emotional security more certain and the end of the world with it...

...Milton, I keep trying, and after every try I feel guilty because I know that what I ask of others I do not ask fully of myself, and that my faults and addictions are many and deserve my total attention...

...If you commit civil disobedience on civil defense day, your sentence will probably be no longer than thirty days...

...Eisenhower and they all thought that the U-2 flight was "unfortunate," but they all learned about it at the fifteenth hole...

...Chess you can play in prison, much more than out...

...Here is Murgatroyd judging chess and the fiddle (and Greek and Russian) in a single context...

...Is there then to be no peace at all...

...That there is no other way left a man to extricate himself is the mark of our democratic totalitarianism...

...To be sure, the Murgatroyds put themselves outside the pale of orthodox politics...

...What makes Murgatroyd suppose that I would be effective in...

...Not they...

...and that was long ago...

...In a way, Milton, is this not the essence of evil...

...Were it not for the Murgatroyds, man would have no fixed point on earth to read the stars by...

...the self-alienated alone is able to defend his country's values against his countrymen and their institutions...

...It is not respect that the right wants, it is men...

...George Ten Per Cent Bye, said "Milting, if you go to prison, I guarantee you that De Witt Wallace of the Reader's Digest will give you $25,000 for your memoirs...

...Your violin would be very busy...

...When the State comes to me and says, "I need your money for H-bombs and U-2's and J. Edgar Hoover," I say No, and the State smiles and takes my money by force and violence and other lawful means, and says, not merely smiling, but smirking, "Now you have your principles and I have your money...

...No," said Murgatroyd, "I have no time for a walk...

...Begonia-growing, pancake-making, lying abed, helping the blind man across the street today so that he will live to be killed by the missile tomorrow...

...We can point to him and say, "You desire to go to prison, and you do it," and to ourselves and say, "/ desire to go to prison, and I don't...

...nothing less...

...He astonishes me, and I would share my astonishment with you, at the risk (nay, the certainty) of boring you with my melancholy lay...

...Edgewood will focus on CBR weapons, there will be a civil defense protest in New York, and this summer we will go after Polaris fleet ballistic missile submarines...

...what will the martial career do to Murgatroyd...

...But I do not go to the State when it does not come to me, and it is, like all States, a bad State and getting daily worse...

...If a Russian U-2 had flown over America, our blood-drinkers would have put the world to the torch in a split second...

...I'm a newspaperman clear out to the rind, an old firehorse tethered by a begonia stalk...

...I have a charming variety of habits...

...He wouldn't know because he wouldn't have noticed...

...A year later, at a peacemongers' meeting in Eastern Europe, somebody marveled at the understanding between Ziak and me, when neither of us spoke the other's language...

...He does not tell me what Malraux, or Camus, or Murgatroyd means by "loved deeply," but it is not so long since, twenty years, maybe, or thirty, that I was called the Cut-Rate Casanova...

...Each season a little more belly here, a little more lassitude there...

...Come along aboard the good old Polaris and be a better man, then...

...He's a full-time fighting-man, is Murgatroyd, nailing his way from front to front and carrying the attack to the walls of the Pentagon...

...At Titian...

...What influence have they now...

...First I must make my mark and rear my children and invest wisely...

...He never saw Paris...

...The tragedy of post-war Germany," says Reinhold Schneider, "is exactly the same as that of pre-war Germany: Everything, all thought, all art, all beauty, all human relations are judged in a single context...

...Humor has already failed him...

...The sitdown-ers made it that in Flint, Michigan, in 1937 and now again, in our time, in Dixie...

...you will only irritate your countrymen and they will love violence the more...

...And in the unsuccessful event of his efforts, will he have bands enough of angels to fortify his forgiveness of his tormentors...

...Have they lived...

...And there is patina enough of truth in both assertions to withstand a superficial rubbing...

...He astonished me five years before that, when he said he was going to give up tennis because he had no right to amuse himself in a world like this...

...Milton, you will have a spectrum of nonviolent action projects to choose from this coming year...

...What will Murgatroyd say if I compare him with the lover of politics, the election-time fanatic, and say that he no better than the politician will understand the Greek don at Cambridge who, at the height of the Battle of Britain, was asked what he was doing for his country and said, "I am what England is fighting for...

...It was either Malraux or Camus who said, 'To have lived, a man must have loved deeply, traveled widely, and been in prison.' Have you lived...

...Elvis Presley...

...Unlike them, I know that I am ineffective out of prison...

...Where...

...I am like the Nixons and the Kennedys (and the Stevensons) who say to the CO., "I disagree with your view, but I respect it...

...he found them locked outside Hell's entrance and envious even of those within: The Heavens, to remain beautiful, drove them out, nor would deep Hell receive them lest the wicked gain pride by comparison . . . Pity and justice alike disdain them...

...How about it...

...The more unjust our society becomes, the more important an ingredient of it is the prison system...

...I fiddle...

...Such men as Young Murgatroyd, fanatical, monotonous, and unmarried, are frightening...

...His army is the Lord's, his buckler the Word, his helmet the shining thorn...

...He came to see me in Paris one spring—it was his first time abroad, and he had just landed— and said he wanted to talk about God...

...For all things there should be a reason...

...And if there is no international peace...

...But he will astonish me again by not doing it...

...Why, it would be madness to think otherwise, for if I don't have these things first, how can I be emotionally secure, or respected in the eyes of my friends...

