AN OLD MAN GONE
315
father found it possible to speak of himself as an "idealist" (it was
a tenn of the highest praise: Debs had been ,an "idealist") who had
devoted his life to the struggle for a better world and lived to taste
the riper wisdom of disillusion. Here again, a saving element of
irony partially retracted the statement, which was true only in its
broadest outlines. But the note of pathos was real: like many energetic
and willful men, he was extraordinarily conscious of the recalcitrance
of the external world, which he was driven to be always nervously
seeking to overcome, and he thought of life as a series of inevitable
compromises and defeats. In
his
political thinking, this brought him
perhaps too readily to the side of realism, but it largely protected
him from that demoralizing pseudo-realism which consists .of trying
to play the game of power without the necessary strength, and which
has been the special affliction of radical politics. On the private
level, the mood of pessimism was the closest he ever came to passivity
and contemplation, and it did more than anything else to soften the
harsh outlines of his personality; it was perhaps the chief source of
his personal dignity and charm, of his erratic and sometimes oppres–
sive generosity, and also, ultimately, of his humor, which even at its
most graceless seemed to express obscurely an acceptance of the hu–
man condition, as if
his
aggressions came out of some higher resigna–
tion that had taught him the uselessness of all ceremony. For me,
when I felt myself laboring under the immeasurable weight of my
father's presence, his pessimism became, oddly, a source of hope:
perhaps, after all, my failure was only part of the general failure, and
might be forgiven. For my own sake, I tried often to make pessimism
the central fact of his character (as I have been doing here), and
sometimes it became for me the very image of maturity; eventually,
it was one of the elements that made him look "natural" in his cof–
fin.
There is no doubt that he wanted more than he got. But how
much more, and more of what? Nothing he might have said in answer
could have been trusted, and perhaps nothing I can say either: the
more I write, the more absurd seems this effort to be "truthful." He
concealed himself behind a screen of restless, purposeful industry
which did indeed bear fruit; but the sum of his activity in its very
clarity never seemed to answer to the great unclear, unspoken de-
I
