The Oasis (3 page)

Today, everyone connected with
The Oasis
, including its author, is long dead, and as the world from which it emerged is also long gone, the roman à clef aspect of the novella seems no longer of consequence. What does remain of consequence is the moving sense of familiarity with which we encounter McCarthy’s Utopians who, decked out in their all-too-human shortcomings, are
still
hungry to make anew a world in which we can all be saved from ourselves.

In fact, it must be confessed that, both in this world and the next, the wicked are always a source of considerable embarrassment.

—FROM THE PASSAGE ON MADAME
DE WARENS’S RELIGIOUS VIEWS
IN ROUSSEAU’S
CONFESSIONS

OBEDIENT TO THE SOCIAL LAW THAT MAKES THE moot guest the early bird at a tea party, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia. The past cannot be discarded in a single gesture, and Joe, in real life a diabetic businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to get more out of it than anybody else. This determination was purely spiritual. Translated from his factory and his garden to this heavenly mountain-top, he intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists. He meant no evil by this; he called it leadership. He expected to be a spur and an incentive, as he had been to the brothers and the brothers-in-law in Lockman Leathergoods below. He would not have been in earnest about the higher life if he had failed to think of it in terms of the speed-up.

Habits die hard, particularly with the successful, and where the other colonists, defeated, for the most part, in their earthly endeavors by drink, pride, greed, caution, or laziness, looked upon Utopia as a concerted New Year’s resolution, an insurrection of slaves against the inner masters, as well as a secession from society, Joe saw it simply as an extension of opportunity. He had always been a good man, and the only sin he had ever committed—the brother whom he had pronounced dead the day the shortage in the firm’s accounts was discovered—he considered a righteous act. His one regret in real life, aside from family cares, was that he had not found sufficient time to give to his painting, a hobby he had taken up in middle age for purposes of relaxation, only to find in art (he had gone straight to the moderns) something bigger and better than business, a gigantic step-up transformer for the communication of personal electricity which excited his salesman’s vision with promises of a vast “development.” He looked forward with the greatest interest to the conversation of writers and painters, and it did not occur to him that he was participating in an anarchistic experiment. He knew himself to be a good mixer, as well as a good neighbor, and the communal program of the colony filled him, therefore, with no alarms—“What’s mine is yours,” he was fond of saying to acquaintances, and though he voted the Republican ticket, he had long been of the opinion that there was too much selfishness in the world. His exodus from Belmont, therefore, had an orderly and calmly
transitional character. He had the AAA map out the route for him as usual, outlining the best highways in a serene wide ribbon of turquoise that ended abruptly, however, at the junction down in the valley, where the dirt road to Utopia trailed off from the numbered highway, anonymous and unmarked.

It was in the AAA office that Joe had experienced his first qualm. Before the blond secretary, he felt really humiliated to think that Utopia did not figure on his Socony Automobile Guide. Etymology being one of his hobbies, he had already done the derivation of Utopia from ou, not,
topos
, a place (“Notaplace, get it?” he had said to his wife, Eva), yet the stare of the secretary unmanned him. He could not resist the impulse to put Utopia on the map. Seizing a pencil from the girl’s desk, he had quickly drawn in a mountain where no surveyor had ever found one. “Look,” he said. “Next year Socony will have it, right between Shaker Village and the birthplace of Stephen A. Douglas.”

Afterwards, he was ashamed of what he had done. “Joe,” he said to himself, in the hillbilly dialect he had adopted for interior disputation, “you hadn’t ought to act thataway. What you care what folks think? We-uns up in the mountains don’t give a damn about they-uns down in the valley.” Self-parody was Joe’s misfortune; he was a buffoon even with his soul. A sad Jewish comedian, grey-haired, grey-eyed, grey-skinned, sick, intelligent, unsure, he lacked audience-sense to an almost fatal degree. He used a dozen masks, accents, patters, soft-shoe steps, to parry an invisible laughter
whose source he could not locate; in the confusion of these disguises, he had lost himself. The go-getting business man, the official greeter, the barber-shop harmonist, the Scout leader, the comic Englishman, Ikey the Jew, all these stereotypes were Joe’s repertory, but they were also Joe. He had made himself grotesque for fear of becoming ridiculous, and though somewhere within him there was a voice crying in the wilderness, it spoke in a babble of tongues, in the base dialect of the Philistines. He was a prophet without honor to himself.

