Darconville's Cat (9 page)

  “Miss?”

  This voice came from the direction of—but it was not
hers. Darconville, with no small difficulty, fixedly tried to keep
his eyes focused on this student alone, a moon radiant only for the
proximity of that adjacent sun whose beauty, even in a condition of
reflected light, seemed startling enough to destroy his sight on
the instant.

  “Trinley Moss,” answered the girl, standing up, her
six bracelets jangling, in an opera blue turtleneck sweater and
plaid wrap-around, safety-pinned at the thigh. “Well, I believe
he’s right unhappy,” she said, “and that this star he mentions,
symbolizin’ brightness, is drivin’ this poor child here, I don’t
know, to wishin’ he could either touch it or, I don’t know, just
plain ol’ flop down and become a”—she shrugged—’’a eremite?”

  Darconville began to feel like St. Paul, watching
errors creep in at Colossae. It wasn’t all that bad, hardly a
matter for despair. He took teaching to be a mission, not a trade,
and sought to avoid the by-the-numbers
Drillschule
technique that, for one reason or another, had apparently long been
held in vogue there by various pompous doodles and
burgraves-of-fine-print on the Quinsy faculty, teachers, for whom
students were the little limbs of Satan, who bored the girls to
distraction repeating opinions seamed by cankerworm and reading
from lecture notes long since parched by the Dog Star. He would be
patient. At Quinsy it was an essential requirement, for although
the state constitution laid claim to its being a school of higher
learning, he from the very first day of arrival wondered just what
level they were measuring from, and if they took salt tablets when
doing so.

  Darconville ranged the room with his eyes for a
better answer— they couldn’t as yet settle on
la femme
d’intérieur
—and noticed a girl, her pencil poised above her
notebook, a response in her eyes, an answer on her lips. He nodded
to her.

  “I am Shelby Uprightly,” she said, neatly pressing
her glasses to her zygomatic arch with one finger. “John Keats in
his sonnet, ‘Bright Star,’ wishing to be steadfast, as he states,
but not alone, is quite painfully expressing, as he often did, the
particular tension of feeling he suffered when torn between a
desire for the Ideal, the lovely star, in this case, and the Real,
the girl mentioned in the last lines, someone he must have—”

  “Excellent. You outdo yourself,” exclaimed
Darconville. “And would you read those lines?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I won’t,” she replied,
confidentially lowering her voice. “I do not read well enough for
declamation.” She tilted her head. “Is that acceptable?”

  Darconville was nodding but continued to listen
intently long after the girl had finished speaking, as if
struggling with an idea encountered, not in the classroom, but at
the innermost of his being, one he was unable to comprehend—then,
suddenly embarrassed, he looked up from the fanciful call of that
mysterious girl in the right front row whose beautiful hair, like
that of the Graces, enshrined the face he couldn’t see. Who then,
asked Darconville quickly, would like to read the lines? He found a
girl sitting directly in front of him, bent down, and smiled into
her eyes.

  “You are—?”

  She was speechless.

  It was Millette Snipes, a girl whose comic little
face, perfectly round, looked like a midway balloon. She blushed,
tapping one of those pencils-with-funheads, and with a farm-bright
smile looked up with huge oval eyes that told instantly just how
deeply she’d been smitten with love for her teacher.

  “Shall I thay the whole poem, thir?” she asked,
brushing aside a cinnamon curl that had stuck to her nose.

  A wave of giggles broke over the class, until
Darconville, soberly, tapped the desk once with his pointer like
Orbilius
plagosus
. Then Scarlet Foxwell, her eye inset
with something of a humorful character, leaned over to show her
where to begin, but not before glancing back at DeDonda Umpton and
Elsie Magoun who were both pinching their noses to keep from
exploding with laughter.

  Then Millette Snipes, her elbows akimbo, her book
high, spoke in a voice from the family Cricetidae.

        ”No—yet thtill
thteadfatht, thtill unchangeable,

        Pillowed upon my
fair love’th ripening breatht,

        To feel forever
itth thoft fall and thwell,

        Awake forever in
a thweet unretht—”

  “Crisper, child,” said Darconville.

  Inevitably, she spoke louder.

