The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (14 page)

Howard nodded, soberly. He had followed Domna’s argument to the end, unlike most of the others, because he knew her to be honest and presumed that therefore, before she finished, a doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole. In general, he agreed with what she had said, though with certain practical reservations. He was quite well aware that he knew nothing empirically about the quality of Hen’s teaching; but neither, he was certain, did the others, and he would have liked to get this admission on the table. “Fitness to teach” was an imponderable which he had no intention of pretending to weigh; administratively, however, Hen was a nuisance, and while he himself would have done nothing to dislodge him, he thought it obtuse to pretend that no reason for dislodging him existed. Domna’s “right to be wrong,” he thought, smiling, he did not contest, especially since the phrasing seemed calculated to disturb the certainties of the others, those of Aristide, in particular, whose face, bent in consultation now with Domna, wore a thoroughly anxious look, as though he had abruptly discovered that he had been exposed to some contagious disease. “You think it possible, then, that we are mistaken in Hen?” he gravely queried, accepting a piece of ginger from Alma and sinking his large, white teeth into it cautiously, as his big pale gray eyes probed Domna’s bright ones.

“Unlikely,” declared Alma, plumping down the silver dish. “Domna is right, of course, abstractly. Some sort of act of faith is probably involved for all of us here. But it’s not the unreasoning faith of a savage; it’s the accumulation of a lifetime of observation and inference. I can’t say, of course, from my own direct knowledge, that Henry is a good teacher. I go partly by hearsay and mainly by inference. I know, from our talks together, just as you all do, that Henry is a man with a brain, a big brain. The finest brain, if I may say so, on our faculty. I can’t think that our students can find anything but profit in being exposed to that brain, whatever happens to their projects or their ridiculous achievement sheets. I’ve profited myself, I can promise you. The man thinks rings around me.” She blew out a puff of smoke and mechanically all looked upward for the ring to form. The definiteness of her tone produced in every mind a concrete and haunting image. Mulcahy’s brain seemed to materialize before them, under Alma’s pointer, like a slide in a medical lecture, a cranium in profile or cross-section, with the tissue of veins and arteries, the soft gray matter, the cerebrum and cerebellum, all of unusual size and preternatural activity. Aristide’s eyes protruded. “You don’t say?” he exclaimed. “I should not have rated him quite so high. Where would you place him, Alma, on our friend Grünthal’s scale?” Van Tour giggled. “How about the Rorschach?” he whispered to Domna. “I agree with Alma,” she proclaimed, silencing him with a jab of the elbow. “Henry is the only man in the department who has standing outside of Jocelyn. I knew his early articles in the
Kenyon
when I was still a student. The synthesis he tried to make between Marx and Joyce was an important critical effort of the Thirties. You may pretend, Howard, that Joyce is a dead end,” she went on, excitably, though this was what she thought herself, “an interesting molehill in which certain pedants have tunneled till they buried themselves alive, that all this is pseudo-modernism, neo-orthodoxy, but what else, please tell me, is there that you find so un-sterile and fructifying? Where has your Proust led us? What you consider modern, your new decadence, is simply the latest billow of the Gothic Revival—Petrus Borel, my God!” Her accent had become more marked, as she felt herself moving along sure ground; like most European women when they argue, she was both angry and zestful. “You may say that these Joyce excavations of Henry’s are like some labor of the Pyramids, a monument of waste in the desert! Yes, in a certain sense, I agree, but it is at any rate a monument, a work requiring patience, study, the knowledge of seven foreign languages—a human sacrifice! What have you or I or any of us here to compare with it? Which of us has learned Italian or studies Hebrew at night with the Bible?”

Domna stopped, breathless, scornfully conscious that she was probably giving offense to the feelings of the others. Whenever she saw, or thought she saw, excellence, she had a summary impulse to make others bow the knee to it, as she did. Generosity in all things was a point of pride with her, but she had no pity for those too lowly placed to dispense it. Thus, in the little speech she had just made, she had been driven by the demon of arrogance to wound Furness’ vanity and incidentally, for all she knew, the separate vanities of the other three. But for the moment she felt perfectly reckless of such matters and did not care whether the effect of what she had said would be a net reduction of the sympathy that had hitherto been extended to her idol. Indeed, she rather enjoyed the idea that only she was sufficiently spendthrift (that is, sufficiently rich in resources) to pay Mulcahy full homage.

