SWING LOWER, SWEET CHARIOT
Mayer, Milton
Swing Lower, Sweet Chariot BY MILTON MAYER and trying to drum up a little business—I'm still there, and still trying—and I got a letter from my friend. "How old are you?" he wrote. "Fifty," I...
...In my fiftieth year I have learned to sleep on straw in youth hostels at a dime a night...
...not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering, and wantonness, not in strife and envying...
...I've been there," I said, "and it's a sell...
...No wind...
...Now you begin to fill up with wistfulness...
...at fifty he held down six jobs and wrote twice as much nights...
...but what he really wants is to be changed, but he has not come to the right Party...
...there's a reflection at fifty for you, friend...
...I know what moves my friend to keep after me decade after decade...
...Nothing but breaks...
...they all will, the little hypocrites...
...The locust will eat yet awhile...
...You remember the Roman's question: "What are you busy aboutT You remember the Carthaginian—Augie of Hippo, they called him—who despaired because children wasted their time in aimless play and then despaired the more when he considered that men wasted their time in things that were worse because they were aimed in the wrong direction...
...True, too, I have managed not to have time to think about why I am not a socialist, a pacifist, and a Christian...
...Now at fifty you must leave them and go back to being doctored, dentisted, dieted, opticianed, vitamined, and arch-supported...
...At twenty-five Bill Benton held down three jobs and wrote nights...
...At fifty Jesus and Alexander had each been dead seventeen years, each having overcome the world, in his own way, at thirty-three...
...Why, Mr...
...little girls who take me for their uncle, who no longer look at me on the street car or crowd over to me at parties or after lectures or receptions...
...I may squander my life at chess, but at least I don't have to tell the Ministerial Council that the American people support the Baghdad Pact—or that they know what it is...
...Fifty," and he whistled into the mail box...
...ONCE IN THE DEAR DEAD DAYS almost, I am glad to say, beyond recall, and before everyone wondered how soon life would end all at once, a literary con man, or fourflusher, leapt aboard the Dale Carnegie gravy train with a book called Life Begins at 40...
...You'll get your second wind at the end of the first mile...
...Let it turn lightly, friend...
...I have never been one to be diddled by the Diddlers of the Masses...
...I lived long enough to hear of what the old Chassid said of the man who foreknew in his lifetime that for him there was to be no heaven: "What a unique and enviable chance that man had of doing right without fear of reward...
...Fifty," I wrote back, "and don't tell me I'd better get going...
...If you think that ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny—still more so, philogyny—you're out of your head...
...And he takes up, and the book falls open, and he reads: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day...
...This, when it comes over a man, at fifty, forty, or eighty, is said to be a beginning...
...God heard me scream when I jumped down from the mountain top...
...IT'S OTHER PEOPLE'S DAUGHTERS WHO rowel me, not my own...
...call them good days...
...Michelangelo had finished the Sistine ceiling fifteen years earlier, and his back still ached, and Leonardo had learned enough about Woman to paint her picture...
...Against him, at fifty, I make war...
...At twenty-five I held down three jobs and wrote nights...
...An old friend, who shall, or should, be nameless, and I were fishing up at Mud Lake once, using an empty bottle for a float...
...I want you to write your reflections on being fifty...
...It's a great life only if you weaken, and this is the Hot Gospel, the Law and the Prophets, the Medes and the Persians, and the Real Gazookus...
...But not to me...
...Are you sure, my friend, that you are not winning the wrong one...
...I wish he'd find something to do...
...Henderson...
...If you have an affair, put your affair in order...
...I don't want her $350...
...Who's the writer in this family...
...Nobody can fire me...
...But put ye on the Lord...
...But not yet...
...You're approaching your prime," he said...
...To your homework, friend, and I, at fifty, to mine...
...He is right behind me on the unlighted path of life...
...Maybe your raptures (when the dentist stops drilling) and your agonies (when he starts) will distract you...
...I wouldn't know, but I can imagine...
...Hierarchy, hierarchy...
...The first fifty years have been a toboggan ride, a two-mile jog...
...I don't try to tell you He does...
...Are you even sure you are winning it...
...in the year 1900, Andrew Carnegie made $23 million and paid no income tax, and his workers' wages averaged $400 a year...
...Anything less and he is about the same this year as last— a little seedier, a little greedier, a little timider...
...So fast flies this life, and lest we have time to think, we fly it faster...