        ”Thtill, thtill
to hear her tender-taken breath,

        And tho live
ever—or elthe thwoon to death.”

  The girl tenderly pressed the open book to her bosom
and looked up soulfully, her wopsical eyes moist and glowing.
Darconville thanked her.

  “Very good. Now, the poet here, as Miss Uprightly
earlier pointed out, aspires to the star’s steadfastness but, you
see,
not
at the cost of hermit-like loneliness. He is in a
state of suspicion about what must be sacrificed in the pursuit of
the Ideal. It is the problem, perhaps,” said Darconville, “of the
paradoxical man who wants to move, say, but not migrate. Fanny
Brawne, a coquette of sorts, was the woman Keats loved, and while
she was not specifically the subject of the poem—it could be
anyone—the poet wanted to live forever with whomever it was, such
was his passion, or else swoon to death.”

  “Thwoon in the thenthe of thuccumb?”

  “Precisely, Miss—”

  “Thnipeth.”

  “The Romantic, you see,” said Darconville, “is a man
of extremes.”

  “It’th tho thimple,” said Millette Snipes, “a thad
poem, but tho very very thimple.”

  “The greatest lines in English poetry,” replied
Darconville, “are always the simplest.” He lifted a lectern onto
his desk and leaned forward on it. “I have something for you—call
it, if you will, ‘The Principle of Trim.’ The poet, you see, is
rather like the seagull who has a perfect process for desalting
water, although no one can explain how it works: he baffles
out
of a given line, if he’s the enchanted metaphorsician
we hope he is, that which otherwise would directly explain it.”

  Darconville wanted to make this clear.

  “The simple line seeks to outwit, not merely resist,
the complexity of thought it noncommittally grows out of and, by
definition, filters out the ideas it must nevertheless, to be
great, always raise, do you see?”

  As he felt the presence of that one girl near him,
he listened distractedly to the voice that didn’t seem his.
Who
are you
? thought Darconville.
Who are you
? He tried
to concentrate his whole nature in one terrific effort to summon
up, that he might dismiss it for once and all, the formidable
magnetic mystery on his right that drew him so relentlessly off the
subject.

  “And therefore the greatest lines always imply the
longest essays, discourses, metaphrases which the poet quite
happily leaves to the agitation of critics, schoolmen, all those
academic Morlocks who study the brain of a line after its face has
come off in their hands.” Darconville looked around. “Do you want
me to repeat that?” (cries of “yes, yes”)

  Darconville thought for a moment. “The ring of a
mighty bell,” he explained, “implies, logically, a technical if
less melodic success in the shift and whirr of its gudgeons, a
secondary sound that can be muffled only in proportion to the
genius of the campanologist.”

  Glycera Pentlock, throwing an exasperated glance at
her neighbor, Martha Van Ramm, recklessly resumed scribbling away
in her notebook. But Ailsa Cragg, chumbling the tip of her pen,
gasped and blurted out, “What is a campanologist?”

  “Use,” said Darconville, “your definitionary. It’s
one of the last few pleasures left in life.”

  Poteet Wilson looked aggravated. Wroberta Carter
spun her pencil. And Barbara Celarent whispered a slang word which,
though unbeknownst to her, was once held in common usage by the
daughters of joy in fifth-century Babylon.

  “Language,” continued Darconville, “often disguises
thought. The successful poetic line, never discursive, is always
thought extensively profound—and surely, upon the examination that
is our burden, will be—but at its very essence it is the furthest
thing from it. Beauty only implies truth, as
fuit
implies
est
. The poet doesn’t say so, however; the factophile
does. Poetry is the more imperfect when the less simple. The nature
of great poetry—a perfect art attempted by imperfect people—
prevents the direct concern with truth and can only suggest by
singing what it secretly shields by showing. The greater the
simplicity stated the greater the complexity implied, you see?”
Several girls put up their hands. “And putting aside for now the
implications this has in the human personality, in affairs of the
heart, know only that the reader is left to assume whether or not
what the poet stated in Beauty he knew as Truth.”

  A yawn was heard, followed by the jingling of some
Scandinavian nail-jewelry.