“He is the antithesis of everything we stand for,” shouted Macdougal Macdermott, the editor of a libertarian magazine, the night Joe’s name was proposed to the Utopian council. “My God, aren’t we going to have any standards? I don’t hold his business against him; he may be a decent employer; but, my God, the man is uncivilized. Don’t you believe in
anything
? This fellow is a yahoo.” Ordinarily a generous-minded man, ready to oppose sectarianism whenever he observed it in others, Macdougal Macdermott felt the proposed admission of Joe Lockman as a personal affront. Of all the enrolled Utopians, he was closest to Joe by temperament. Tall, red-bearded, gregarious, susceptible to a liver complaint, puritanical, disputatious, hard-working, monogamous, a good father and a good friend, he had suffered all his life from a vague sense that he was somehow crass, that he did not belong by natural endowment to that world of the spirit which his intellect told him was the highest habitation
of man. That he could not
see
this world was a source of perpetual grievance to him; he knew that it existed through perceiving its effect on others, as a man in a snug house infers that the wind is blowing from the agitation of the leaves on the trees. Had he not seen a poem, he would have scoffed at the idea of poetry, and had the idea of poetry not been presented to him, he would have scoffed at a poem. Nevertheless, ten years before, he had made the leap into faith and sacrificed $20,000 a year and a secure career as a paid journalist for the intangible values that eluded his empirical grasp. He had moved down town into Bohemia, painted his walls indigo, dropped the use of capital letters and the practice of wearing a vest, and, having thus impressed his Sancho Panza into the service of quixotic causes, he now felt it to be the keenest ingratitude that he should be asked to admit into the fellowship a man who had done
nothing
. A whole habit of thrift in him cried out against the proposed largesse. Where was the justice in the world, if the savings of a lifetime were to be wiped out in a sudden inflation of the currency? Like the Prodigal Son’s brother, he rebelled against this capriciousness of favor; his logical character cried out against the illogic of grace.

In the heat of the discussion that followed, two tendencies crystallized, the strict and the latitudinarian, and the strict would have won the day had not Mac himself, in one of those reversals of feeling characteristic of amateur parliaments, suddenly shifted ground. The ease with which his arguments were prevailing
awoke him to question their validity; the novelty of winning a point put his dormant conscience on guard. He had been carried to the center of opinion more rapidly than he had anticipated, and the very smoothness of the voyage made him distrust the current of passion that had swept him there. The elation of his supporters disgusted him and invoked a sympathy for Joe which persuasion could not have induced in him. “The man is human,” he yelled, all at once, disregarding his previous contentions, just as though someone else had uttered them. “My God,” he exclaimed, wheeling on his chief constituent, “what is this word, philistine? You talk as if he were an ape.” “Mac,” his supporter protested, “you’re being inconsistent.” “What if I am?” he shouted, waving his arms in the air. “You know what Emerson said. All right,” he conceded, “I was wrong. The man has a right to exist.” “And what,” said Mrs. Macdermott, entering the argument unexpectedly, now that she found herself in agreement with her husband, and speaking in a quiet voice, “is Utopia but the right to a human existence?”

