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PARTISAN REVIEW
out of the State university, with a job for the next year teaching at a high
school, and plans, after that, for a master's degree, and perhaps a job in
the department at Cornell, where he had an uncle in the Agricultural
School. The father had been a small business man in a Pennsylvania coal
town, the grandfather a farmer, the mother a little lady from Tennessee.
But then there came the Officers' Training Camp, and the brilliant war
record, and the right connections, so that the high-school job was never
taken, and instead he was playing handball at the Athletic Club in the
evenings, and working as a metallurgist for the steel company during the
day. Soon he was moved into production, but somehow he was too amiable
and easy-going for this, and after his first marriage, he went into the coal
business. When he came back to the steel company, it was as a purchasing
agent, and here his shrewdness and bonhomie were better employed. He
became Chief Purchasing Agent and Fourth V.ice-President; it was
doubtful whether he would ever go further.
For ten years, he confided, he had been visited now and then by a
queer sense of having missed the boat, but it was all vague with him: he
had no idea of when the boat had sailed or what kind of boat it was or
where it went to. Would he have done better to take lhe teaching job? It
hardly seemed so. Plainly, he was no scientist-the steel company had
seen this at once--and, had he taken that other road, at best he would have
finished as the principal of a high school or the head of the chemistry
department in a small-time state university. No, she thought, he was not
a scientist manque, but simply a nice man, and it was a pity that society
had offered him no nicer way of being nice than the job of buying mate–
rials for a company in Little Steel. The jop, she saw, was one of the least
compromising jobs he could have held and still made money; by regard–
ing his business life as a nexus of
pe~sonal
friendships he had tried to
hold himself aloof from the banks and the blast furnaces. He was full of
fraternal feelings, loyalties, even, toward the tin salesmen and iron mag–
nates and copper executives and their wives who wined him and dined him
and took him to the latest musical shows over and over again. ("Don't mis–
take me," he said, "most of those fellows and their women are mighty fine
people"). Still-there was always the contract, waiting to be signed the
next morning, lying implacably on the desk.
Here he was, affable, a good mixer, self-evidently a sound guy, and
yet these qualities were somehow impeached by the commercial use that
was made of them, so that he found himself, as he grew older, hunting,
more and more anxiously, for new and non-commercial contexts in which
to assert his gregariousness. He refused the conventional social life of
Cleveland. At the country club dances, he was generally to be found in
the bar, shooting dice with the bartender; he played a little stud poker,
but no bridge. In New York, he would stay at the Biltmore or the Murray
Hill, buy his clothes at Brooks Brothers, and eat-when Leonie was not
with him-at Cavanagh's, Luchow's or the Lafayette. But the greater part
of his time he spent on trains, talking to his fellow-passengers, getting
