1.

GANDHI
By Mary McCarthy

From On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961)
Pages 20-23 

Winter, 1949

“Well, did you hear, they got the Mahatma,” said a woman faculty member, settling down at the lunch table in the Sarah Lawrence faculty cafeteria. Her manner was bright and newsy, and she put the word Mahatma in comical quotation marks, as though to say the Swami, the old rope-trick artist. “The Mahatma,” echoed another woman teacher, holding her fork in the air, twinkling, merry, reminiscent, thinking, it would seem, of the long series of fads her newspaper memory spanned -- Coué, King Tut, Aimee McPherson, the cloche hat. There was a moment of silence before the conversation was reopened and raised to a “responsible” plane. “Nehru was much more realistic,” said a male history professor in a conclusive bass. No one articulated any further thoughts. Our end of the table -- the new, younger teachers -- glared at the others in defiant speechlessness: if Gandhi’s life, not to mention his death, was powerless to defend him against this complacency, what was there for us to say?

When I came home in the evening my little boy and the colored maid were talking about Gandhi too as she moved about, setting the table, and he sat on the floor, pasting stamps in his album. The little boy was angry, and the old maid was sad. “They ought to have let him live out his life and finish his work in peace,” she iterated sorrowfully, as if the right she claimed for him were too feeble and beaten to be anything but a plaintive mild assertion. “The dirty things . . .” said Reuel.

A little boy, an old domestic worker, myself and a few friends, we, I presume, must be the people who were meant by the newspaper and the radio commentators who declared, “The world was shocked to hear, etc., etc.” For the world, actually, was not shocked at all, and if we few protested Gandhi’s death, it was only out of raging impotence. We could not bring him back to life or punish his assassin or even influence others (the faculty realists at the lunch table) to feel the slightest regret for what had happened.

And the fact is that a protest against such a death as Gandhi’s, or Trotsky’s, or Carlo Tresca’s, can only be made to God. It is God, metaphorically speaking, i.e., some ideal assumption of an unwritten law governing human conduct, that we call to account for such an outrage; it is this assumption, indeed, that is injured. A crime like this cannot be felt toward in a positive or practical manner; insofar, in fact, as we are positive and practical people, it is impossible for us to fully react to it. After all, as one of those wise heads said in the faculty cafeteria, he was seventy-eight years old; in other words, it was time for him to die anyway. There is no action, moreover, which can answer such a crime. The futility of writing letters to the newspapers, holding memorial meetings, even catching the criminal, has been fully demonstrated in the Trotsky and Tresca cases; action somehow misses the mark. And today, if Stalin’s régime were to be overthrown and the entire NKVD brought to justice, Trotsky’s murder would remain unrequited, since it was not Stalin or the NKVD who struck him with the alpenstock but one man who came into his library and talked with him face to face.

The horror of Gandhi’s murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the fact of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull the trigger. The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around, and particularly today, on the left. One wonders why the Nazis did not kill Niemöller, for instance, when in Stalin’s hands his opposite number would certainly be dead. Prudential reasons do not explain it; it was imprudent, in the long run, to kill six million Jews. But the Nazis, in general, seem to have shrunk in an old-fashioned way from murdering their more prominent or distinguished opponents -- those opponents who were “symbols.” Not so on the left. On the left, it is Gandhi who can be killed or Trotsky, men integri scelerisque puri, while Stalin, apparently, bears a charmed life. Obviously, anyone with a matured plan and sufficient resolution could long ago have succeeded in killing this tyrant if some mysterious factor were not involved; he seems to have been protected, not only by his plain-clothes men, but more powerfully by the mana of his crimes.

In Gandhi’s death, as in Trotsky’s and Carlo Tresca’s (no one yet knows who ordered his murder -- the Stalinists, the Fascists, or some offended racketeer), the very amiability and harmlessness of the victim appears to have formed part of the motive: Gandhi on his way to a prayer-meeting, the Old Man in his study, Tresca stepping out from a spaghetti dinner -- the homely and domestic attitudes in which these sages were caught emphasize the horror of the attacks and suggest a reason for them; to the murderer, the serenity of the victim comes as the last straw. It is as though the very fact that these men were patently not dangerous had incensed the killer against them: for the past two years, Gandhi’s influence had been very noticeably declining; Trotsky and Tresca too, no longer “counted” as political forces in the world. Their murders, therefore, have an almost gratuitous character; it is as though the announced motive were not the real one. Was Gandhi murdered, as his assassin claimed, because of what he stood for in the Indian question or rather because what he stood for in his life -- simplicity, good humor, steadfastness -- affronted his assassin’s sense of human probability?

There is clearly some reciprocal relation between the fact that we (children, old women, and Politics subscribers) refuse, in a certain sense, to credit the killer’s deed and a refusal on the killer’s part to credit the existence of such a man as Gandhi in the world. And the good-natured derision of my colleagues at the luncheon table, as they “cut him down to size,” between mouthfuls, is different only in degree from the angry unconcern of the murderer, who immediately told reporters that he was not “at all sorry.” This crime and the Trotsky and Tresca crimes too are acts, as it were, of intellectual or artistic criticism; the killer eliminates these venerable men from the human scene as the modern academic critic dismisses the “good” characters in a novel -- glaring improbabilities.

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[From the book jacket] Mary McCarthy has been called by Time magazine “quite possibly the cleverest writer the U.S. has ever published. She is the author of Stones of Florence, Venice Observed and other works of fiction and non-fiction, and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Reporter, Partisan Review, Commentary, and Encounter. On the Contrary is her first collection of essays since Cast a Cold Eye (with the exception of Sights and Spectacles, devoted exclusively to theater criticism).