A constrained silence followed her outburst. “Grant Hen everything you say,” remarked Furness at length, “none of all that really touches on the question of whether he’s the right man for Jocelyn or for this particular department. God knows,” he interjected, laughing, “I don’t want to put myself in the position of robbing the poor-box or taking the widow’s mite. Let’s pretend that poor old Hen was a big figure in his time; let’s allow him his few words of Hebrew and his quotation from Leopardi. What you’re invoking, nevertheless, Domna, is a medieval standard of scholarship as an end in itself. Here at Jocelyn, I’ve been given to believe, we’re after something different: an active, two-way relation between the student and the faculty-member. Great learning can be an impediment to this; it opens up too great a hiatus, as in Hen’s case, between the student and the instructor. Hence we don’t insist on the Ph.D. or even the Master’s; in fact, we regard advanced degrees as a liability, if anything. None of us, except you, excuse me, Aristide, would be here if the college didn’t have this policy. Quite apart from other factors, Hen’s appointment, from the beginning, was a regression from Jocelyn principles. Hen, to speak frankly, has never subscribed to our methods, and I think a great deal of the trouble we’ve had with him can be laid to an unconscious resistance on his part to the experimental ideology. This refusal to fill out the achievement sheets and the field-period reports isn’t the result of mere inefficiency—it’s an act of obstructionism, or sabotage of the experimental machinery, unconscious, as I say, and very likely irrational; I think it very probable that Hen literally
cannot
fill out our achievement sheet. More power to him, in a way; one can’t help but respect an integrity that buckles at putting a check beside ‘prejudiced but genial’ or ‘truly liberal.’” The mocking smile played over his lips, but at bottom he was powerfully in earnest. For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words,
modern, secular, experimental,
were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation.

“Hence, Alma,” he declared, “I can’t join you in thinking that all Hen’s sins of omission can be relegated to the realm of mere technicalities. They’re the expression of a certain reactionary Schweikism which we’ve seen also in faculty meetings.” “Most interesting, Howard,” exclaimed Aristide. “I’ve observed the same thing myself. Hen and I have had a number of discussions on the question of relative grading, and he assures me that he doesn’t believe in it. He believes in absolute grading. I had not myself drawn the inference that he subscribes to a belief in the Absolute.” “I too believe in absolute grading,” insisted Domna. Furness laughed. “My eye,” he said. “How many Excellents did you give last term? You’re a real fraud, Domna, when it comes to the achievement sheet. You grade them on their beauty or on a look in their eye. Your marks, take it from me, my dear, are an exercise in
sheer coquetry.
” He laid a drawling stress on the last words; Domna colored. “As far as that goes,” he continued, “our friend Hen is rather liberal with the Excellents when it serves his purpose. But seriously, the point is, Hen doesn’t belong here, doesn’t share our objectives. He came here—let’s be frank—for asylum; we gave it to him. He ought, long since, discovering his hostility to us, to have looked for another connection. Instead, he’s remained here on sufference and treated his post as a sort of embassy, with extra-territorial rights, from which to attack our institutions. Why should Maynard stand for it? He’s stood for it this long, I can assure you, out of simple kindheartedness and decency, in the hope that Hen would have the grace to move on, once he had re-established himself, to the kind of academic work he prefers. If Hen had made the slightest effort to find a post he liked better, during the two years he’s been here, I should have more sympathy now for him
and
for Cathy…. After all, Alma,” he argued, turning his persuasion on her, “Cathy is responsible, equally with Hen, not only for his hanging on here, but also for the attacks he’s made on Maynard and the faculty as a whole. Having been married, you know very well that the woman can always control these choices. I’ve tried, more than once, to get her to see that Hen was doing himself harm with these continual rows over trivialities, and she’s graciously informed me that Hen owes it to himself as a pedagogue to correct misdoing wherever he sees it. That Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy approach bores me, I must say. She encourages Hen in these power-fantasies to keep her hold on him as the one true and excellent wife; why, the woman’s a regular Maintenon. As it happens”—his eyes narrowed—“the last time I went there, to offer a little unwanted advice, my car wouldn’t start when I left and I was treated, through the picture-window, to an imitation of myself. Cathy, wearing Hen’s hat and muffler, was prancing up and down the room—”

