CHARACTERS IN FICTION
liS
to
inquire whether he has really been a Communist because
everyone is too preoccupied with defending
his
right to have been
one and still remain a teacher; even the college president, know–
ing (who better?) that politics has nothing to do with the pro–
fessor's being dropped from the faculty, yields as a professional
liberal to this blackmail. Now the normal way of telling this
story would be from the outside or from the point of view of one
of the professor's sympathizers. But I found I had no interest in
telling it that way; to me, the interest lay in trying to see it from
the professor's point of view and mouthing it in the cliches and
the hissing jargon of his vocabulary. That is, I wanted to know
just how it felt to be raging inside the skin of a Henry Mulcahy
and to learn how, among other
things,
he arrived at a sense of
self-justification and triumphant injury that allowed
him,
as
though he had been issued a license, to use any means to pro–
mote his personal cause, how he manipulated and combined an
awareness of his own undesirability with the modern myth of the
superior man hated and envied by mediocrity. To do this, natur–
ally, I had to use every bit of Mulcahy there was in me, and
there was not very much: I am not a paranoid, nor a liar, nor
consumed with hatred, nor a man, for that matter. But this very
fact was the stimulus.
If
I could understand Mulcahy, if I could
make myself
be
Mulcahy, it would get me closer to the mystery,
say, of Hitler and of all the baleful demagogic figures of modern
society whom. I could not imagine being. There was no thought
of
((Tout comprendre, c'est pardonner"
or of offering a master–
key to public events like
Darkness at Noon.
What I was after
was something much more simple, naive, and childlike: the satis–
faction of the curiosity we all feel when we read in the paper of
some crime we cannot imagine committing, like the case of the
man who insured
his
mother-in-law at the airport and then
planted a bomb in the plane she was taking. Certain crimeS,
certain characters, in their impudence or awfulness, have the
power of making us feel
bornes,
and in a sense I wanted to tip–
toe into the interior of Mulcahy like a peasant coming into a