...Chess is the ultimate form of supraverbal communication...
...Let your death mean nothing to you, and it will mean nothing to anybody...
...Nobody will miss you...
...But if you were to live ten minutes less than forever, that would still be the case...
...He kicked them off and told me some of his troubles...
...I waited and waited for life to begin...
...A couple of months ago I was in Europe saving my money Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor for more than forty years, died on April 20...
...Ah, but then their ranks (if not they individually) begin to thin...
...Meanwhile, I am my own man and my own fool and not, like Mr...
...I'm just about the same, except for my hair, or, as I am now able to say, my hairs, as I was at Mud Lake...
...And you must establish your hierarchy in terms of two separate and coordinate principles...
...I finished late that night, and Englewood won the meet by one point and, with it, the city championship...
...An old friend dies—if you haven't died at fifty nowadays, you never will—and that's a greater betrayal...
...It will lie to thee and tell thee that thou hast twenty-thirty good years yet...
...Peaches-and-cream little girls—past their teens now...
...Then He wised me up by letting me hear the Chassid, the vicar of Wakefield, and A.J...
...In my fiftieth year I have learned, in a word, to punish myself a little, knowing that at fifty the devil's whisper is always, "Why punish yourself...
...In the fall an old man's fancy turns to death...
...They leave you there alone, with strangers, who do not care what happens to you because they themselves are beset, like you, with their responsibilities and their betrayal and (finally, when you and they are both very old) their bitterness...
...But his friends grow old with him, and, growing old all of them together in lockstep, they are always young and fair (or fair to middling) to one another...
...You are coming apart now...
...I would wait until I was forty and life began, and see for myself...
...I waited and waited for life to begin at...
...So flies this little life, and a fellow with it, away...
...And so they have been, like every ten years before them...
...All the breaks...
...He wants to know if I see anything up ahead...
...To thine worst enemy, the mirror, friend...
...And if you, my friend, think, you and your campaigns to change the world, that you will not leave the world and yourself a little worse than you found them, you're crazy...
...It isn't bad...
...You must have a fixed hierarchy of things you intend to do and steer yourself by it, for he who will not answer to the rudder will answer to the rock...
...if I do, it will be because I changed myself into a chess player...
...Now, as I totter around Russia and parts farther still, I need not learn the language...
...The good for which he chooses it he will do tomorrow...
...It didn't...
...All He had to do was direct my attention to the merchant prince's unbuttoned button, to the judge's cuspidor, and to the wisp of straw sticking out of the stateman's shirt...
...Everything is said to be easy for Him, but this was pie...
...Thus, it would seem, and only thus, life begins...
...None of his virtues, wisdom included, offsets his one unforgivable vice of being old...
...True, I have attacked everybody, I am a war criminal, and my back aches...
...I'm gone...
...Me— I die forever...
...Helena to think about why he was not a socialist, a pacifist, and a Christian...
...The only thing you can count on doing forever is busying yourself being dust...
...I had my feet on his desk...
...Hilas...
...if God exists, nothing else is important, simply because the road ahead is longer than the road behind...
...But nothing decisive happened, and not much even indecisive...
...I may never get it paid off, but at least I won't welsh...
...The next ten years will tell the story...
...We will continue to support it and its objectives...
...IN MY FIFTIETH YEAR I HAVE LEARNED to play chess...
...Things are great, even peachy, but they always were...
...Who sees the sparrow fall...
...He looks behind him and around him, and it is dark unto ebon...
...Do you know," he wrote back, "what I want you to do...
...Not at all, says the mirror...
...The evil he chooses, my son," said the vicar, "he must do today...
...first, in terms of the things that are good in themselves, such as changing the world, and second, in terms of the things that are within your own power, such as changing yourself...
...And he whistles a beatific whistle and sells what he has and gives it to the poor...
...still better, nobody can pension me...
...Learn to do good...
...I never will, fll keep going anyway until they repeal Newton's first law of motion...
...you will change the world in so far, and only in so far, as you change yourself for, as the men are, so will the world be, and you, though you would never know it to look at you, are a man...
...chess is the universal language...
...Consider how your light is not spent but thrown away...
...So fast flies this little life away, I remember a tale out of school, and what a school...
...But I'm a miler," I said...
...the worse the bargains, the tighter he hugs it...
...He picked me up and threw me into good company and let me see Red Schaal of the American Friends Service Committee bent in half carrying suitcases full of books through the railroad station so that the two-bit tip would go, instead, into a bottle of milk for a kid somewhere far away...