“Stop it,” cried Alma, sharply. She and Domna exchanged a horrified look. These imitations of Cathy’s were well known to them; indeed they had laughed at them heartily, but seen from Furness’ side of the window, they assumed another perspective. In this light, Mulcahy’s position at Jocelyn did in fact appear unjustified. Moreover, the two women could not help but feel to some extent implicated in that rather dubious position; they also had encouraged Hen to tilt against the local pieties and abetted him in his sarcasms; for the first time, strangely enough, it came home to them that Maynard Hoar
did
have a sort of case against their friend, but at the same moment they discovered that it would be wiser not to see this just now—any justice to Maynard would have to be done hereafter. Yet a sense of complicity held them silent in each other’s presence; each read the other’s thoughts and did not wish to be the first to disavow them. But Van Tour rushed in, colors flying, and saved them from a moral predicament. “‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’” he hotly quoted, turning to Furness. “Isn’t that what you’re really saying, Howard? It’s the old move-on-buddy line that we used to hear in the Hoover days when anybody got independent. ‘Why don’t you go back to Russia if you like it so well there?’ I must say,” he added, chastely, “I never thought I’d be listening to that old bull slung at Jocelyn.” For a moment, every face wore a look of gratitude to the speaker for reviving the old militant simplicities, like a martial tune from long ago, but then a sigh went up; the inalienable right to “bore from within” was something they no longer believed in, though they felt a sort of pain where the belief had been, as a veteran does in an amputated limb. “It’s no good, Consy,” said Furness, regretfully. “Change that phonograph record. Maynard doesn’t owe Hen a living just because Hen disagrees with him. How about it, Domna?” he pressed her. “Even you wouldn’t allege that.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Candidly, I don’t know. Logically, you are right, of course. Maynard
owes
Henry nothing as a college president; yet as a man I feel that he does. There’s a certain
noblesse oblige
that we owe to people who criticize us and whom we have the power to harm. Strength ought to impose chivalry; we stay our hand against a disarmed opponent.” Furness smiled, recognizing an echo from his own course in the Epic. “You think it’s my feudal background?” averred Domna. “The code of the noble which is based on privilege? That is true, I think, but it is also the Christian ethic. What would you put in its place? A purely utilitarian view, which treats men as things in terms of their utility value?” Her voice had grown firmer as she moved into the field of rebuttal. “As long as we have a society of privilege, the code of the noble should restrain us against the exercise of an absolute power.

“What you charge Henry with, is an abuse of hospitality. All very fine, as if Maynard had treated him in the style of an Arab sheik, as an honored guest of the college! Then, if this were so”—her eyes had begun to flash—“I would say yes, by all means, Henry had the obligation to repay courtesy with courtesy. But this is not the case here. Far from it. Maynard has used Henry to advertise his own reputation as a liberal; he hires him to salve his own conscience and write an article for the paper on how much better conditions are at Jocelyn than behind the iron curtain of reaction in the big rich universities. He treats him as we treat the DP’s, as a sort of testimonial to the paradise of freedom we have here, and then imposes on him all sorts of restrictions of what he can think and not think, do and not do. He is put to work at the lowest possible salary, housed in wretched conditions at an exorbitant rent, ordered to adapt his teaching methods to the progressive routine, expected to conform socially, to take advice and be grateful every day, like a refugee counting his blessings. When he shows signs of independence, it is time to get rid of him; out with him, out with the wife and children, accuse him of disloyalty to the Jocelyn way of life!”

Furness made a motion of ducking; he smiled uneasily. Domna, roused, he thought, was rather splendid, in the manner of a classic heroine; a chaste fire glowed from her; she had the air of a dragon-killer or an acrobatic virgin bringing the serpent to heel. He allowed his admiration for her person to neutralize the effect of what she was saying; that is, he evaded the task of considering it as either true or false. “Go on, Domna,” urged Alma, sympathetically. Domna complied, but more modestly; she feared that once again she had yielded to the temptation to show off—was she herself not treating Henry as an occasion for the display of youthful virtue and high feeling? “Hospitality,” she speculated, “is a mutual affair, as the French word
hôte
indicates. Here in America, I think, we tend to overemphasize the obligations of the guest, as though he entered a hotel where the rules were pasted over the wash-basin. It may be that Henry has infringed the house-rules of Jocelyn by treating himself, not as a visitor, but as a member of the family, with all the prerogatives of criticism that family membership implies. But if he is wrong, and he is not a member of the family, but a stranger in the house, must we not then treat him with
aidôs
? Does not his special situation make gratitude less incumbent on him than
aidôs
on Maynard and on us?”