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Authors: Nigel Dennis
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warnings in the form of striking clocks, gathering stormclouds, jugular veins, termites, copperheads, wormwood, gall, Frankenstein, Leviathan, Juggernaut, bastions and dykes. But Divver’s imagery, which he applied without distinction to persons, or nations, or corporations, made his articles look like an up-to-date laboratory manned by all types of psychotic workmen. Sometimes he used his imagery so freely in the body of an article, that when the time came to sum up, his final conclusions sounded lame: “Congress may consider either or both of these imperatives. But it cannot merely twiddle its thumbs”; “One morning Senor Branco will awake to find that the train has gone.”
Although Divver believed in the omnipotence of Forces, he was equally faithful to the hope that somewhere, in a town he had never heard of, in a street he had never walked, in a top room he had never entered, he would find a great man who had succeeded in denying them. It was a source of shame to him that if he was let down really painfully by objects of his admiration, he became incapable of judging them in the calm scientific terms applicable to neurotics, and invariably fellback on irrational obscenities. He was a pugnacious man, and at such times he sometimes picked a fist-fight with someone, and felt a good deal better for it: it had always been a great help to him, though he never said so, to find that his most intellectual, anti-war friends looked on physical violence as a virtuous form of expression, the only natural and respectable outlet left, since sex had turned out to be chiefly a rational exercise of the super-ego. But when Divver’s disillusion was serious, not even fighting could help him, and he would miserably pick over his failures with previous heroes—the brave Negro trade-unionist whose fare to New York he had paid, and who turned out to be a wicked snob; the refugee with terrible stories to tell, who simply ended up as a bore; the talented girl whom Divver dreamed of making the first woman-President of the United States, or his third wife, or both, and who turned out to be just another masculine type. In these moments, he would have a horrifying fear that anybody who was capable of becoming his friend was bound to be a contemptible character, that he was doomed to despise anyone who liked him. He would also recall the sins of his youth: the fact that he had considered Jews a low type of persons; that the faces of tyrants had always impressed him; that the man in the street was just a mob. When he was depressed, he feared that he still believed these things, and that he would be discovered. He would dream of a group of simple but advanced people sitting around a plain table in a hut: one of them would say: “I’m afraid Max Divver cannot be counted as a serious man”—and Divver would wake up feeling that it must be true. Occasionally he was able to cheer himself up with a remark that put him back on a sound footing by giving him a strong classification: “I guess I’m nothing but a manic-depressive,” he would say to himself, and feel greatly relieved. At other times, he simply couldn’t think of a single scientific word that really seemed to be related to thebrutal, commonplace course of everyday life. Sometimes his self-contempt was so strong that he needed a visit to Europe to bring back his self-confidence.
He was helped by such visits because to find a hero one must first define evil, and Divver believed that evil in its basic form was exclusively European. He knew that it was wicked to think like this, and in his editorials he was harsh with people who did: such a point of view, he said, was chauvinistic and immature. Nonetheless, Divver could imagine real evil trickling into America only as a harbour official imagines the tricky entry of an undesirable alien. But unfortunately he also felt sometimes that by hogging all the evil, like old masters, Europeans made their lives unfairly exciting. When he met the
Although Divver believed in the omnipotence of Forces, he was equally faithful to the hope that somewhere, in a town he had never heard of, in a street he had never walked, in a top room he had never entered, he would find a great man who had succeeded in denying them. It was a source of shame to him that if he was let down really painfully by objects of his admiration, he became incapable of judging them in the calm scientific terms applicable to neurotics, and invariably fellback on irrational obscenities. He was a pugnacious man, and at such times he sometimes picked a fist-fight with someone, and felt a good deal better for it: it had always been a great help to him, though he never said so, to find that his most intellectual, anti-war friends looked on physical violence as a virtuous form of expression, the only natural and respectable outlet left, since sex had turned out to be chiefly a rational exercise of the super-ego. But when Divver’s disillusion was serious, not even fighting could help him, and he would miserably pick over his failures with previous heroes—the brave Negro trade-unionist whose fare to New York he had paid, and who turned out to be a wicked snob; the refugee with terrible stories to tell, who simply ended up as a bore; the talented girl whom Divver dreamed of making the first woman-President of the United States, or his third wife, or both, and who turned out to be just another masculine type. In these moments, he would have a horrifying fear that anybody who was capable of becoming his friend was bound to be a contemptible character, that he was doomed to despise anyone who liked him. He would also recall the sins of his youth: the fact that he had considered Jews a low type of persons; that the faces of tyrants had always impressed him; that the man in the street was just a mob. When he was depressed, he feared that he still believed these things, and that he would be discovered. He would dream of a group of simple but advanced people sitting around a plain table in a hut: one of them would say: “I’m afraid Max Divver cannot be counted as a serious man”—and Divver would wake up feeling that it must be true. Occasionally he was able to cheer himself up with a remark that put him back on a sound footing by giving him a strong classification: “I guess I’m nothing but a manic-depressive,” he would say to himself, and feel greatly relieved. At other times, he simply couldn’t think of a single scientific word that really seemed to be related to thebrutal, commonplace course of everyday life. Sometimes his self-contempt was so strong that he needed a visit to Europe to bring back his self-confidence.
He was helped by such visits because to find a hero one must first define evil, and Divver believed that evil in its basic form was exclusively European. He knew that it was wicked to think like this, and in his editorials he was harsh with people who did: such a point of view, he said, was chauvinistic and immature. Nonetheless, Divver could imagine real evil trickling into America only as a harbour official imagines the tricky entry of an undesirable alien. But unfortunately he also felt sometimes that by hogging all the evil, like old masters, Europeans made their lives unfairly exciting. When he met the
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