...He kept calling my attention to little items like that— always little items—like the little item from Toyko that reported that sixty Japanese (sixty known) had died in the year 1958— you heard me, 1958—of radiation incurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the year 1945...
...when he took off, he reminded me that Sophocles hadn't hit his stride until he was ninety...
...Where...
...In another ten years, fifteen anyway and maybe five, you will be coming apart full-time...
...and that the masochist answer is the only right one, "Because I enjoy it...
...THE LESS A MAN HAS TO lose, the less he is willing to risk...
...and signing no more petitions, writing no more inspirational essays, running for no more offices in which he may serve his fellow citizens, and selling no more soul for no more money, he walks into a monastery (like the young man who bombed Hiroshima) and escapes at last (like the young man in Stendhal who went to join Napoleon) the sorrows that are poisoning his life, especially on Sundays...
...If you will avoid misery, reflect...
...You're neither a miler nor a two-miler," said Rosie, "but there are only two men entered, and if you finish, we pick up a point...
...just enough to make my fortieth year a landmark...
...There is, of course, the grace of God...
...we've been traveling companions for fifty years—and I know his name...
...So they maintain the hallucination...
...Me, too...
...Bite off more than you can chew-sure—but not so much that you choke on it...
...Your death—reflect at fifty, friend—means nothing except to you...
...He wants to know when life begins...
...In an Italian hostel a Greek standing next to me in the washroom said, "You are the first American boy I have met in a hostel...
...But how have you spent a fourth of yours, my friend-deciding that to go to war with the Democrats is a lesser evil than going to war with the Republicans...
...The Bentons, Geheebs, and Sophocleses live forever...
...In my fortieth year I thought I was just about where I was in my thirty-ninth...
...This article appeared originally in June 1959, when Mayer and The Progressive were fifty years old...
...I remember the mountain top and its raptures and its agonies and how little time it left me to think about why I wasn't a socialist, a pacifist, and a Christian, and I don't have to go up there any more...
...I haven't got time to listen to him...
...Who changed her diapers and washed them and wiped her little nose and held her while she took her medicine and sat her on the toilet and wrapped her pink blanket around her to keep her warm...
...my friend—never...
...At fifty Marshall Field II had, by pluck and luck, accumulated $75 million...
...I see that the road ahead is longer than the road behind...
...I was reading in the paper, only the other year, that sixty-five scientists who made the atomic bomb for Mr...
...Meat fifty I have overcome no worlds, painted no ceilings, learned nothing about women, and accumulated between $34 million and $75 million worth of grocery bills...
...I'm challenging Brother Mao...
...You insist that you would do more—maybe remake America—but America is remaking you faster than you will be able to remake it...
...I am losing the war-winning a skirmish here and there, but losing the war—but at least I am losing the right war...
...I was sitting in the office of the president of the school, admiring his $ 150 million...
...I only said "maybe...
...Nothing but breaks...
...At fifty I'm winded...
...Under the circumstances he mistakes one landmark for another (or a divot for a landmark) and some, lying lower along the horizon, he does not discern at all...
...Quick, turn off the lights and we'll pretend we're in bed...
...If I had time to think," he said, "I would have to think about why I am not a socialist, a pacifist, and a Christian...
...I remember the first time I heard myself saying that Socrates's choice was no mystery: by being noble, and taking death instead of dishonor, he simply traded in a couple of years of life for immortality...
...Through no virtue of my own, I'm a free enterpriser, and therefore, a free man in posse...
...The American government and people have unstintingly supported the Pact...
...Money, fame, and power were a dime a dozen, but many an eye had a cinder in it...
...They ought," he said, "to be the best ten years of your life...
...I have learned to live on a little less money, a little less fame, and a little less power than I lived on twenty years ago, knowing that at fifty the devil's whisper is always, "All these may be yours...
...said my friend, who thought he had just snagged a pike but turned out to have snagged a pikestaff and had grown pensive...
...never anything else, and neither of them recollectable now except by analogy...
...An old friend moves away, and that's a betrayal...
...a hair here and there gone, another here and there discolored, gray with the dust of life's dusty road...
...That's the kind of talk...
...I know the devil—I guess I ought to...
...best of all, nobody can retire me with a blue-plate dinner and a gold watch (which turns out to be plated) for fifty years of faithful service to—what...