  “Bear with me? God alone is pure act, never in
potency, whereas finite things ar.e metaphysically composed of act
and potentiality. But, in poetry, Beauty is act, you might say,
Truth the potency involved by inference in that act, and of course
there follow many attendant questions that can be raised: will
Beauty wane as Truth waxes? Is one the synonym, or the antonym, of
the other? And what of the old idea that Beauty, meeting Truth,
must always corrupt it—the Beauty that turns Truth, as Hamlet said,
into a bawd? What are the implications—the essential question must
be asked—of the Ideal?” A heavy inert apathy settled over the
class. “We must consider the final lines of another poem of Keats,
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ “

  The students, exhaling sighs, actually seemed to
decompress. It didn’t matter. Darconville, perhaps not even aware
of it himself, was busy sorting out matters in the depths of his
own mind.

  “ ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’: I call this
Keats’s Comfort—he is saying his prayers and, embarrassingly, is
overheard. It is a correct epistemological utterance, you might
say,” continued Darconville, “made aesthetically incorrect at the
very moment it is introduced into the poem. Beauty is Truth, Keats
forgot, only if and when the didactician is there to say so by
whatever means he can. Arguably, Beauty is Truth precisely when it
does
not
say so, just as, turn about, a holy man disproves
his holiness as soon as he asserts it. Ironically enough, then,
this, the most famous line of Keats, while starkly simple—indeed,
it is generally accepted as the classic example of such—denies
exactly what a simple line must be valued for, asserting what
should be implied, attesting to what it can’t. The line expresses
what it does not embody—or, better, embodies what it has no right
to express: a beautiful messenger appears delivering ugly news.
It’s a paradox in the same way that—”

  Darconville paused, turned to the blackboard, and
chalked out a wide rectangle. He wrote something and backed away
for perspective.

        --------------------------------

        | This
boxed sentence is false |

        --------------------------------

  “The paradox here is clear,” asserted Darconville,
“is it not? If the sentence is true, then it is false; if false,
then it is true.” Various eyes roved in troubled scrutiny over the
board. “Do you see? A liar says that he lies: thus he lies and does
not lie at the same time. The
jeu de mots
is fun
grammatically,” warned Darconville with a smile, “but imagine how
vulnerable would be your philosophical calm if this translated into
the behavior of a human being? Careful,” said Darconville, “with
your boyfriends.”

  The girls tittered.

  It was an academic matter, of course, and yet,
incredibly, Darconville found
himself
thus preoccupied,
searching to apprehend a figure in the distance, an interval so
wide, for a thousand reasons, it dulled the edge of consequence but
a distance nevertheless that also warned, by its very remoteness,
that no real exchange of feelings was possible, a morbid
underbreath, as if aloofness itself, whispering, told him to desist
from that which he must inevitably be excluded. And yet how often,
even from childhood, had this been the case in his life! And so he
listened to what he thought, serving to clarify a matter at the
heart of things and verify a falsehood. It formulated his final
remarks.

  “The artist,” concluded Darconville, going to the
window and staring out at a group of hardy catalpas, “when a
logical paradox to himself becomes, I suppose, the most unpoetical
of men.” A cardinal went
snip-snip-snip
in the trees. “I
don’t know, perhaps Keats had one glass of claret too many,
loitered palely, and was overcome with the necessity of writing a
line that could acknowledge two simultaneous but incompatible
forces within him: poet and priest. He becomes a pomologist”—Ailsa
Cragg looked frostily at Darconville and sucked a tooth—”trying to
get fruit back to its paradisaical best. ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth
Beauty’? It’s a
concio ad clerum
: a sermon to the clergy,
wherein the poet is attempting to cheer himself up—in a fit of
un-steadfastness, say?—and is at the same time begging us to accept
not only what we should but also that which, poor poet, he more
than sufficiently allowed us without special pleading. The poet’s
own voice has interrupted him. He is awakened by his own snore. The
line, which I disgressed to explain, is only a false bottom,
collapsing an otherwise beautiful poem—and one which provides,
perhaps, the best single commentary we have on the sonnet, ‘Bright
Star.’“ Darconville was finished. “Are there any questions?”