Eating People is Wrong (2 page)

This tutorial, the first of the new academic year, had already assumed a characteristic tone of embarrassment and uncertainty. Learning lay heavily in the air like pipe-smoke. Treece leapt up
jerkily from time to time to pull books suddenly from off their shelves, and it was like throwing stones into a pool; the students jumped visibly in their seats, as if they expected to be attacked.
The cold light shone on the pupils of their eyes. Students (it was at Oxford and Cambridge that one called them undergraduates) were not at all cast in the heroic mould when it came to the study of
literature; they plodded along the towpath like barge horses. And, for the teacher, the desire to mould the great spirit, along with the search to lead one’s own life on the heroic level, was
soon defeated by the pressures of a heavy routine. Thus these three sat before him, the usual unpromising examination material which three years of tuition and, more importantly, self-discipline,
concentration, good influences, would bring to degree level – gauche youths, shuffling their feet, opening and shutting their new briefcases, noting down with ostentation the
not-always-valuable points, turning red when spoken to, propounding the too-glib possibility (‘Wouldn’t you say that was because of the influence of Marlowe?’), furtively
inspecting their new watches to see how much longer this was going to continue. You couldn’t help wondering about their sex life; did they like it, would they get it, what would they do with
it? It was with thoughts like these that Treece gave an extra-mural gloss to the academic man. That the place of knowledge was with experience he had no doubt, and the endeavour to attain to the
former when one had so little access to the latter always seemed to Treece a hopeless and foolhardy proposition.

Cumulo-nimbus stacked up outside; Treece always associated it with the provinces. Three weakly marigolds stood in a jar on his desk. Treece peered over the top of them and spoke on. He was
saying nothing very interesting and no one was saying anything very interesting back. He had become disabused with his own sparks of passion. It was difficult to engage, in the issues he felt to be
interesting, students who didn’t even buy books, who didn’t read the books they were invited to read, who had a scanty grasp of the contemporary or any other scene, who were
unacquainted with the principles of logic and straight thinking. ‘Mind, a wasp,’ said one of them, pointing at a seedy-looking, tired wasp that was making forays at Treece from a refuge
in the marigolds. It was as if their eyes sought out and fixed on objects as an antidote to Treece’s abstractions; their gaze flitted emptily about the air and focused on wasps, raindrops
coursing down the pane, the decorated spines of books in the bookcase. And as, with the clearer formulation in his mind of the impressions gained from passing glances, the students each began to
assume their own individuality, it became obvious to Treece that two of them at least were persons for whom statements about creativity meant exactly nothing. They were youths straight from some
grammar school sixth form, rejects of Oxford, Cambridge, and the better provincial universities, whose course could be charted easily enough; one could name almost the haphazard collection of books
that they would read, one could sketch out beforehand the essays they would write, indicate simply their primary values. They appeared each year, to eat for three more years in the university
refectory, to join sports clubs, and attend the students’ union dances held each Saturday night, sliding gracelessly through weekly waltzes and tangos, drinking down beer at the impromptu
bar, tempting girls out into the grounds in order to kiss them on damp benches; to throw tomatoes at policemen on three successive rag days, to go out in three years with perhaps as many
girlfriends, and finally to leave with a lower second or third class degree, passing on into teaching or business seemingly untouched by what, Treece thought, the university stood for –
whatever that was. Each year he wondered, is it worth it? Each year he planned to send out into the world, at last, a little group of discontented men who would share his own disgusts, his own firm
assurance in the necessity for good taste, honest feeling, integrity of motive; and each year the proposition came to seem odious as he foresaw the profound weariness and depression of spirit that
would overcome such people when, with too few vacancies in the faculties of universities, they would find themselves teaching in grammar schools in Liverpool or working in the advertising
department of soap factories in Newcastle. The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I’m a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to
extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues.