...It is Ego...
...And after doing all that for me, He crowned His free and unmerited gifts by letting me grow old without growing up...
...Like all sweet deceits, this one sold a lot of copies...
...The devil took me up to the covers of the slick magazines and watched me leap off and split his sides as I screamed going down...
...Confound it, I haven't seen $350 in one piece in twenty years...
...Third wind...
...I'm retreating," I said, "and there isn't any story...
...I was wrong, of course, because the man who thinks he is just about where he was a year ago didn't know where he was a year ago either...
...death is wasted on the old...
...He didn't mind dying...
...He was an old man, anyway," I said...
...At fifteen Coach Rosie Rosenbaum of the Englewood High School track team put me in against De Paul in the two-mile run...
...What a waste...
...You must have some...
...I feel as heavy as yonder stone...
...in which case work or play will burst you, and the wistfulness of a sprig of mignonette, of a ribbon, of a glove or a garter, will come seeping back anyway and fill you up...
...You'd better get going," he said...
...See the Editor's Memo on Page 4 of this issue...
...I remember the time a vicar in the town of Wakefield was quoted as telling his son that a man must never choose the lesser evil in the hope that he might, thereby, survive to do good...
...Don't get excited...
...Recollected in no tranquility the first love...
...But maybe it won't ever end either...
...Age forty came and went...
...And in Karachi a month or two ago Mr...
...I tell you that these separate principles are not only coordinate but cooperative...
...rapture and agony...
...Somewhere," he said...
...A little child of mine led me and beat the pants off me...
...I never got my second wind...
...It isn't bad, to have lived long enough to hear the Word, even on the fly...
...I don't mean that He left me illiterate...
...Thanks just the same...
...And who, did you say, is Mr...
...if you work and play by day and by evening, then by night...
...Landmarks are hard to discern anyway...
...Henderson, as head of the American observer delegation to the Baghdad Pact Ministerial Council, informed the Council, as per Dulles, Acheson, and Stevenson, that "the free nations recognize that survival requires concrete measures to meet the threat of international communism...
...Reflect at fifty...
...What right has my Little Julie to sell a story for $350...
...Things went on, or didn't go on, pretty much as they had...
...You will know, the day it's discovered, what television is going to be and do, because you saw radio do it...
...I have spent maybe a fourth of my fiftieth year playing chess with the companion o.m.s.(a.t.c.o.m.o.t...
...But you're too tired to work and play, too tired to withstand the wistfulness...
...What you need," I said, "is time off, to think...
...if I see darkness ahead, what see you behind except darkness...
...Kids who once wanted advice are giving it now...
...he has to fight now for a hearing...
...What Lucian, Cervantes, Swift, and Rabelais saw and articulated, He taught me to see and left me inarticulate lest I let the devil take me up to the mountain top again...
...Fool, this night...
...It never did...
...If, fool, this night my soul is required of me, my regret is that I owe the world a living and I haven't had time to pay anything on the debt...
...One day, as he weeps in the garden, he hears a voice as of an angel saying: "Take up and read...
...Unless you're a fool clear out to the rind, you have long since discovered that there is no progress...
...his gray hairs command the disrespect of the young...
...Ah, yes, because of all the things you intended to do...
...He taught me to read straight, so that when I read the words, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us," I knew that the important word was "as," and I realized I'd better get going...
...what I want is for her not to have sold a story for $350...
...oh, a wee bit, but only a wee—dimples to creases and creases to ruts...
...But before tomorrow comes, the book of his life may be closed, and then the evil he did will be written in it, and the good he would do—" I remember the time I read of the man who ate, drank, and was merry, instead of building a barn for his goods, and then resolved that he would positively build the barn tomorrow, when he heard a voice saying, "Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee...
...It will burst you unless you work or play harder to shrivel it...
...If thou wast not handsome then, hast thou changed...
...I've been intending to pay—a little something, anyway—but the road to good intentions, my friend, is paved with hell...
...I whistle up the Urals...
...Now just what are the things you intend to do, friend...
...Paul Geheeb, the greatest educator in Europe, is out mountain-climbing in the Berner Oberland at eighty-nine...
...At fifty I hold down no jobs and write days—some days...
...Everything—a lilac bush, a sidewalk crack, an ice cream cone-bespeaks wistfullness...
...Brother Ziak, the vice president of the Czechoslovakian People's Republic, beat the pants off me...