...Horn-yonum will say about it...

...We played all night, and then I found out that he was Vice-President Andrej Ziak of the Czech Parliament...

...Rome burns...

...Must I be as deadly earnest as he to be saved...

...If a thousand like me went to prison—and then a million—we might get somewhere...

...Of all God's handiworks," I said, "Paris in the spring is His favorite...

...If he gave Shakespeare a pass, he'd have to draw the line somewhere...

...A few hours later he got up out of the chair and went on around the world and talked about God...

...It suffers from depravity, and what do I do?—I go on giving it its allowance to pay for its depravities...

...My commitments...

...a whole society with a suicide compulsion finds them afflicted with a martyr complex...

...This past spring—they are all alike to young Murgatroyd—he wrote me a long letter advising me to come east to go aboard the Polaris and almost certainly thence to the Federal Correctional Institution at Springfield, Missouri, from which Murgatroyd operates on a rubber band...

...I did not want Murgatroyd to have an apoplexy, I wanted only to rile him up to the point where he would, once again, astonish me...

...If I were Shakespeare, would he have me board the Polaris...

...Nobody will listen to them...

...Well, sir, one night in Western Europe, I got into a chess game with a man whose identity was wholly unknown to me...

...She and I grew up in a lighter air than that which now suffocates him and (I confess) oppresses us...

...So, Milton, I've done my best to provide you with opportunities...

...There are plenty of cells and the picture magazines will pay me no more attention than they pay Murgatroyd or Muste...

...Chess and the fiddle—which were played by "the Germans"—have no relation whatsoever to international peace...

...I think he would, and I do not say for sure that he would be wrong...

...It needs my cure...

...You bet he would...

...To do less and be political is to do nothing...

...He is right because his is the only way left to say No to the evil whose floorwalkers are the Nixons and the Kennedys (and the Stevensons...

...How much more would they be heartened by my absence when they learned that I was in stir for having done a small chore for the Lord, at the pain of a few months of close quarters...

...Civil disobedience at Edgewood will earn you at fewest six months in a Federal penitentiary...

...joined with that choir of wicked angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but for themselves . . . And where did the poet find them...

...it always will...

...Why should the machine which grinds up a President break its teeth on a Senator, an editor, a preacher...

...I would worry about Murgatroyd, and evade the issue...

...so the next time the fliers flew an RB-47...

...he must not cut himself off and some day blow up, as I predict Murgatroyd will...

...Writing...

...To do anything political, a man here, as there, must break the law...

...Whatever is done must be justified by the pursuit of international peace...

...Has he (or any man) a sufficient store of charity to survive his arrogant enemies, his fainthearted friends, and a publicum which mocks him...

...Then I will be able to turn my attention to helping other people, to reforming society...

...Would a bad man go to prison for $25,000...

...Weren't these (I said) important activities too...

...None of these opportunities is likely to win, for those who capitalize on them, popular acclaim, or even approbation from the pacifists, but then there is little in Christianity to make one expect popularity from doing God's will...

...It is with me only to worry about us both...

...When I was young and I said I would not let myself be forced to kill as many as possible of my brethren who were being forced to kill me, my literary agent, Mr...

...He knows where he is, and why he is there, and what he is...

...His monomania, like all monomanias, is wonderful to behold, all the more so in this neuter land...

...What right (outside the right to be fat-headed) have I, if I respect Murgatroyd's view, to reject it...

...Shall I find it if I give up chess for Russian...

...Dwight Macdonald's protest against having to read Inside Mayer wherever he turned...

...Chess and violin playing have no relation whatsoever to international peace...

...Meelton and I," said Andrej, "we speak the language of chess...

...Eisenhower and they all thought that the U-2 flights should be stopped...

...When he warns me and all men against "choosing to satisfy our desires and our wants first," he hands us Mayers still another dodge, still another reprieve from the issue...

...Nor will you suffer much from a few months of good hard labor, plain food, and regular hours...

...Must I believe that what I do or don't do will save others...

...She likes to have me at home once in a while, you know...

...Imagination, tenderness...

...Fox would say) to give Young Murgatroyd the business, I might do so smartly, and thus evade the issue, which isn't Murgatroyd at all, but me...

...We each have a chair...

...Murgatroyd is a stirring figure just because, like Gandhi and Hitler, John Brown and Torquemada, he believes in something with passion and most men in this hollow land are vacuous...

...We have perhaps, if we are fortunate, seventy years, a finite number of instants in which to choose, and each time we choose to satisfy our own desires and wants first, we make a philosophic error, do we not...

...But as for the statesmen, the editors, the preachers—in one word, the Mayers—their place in the apocalyptic scheme was assigned them seven centuries ago: . . . the wretched souls who lived without infamy and without praise...

...What is the price if he is to be redeemed from evil itself...

...There is a transient reality—the reality of seventy years of organic decay—and a durable reality which is timeless...

...Why don't I go and doctor it...

...My "desires and my wants," says Murgatroyd...

...What holds me...

...we'll talk here...

...I still remember Mr...

...In Hell...

...The durable is longer than the transient, but they are both of them real...

...The art of the impossible might become the art of politics...

...Ancient Greek you can study three to four hours a day in prison...

...I say I am expected in Eastern Europe to hearten the Christians there by my presence...

...Why not, then...

...Five hundred New Yorkers faced prison in the air raid drill last spring, and it was only two or three years ago that only four or five faced prison there...