At this point Treece began, covertly, to inspect the third member of the tutorial group. He came as a slight shock of surprise. Unlike the others, he was not a youth and clearly had not come
straight from school. He had an extremely large head, moulded in great pocks and cavities and formed on, it seemed, almost prehistoric, pterodactylian lines. The front of his pate was bald, but,
starting in line with his ears, a great fan of unkempt black hair stood up; from out of large, eroded eyesockets, black shining eyes fixed Treece with a wet look that besought attention and
interest. ‘Who?’ wondered Treece, pausing in his discourse. He had forgotten the man’s name and wondered whether he should, in fact, be here at all; he looked the sort of man who
might have been passing the door and, seeing a tutorial about to start, had decided to participate. One could tell that he wanted to
know
. He was folded up tightly in a chair too small for
him, but he held his head up high, fearless and brave, careless of the shoddy little receptacle that held him. The holes in his pullover disclosed a shirt with a pattern of heavy stripes.
‘Well, now,’ he kept saying judicially from time to time; occasionally he nodded his head with slow, approving motions. While he went on talking, Treece furtively consulted the pile of
application forms left handy in a folder on his desk. Among the passport photographs pinned to their corners, he noticed one where the face of this disconcerting man peered fearlessly out, as if he
was ready to have this one published in
Time
; the heavy light from above and the inferior photography emphasized the large bone structure of the cranium and the shape of his excessively
large, wet mouth. The man’s name was Louis Bates, aged twenty-six. He had, the form revealed intriguingly, formerly been a teacher in a girls’ school. Then followed a gap of some time
during which he had not apparently been employed, but elsewhere on the form a bit of a hint was given to the nature of this pause; his experience, he said, included six months’ library work
in a mental hospital. Elsewhere, Bates had written, against the place marked
Interests
, in a large, European-style hand – ‘My interests are what the ultra-democrat would call
“highbrow” or “longhair”.’ This was a curious mixture of the promising and the absurd. Treece, possessed, paused and looked again at Bates. The moment of interest was,
it appeared, all that Bates had been waiting for for the last three-quarters of an hour. ‘Excuse,’ he said, wetting his lips with his tongue.

Treece stopped, surprised. In a low, insistent, carefully modulated voice, Bates began to talk, taking quick advantage of the lull. ‘What do you mean, precisely, by organic?’ he
demanded, taking up a point Treece had made a few moments before, and when Treece, a trifle disconcerted, did not answer immediately, he went on. ‘Well, it’s really no use our talking
in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us . . . and nothing’, he added with a wet grin, ‘to some of us. It’s all very well using
these coins, as long as we know what their value is, and agree on it. But do we?’

These near-impertinences drew looks of mingled consternation and amusement from the other two students. Treece looked a trifle uncomfortable, as if he had been invited to the wrong sort of party
and had now been asked to sing. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but is this let’s-define-our-terms academicism really important at this early stage?’

‘Well,
I
think it is,’ said Bates, after considering this with a great appearance of sagacity.

‘Do you?’ said Treece. Generously, he felt, he granted the fact that Bates was simply trying to state a presence;
I am here
, was what this was all about, and, perhaps,
I
know all about logical positivism
.

‘Well, is this ever irrelevant? When Coleridge called any aspect of Shakespeare’s work “organic”, he knew what he meant, and he left enough references elsewhere to make
it clear what he meant when he used the word. We don’t. And in any case the word is debased currency, in my view, and has been ever since Coleridge. I mean, words are all very well, I grant
you, and in the beginning was the word, which is to say that what thought is is articulation. Now it’s true that a play by Shakespeare can be described as “organic”, but if we
consider that in, say, almost any one of the comedies, there is a large body of added matter that is, after all, apparently if not actually irrelevant to the main theme, the word doesn’t mean
all that much until we’ve narrowed it down and clarified it. What are words for? How are words true? I mean, we want to know, don’t we?’