...Cut yourself down to size and them with you, or you will be miserable when you have lived ten minutes less than forever...
...The Baghdad Pact is playing a significant role in this effort...
...There followed the years 28/JUNE 1986 (when life first flew fast away and you never noticed) of no doctor, no dentist, no diet, the years you did as you pleased, the years you balanced on ladders and then the years you played with hooks...
...But I always was...
...When you were little and you had your toy hook-and-ladder, you were doctored and dentisted and dieted all the time, and you had to leave your hook-and-ladder for them...
...He even saved me from saying, like The New York Times the day after the Nazi murderers were murdered at Nu-renberg, that "mankind has entered a new era of international morality...
...It's the end of the first mile and the beginning of the last...
...I was maybe a wee bit worse in my fortieth year than I was in my thirty-ninth—just a wee...
...and at sixty he holds down nine jobs and writes three times as much nights...
...I said...
...It's the space age, and he hasn't found out yet how to use the space he already had...
...He says, and he thinks, that he means to change...
...Here comes old man Mayer again...
...I lived long enough, too, to hear A. J. Muste say, "If I can't love Hitler, I can't love at all...
...When I go back into faithful service—if ever—I'm going to take the light yoke, and you know Whose that is, friend...
...I will restore to you," the Lord promised me through his prophet Joel, "the years that the locust hath eaten...
...they go on dancing, or drinking, or walking, or whatever they always did, with one another...
...The long pull, and all pull now...
...Then I taught the companion of my sorrows (and the cause of most of them) and now she beats the pants off me...
...This little life flies by so fast, and a fellow has all he can do to hold on to its tail feathers...
...meanwhile I would save my money...
...I don't even want her not to have it...
...Maybe I'll change the world...
...If you don't, keep going anyway...
...Where have I been all my life...
...Forty," I said...
...Me—I was superannuated at fifteen...
...My friend, who was a couple of years younger than I (and, indeed, still is), whistled...
...Truman, on July 15, 1945, not to use it...
...At fifty the devil takes over, if, indeed, he has bided his time that long...
...There are twenty-thirty years in you yet, but don't call them good years...
...What right have they to take you for their uncle, to go out with you, unafraid, after dark...
...A fellow is ever more isolated...
...nothing else, then, is important except whether God exists...
...Then He gave me the gift of prophecy, so that I knew before-every brave new war began that the winners would be the buzzards and the sharks and so that I would never make an unholy chump of myself by saying, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the aim of the peace-loving peoples was to get rid of German militarism forever, "the cancer which for generations has produced only misery and pain for the whole world...
...never picked up a point again...
...see all the relicts, a few months afterward adjusted, a few years afterward happy as birds...
...Henderson, somebody else's...
...He taught me that, when I read the words He spoke to the Prophet Isaiah, "Cease to do evil, learn to do good," He did not mean "do good" but "learn to do good...
...No use stalling around and waiting for life to begin, because it won't, not ever, not even if you live to be fifty...
...Henderson is Loy Henderson of the Dulles-Acheson-Stevenson State Department...
...I was reading in the paper, and only the other day, that the Essex Universal Corporation, which makes missile control systems, has acquired William Gluckin & Company, makers of corsets and brassieres, and that Wilson Brothers, men's underwear and shirt makers, have absorbed the Sciafe Company, producing missile equipment...
...Among the new things a fellow resents, at fifty, are his children, as his parents resented him, and with reason...
...Muste...
...A very old man—I know some great men who are very old—is either a bore or suspects that he is...
...Who taught her to write...
...But she will always pretend that all that she is today she owes to her darling father...
...and Napolean had had four years on St...
...But at least I don't have to go up there any more...
...You will be old and resent every thing new—plastics and light metals, calculators and computers, ranch houses, clutchless cars, frozen foods, picture windows, and turnpikes...
...IT'S FUNNY...
...At fifty Hitler attacked everybody, and at fifty Alfred Krupp, who owned a hundred companies at thirty and was a war criminal at forty, owned a hundred companies again...
...Not yet—but soon...
...Mozart at thirty-five...
...Boy...
...TWENTY YEARS AGO I WAS AN eagle flying high in Bombay...
...It isn't death but dying that bothers you, is it...
...Roosevelt petitioned Mr...
...He inflates a fellow's ego as a defense against being passed by by the world and the new generations indifferent to what a fellow knows and thinks and is...
...Young man," said an old man in the group, "you have never been an old man...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