The others fell silent, mortified, recalled to their principles or to the principles, at any rate, of the colony, to which, however dubiously, with whatever reservations or secret hostilities, they were lending a gingerly credence. A few of the men grumbled, not because they disagreed with Mrs. Macdermott, but because they grudged Mac Macdermott the luxury of being both right and wrong in the same argument—one opinion apiece was enough in a democracy. And
the placidity of Mrs. Macdermott’s tone, sounding into their discord, fretted them as usual; Mrs. Macdermott, unlike the other colonists, had been born into New York society, and though a gentle disposition and an identification with the unfortunate had given her pretty, slight form and fragile pastel features that downtrodden and even necessitous appearance so common among charitable women, she still expressed herself in the secure manner of one who has enjoyed advantages; the silver spoon tinkled in her mouth whenever she spoke against privilege. Retiring and diffident as she was, she nevertheless appeared to feel herself as a modest pivot at the very center of judgment, and the long pale baby on her lap tonight, as always, seemed to point the finger of reproach at the less “responsible” members of the party—the Macdermott children, naturally, had not been made slaves of a schedule and enjoyed all the democratic freedoms, including the freedom of assembly.

“Eleanor’s right!” Mac shouted, slapping his knee in delighted admiration. He applauded his wife thunderously, as if she were a team of acrobats, whenever she performed what to him was the extraordinary feat of arriving at a balanced opinion. His co-Utopians smiled. At bottom, they were grateful to Eleanor Macdermott for saving them from an act of ostracism, which would indeed have been an ugly beginning for a community devoted to brotherhood. The incident, in fact, had frightened them a little. They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at
a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them from themselves. They now felt somewhat dashed to find that they behaved (or had nearly behaved) worse together than any of them might have done singly, and, reluctantly dismissing from their minds the vision of Utopia as a kind of collective security, they resolved that
from now on
(a phrase, alas, not new to any of them) they would set a guard on themselves and distrust their spontaneous feelings. There was no further debate about Joe Lockman, who was elected by acclamation—a good omen, everyone thought, for the success of the venture, for somehow, during the past half hour, Joe had become a symbol; the colony had found in this stray bird of the cormorant capitalist species, attaching itself so incongruously to their fortunes, its indispensable albatross.

Was it to follow then that
anyone
could be admitted to Utopia—a thief, a blackmailer, a murderer? Why not, declared the purists, arguing for the life of risk and the precedent of the bishop’s candlesticks. Impossible, said the realists: the physical survival of the colony was more important than a mere demonstration of principle—a strong and self-confident Utopia could perhaps afford a murderer, but a Utopia not yet consolidated must defer this luxury until a later date. Fortunately, perhaps, the point remained academic. No murderers or thieves applied, only ordinary people
of ordinary B-plus morality, people whose crimes, that is, had been confined to an intimate circle, and who had never injured anybody but a close friend, a relation, a wife, a husband, themselves. There were no saints in Utopia, and none that believed themselves saintly. The only saint with whom the colonists were personally acquainted had disappeared in a darkened city of Europe and was believed by the American consul to be, very probably, dead.

To members of the purist faction, the absence of this man was terrible, for it was from him, an Italian anarchist in possession of his first papers, a veteran of the Spanish war and of Vichy’s prisons, a lover of Plato and Tolstoy, a short pink-and-black man with a monk’s tonsure of baldness and a monk’s barrel chest, that they had learned certain notions of justice, freedom, and sociability which now, long after he had left them, they were endeavoring to illustrate in action. The realistic party, on the other hand, while sympathizing vividly with his American wife (far more indeed than the purists, who thought principally of the loss to themselves) and urging attention to the case upon various acquaintances in the State Department, regarded the absence of the Founder as, on the whole, a blessing. They feared, above everything else, that Utopia, like Oneida, Brook Farm, and the phalansteries, would make itself a laughing-stock by the advocacy of extreme ideas. To them Utopia was justified on sheerly practical grounds, a retreat from atomic warfare, a summer-vacation colony, a novelty in personal
relations; and though in their hearts they too hoped for some millennial outcome of the experiment, for the reign of justice and happiness, they shrank from a definition of the colony which committed them to any positive belief. Conspicuous goodness, like the Founder’s, filled them with uneasy embarrassment; they looked upon it as a form of simple-mindedness on a par with vegetarianism, and would have refused admission to Heaven on the ground that it was full of greenhorns and cranks.