Of course Bates should have gone to Nottingham, where all the members of the English Department have read Wittgenstein, Treece thought; the truth is, Treece had to admit, that I don’t want
to get mixed up in this kind of thing. He said so. ‘What seems of most value to us all just now is a discussion on a simple level, accepting simple meanings.’

‘Well,’ said Bates, ‘let’s see what the others think.’ He looked about him. ‘What do people feel?’ he asked.

Immediately all was embarrassment. Feet were shuffled, faces reddened, useless notes were consulted diligently. No one spoke; then Bates, who seemed unconcerned by, or completely insensitive to,
the confusion, remarked, ‘Perhaps Mr Sykes will give us his opinion?’ Mr Sykes desperately fastened and unfastened his briefcase. ‘Mr Cocoran, then,’ said Louis.

Treece heroically took command. ‘The point must, I suppose, be a matter for some concern,’ he said, ‘but let’s save it up for your literary criticism tutorials. Here
it’s rather a diversion than anything else.’

‘Why?’ asked Louis Bates.

Treece looked at him ominously.

‘I mean, isn’t it a matter wider than critical?’

‘No,’ said Treece. ‘And so, I think, back to Shakespeare.’

‘What happens when you cut off my head?’ demanded Bates and Treece wondered for a moment if he had actually threatened this aloud. ‘I’ll tell you,’ said Louis.
‘I die.’

‘I grant you,’ said Treece.

‘But if you merely cut off my feet,’ went on Bates triumphantly, ‘I live. Yet both are organic to me.’

‘That’s enough of that,’ said Treece.

On the fringe of the hour, when the corridor outside echoed with the amplified sound of thunderous feet and barbarous whoopings, Professor Treece dismissed his tutorial. ‘Good afternoon,
Professor, thank you very much,’ said Mr Sykes and Mr Cocoran, bumping into each other as they rose, wondering what sort of an impression they had made, and whether they had, perhaps, worn
too bright a tie or shoes too fancily stitched. ‘Thank you very much, Professor,’ each repeated in turn, with little smiles, as they jammed side by side in the doorway.

Louis Bates, meanwhile, sat firm in his chair, openly enjoying the performance, waiting for the jerky mood of embarrassment to subside. Then when the door was closed again, when Treece had taken
his place at his desk once more and looked up questioningly across his papers, Louis commenced to speak, explaining in his carefully modulated tones just why he expected special treatment. He said
that he hoped that Treece would not mind his taking him to task on the matter of the word ‘organic’, but he believed that it lay in the true function of the university to promote that
interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The student could be, as it were (he said), the
rubbing post for the thought of his teacher. Treece peered down at his desk and, picking up a pencil, drew great rotundities on a scrap of paper. Bates looked just the way a bassoon sounds –
gruff, heavy footed, pompous. Let this be a lesson to you (thought Treece) not to have children after you’re forty; and with this came the uneasy recollection that he had only a year or so
left. Him, Stuart Treece, forty! – why, he was just not built for it. Bates went on. He explained that he admired the tutorial atmosphere, though the resolute refusal of his colleagues to
enrich discussion was a matter of some woe to him. He used that word –
woe
– right there in Treece’s office, and Treece supposed that it was the first time the word had
been used there, in the ordinary passage of conversation, in forty years; one had this perpetual whiff of the Victorian when one talked to Bates. Bates now said that Treece would appreciate that
he, Bates, was somewhat different from – indeed, he said, somewhat apart from – the other students in the University and suggested that the difference was, in part, one of maturity and
energy of intellect. He went on to announce that, if Treece was prepared to cooperate, he could quite easily get a first. This was, he said, not sheer bravado on his part; on the contrary, he had
come to the decision on a strict and critical assessment of skills and deficiencies. He reiterated his comment about the maturity and poise of his attitudes, adding that, moreover, he knew a bit
about these degree examinations and had come to the conclusion that it was little more than a question of effort. What was necessary, he said, was that Treece and he should work
together
.
‘I must have someone to give my work
direction
,’ he said. ‘I see,’ said Treece.