The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (25 page)

How weirdly irresponsible this was could be judged by a comparison with Furness. Furness, for all his malice, was a man of the world who used reasonable prudence in his estimates of other human beings. If he was no knight errant, on the one hand, he was no credulous clown on the other. It was plain that he had taken Domna’s wild stories of Party membership with the requisite grain of salt, which was the thing that perhaps, even now, she could not bring herself to forgive him. Indeed, even to Mulcahy’s mind, he rather overstepped the bounds of what was permissible in jocular allusions to the “thirteenth floor,” “Gospodin Mulcahy,” and so on. What Mulcahy found tiresome about this was the assumption, so characteristic of Furness, that we are all a parcel of rogues and confidence-men; he seemed to regard Mulcahy as Domna’s confederate in a hoax on the college’s credulity. His wised-up air was as irritating, though not of course so dangerous, as Domna’s exaggerations. His little store of worldly knowledge had made him overweening and captious: he knew just enough to know that Mulcahy was not Party timber and not enough to see that Domna was but the latest of a long series of persons who, for good or bad reasons, had chosen to think otherwise. Since the idea of Mulcahy as a Communist was fantastically comic to his mind, it diverted him, evidently, to regard it as Mulcahy’s own fantastic invention, but for Mulcahy, who had suffered because of this mistaken idea, the joke was not funny and did not gain by repetition. It stung him to see that Furness had so little appreciation of his life—the supposition that he might have been a Communist was not so far-fetched as all that. To be told that we would be ludicrous in any life-role, even an uncongenial one, is an insult to our sense of human possibility.

The first premonitory signs of Furness’ treachery came to light late in March, along with the skunk-cabbages in the damp places and the first bouquet of spring beauties brought by Alma Fortune to the department office. The whole campus was, as usual, unsettled by the vernal influence and the prospect of Easter vacation: hitherto well-satisfied students came before the department wanting to change their major or their tutor and were dissuaded with the greatest difficulty; roommates broke up; love-affairs were blighted; girls wept in the washroom; Miss Rejnev’s Russian literature class sent her a petition that they had had enough of Dostoievsky. But it was the coming poetry conference that provided a focus for the general restlessness and disaffection. From nowhere and everywhere, all at once, came the cry that this affair—the first of its kind ever to be held at Jocelyn—be run on democratic principles. The campus, suddenly, was seedling with rumors of a “loaded” panel; it was said that Mulcahy and Ellison were planning to use the symposium for an attack on contemporary verse, on formlessness, on “pure” poetry, on “impure,” i.e., paraphrasable, poetry, on the idea of progress, on progressive education. Conflicting stories circulated, but every story run down by Mulcahy agreed on two prime assumptions: (a) that the conference would not be representative and (b) that it would be the scene of an attack.

At first blush, these rumors and spiteful charges seemed merely amusing, as illustrating the perennial tendency of philistia to suspect what it does not understand, but as they grew in volume to a regular chorus of detraction, Mulcahy felt his smile becoming thinner and anxious. He was tired of denying the weary old lies that were carried to him by his students from every corner of the campus. It was all very well for Ellison and Cathy to advise him to pay them no attention; his nature, unfortunately, thanks to long ill-usage, had become a gallèd jade that chafed at the needless and quivered to the goad of baseness. The number and variety of these stories made him fear, moreover, that there was more than one force at work against him in the college. As with all symposia and anthologies, criticism fastened on omissions. It was claimed that certain allegedly leading figures had not been invited: Dr. Williams, W. H. Auden, Cummings, Yvor Winters. Humbugs like Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones were expressing the gravest diplomatic concern over the affront to Mr. Robert Hillyer, as though the slight to his poetic gift were an international incident capable of world-wide repercussions.

But more disturbing than these manifestations from the extreme right was a notice posted one night on the bulletin-board by somebody unknown—
WHERE ARE THE POETS OF THE MASSES?
—lettered in crude red ink. Mulcahy, hurrying into the store to find Ellison, discovered the room buzzing with it. It was a student prank, perhaps, as some of the old guard tried to assure him, but he could not help but suspect something uglier and more personal behind it. And he was not alone in thinking that there was a faculty hand involved. Fraenkel of Social Sciences was explaining, in his usual dry-as-dust way, that the student body this year conformed to a national trend observed in a New York
Times
survey in being conspicuously a-political; hence he did not think, and so on, meticulously,
ad infinitum,
while Consy Van Tour, giggling, pointed out that the word,
where,
was spelled correctly, which
proved
faculty assistance. Mulcahy, not finding Ellison and spotting Domna and Kantorowitz and Bentkoop in one corner with their heads together, as usual, turning in concert to survey him, was on the verge of leaving in some alarm and dubitation when Furness appeared, a large frown writ on his forehead, and called a department meeting.

“I don’t like this, Hen,” he announced, when the flock was gathered in his office. He had just been seeing Maynard and had carried away with him, apparently, something of Maynard’s fussy severity. “Maynard tells me the whole campus is in turmoil over this poetry conference. We can’t seem to find out who posted that notice, but the wildest stories are going around about some coup you boys are supposed to be planning. What’s up, anyway?” A note of pugnacious cajolery edged into his voice. “Let Uncle Howard in on the plot.” To Mulcahy’s surprise, everybody was looking at him, tensely, almost accusingly, except Ellie Ellison, who was leafing through a volume of Apollinaire that he had selected from Furness’ bookshelves. “Yes,” reinforced Van Tour, full of breathless righteousness. “Where
are
the poets of the masses? That strikes me as a
very
good question.”

Faced with all those eyes, gleaming on him expectantly, Mulcahy reacted with laughter. “Am I on trial?” he demanded. “What are you accusing me of?” Furness scraped his clean jaw and glanced, as if for succor, at Alma, who at once took charge of what was apparently to be an inquisition. “We’ve been told,” she declared forthrightly, “that the conference is going to be rigged. A certain elderly poet is going to be asked here, to be attacked by his juniors and by certain members of our faculty. The same treatment, we hear, is to be accorded a well-known foreign poet who is a guest of this country. The panel is being organized to exclude all contemporary tendencies except those of the attackers and of those under attack. A manifesto for a new kind of verse, calling itself the Mythic, is supposed to be drawn up, if all goes according to plan. One of our own members is also to be under fire and to be censured, poetically, from the podium. We’ve all heard this and don’t wish to believe it, but there it is. The students who tell us these things are resentful also, evidently, of a conference that isn’t fairly representative of the leading tendencies in verse and of a symposium that will reach conclusions already prearranged. That, I presume, is the meaning of the placard we all saw this morning, if it is not simply a joke at the expense of Jocelyn and of the department.”

Her leathery face flushed; her jaw clamped shut suddenly. All eyes turned again to Mulcahy, who in his just shock and fury thought for a moment that he would not deign to answer such trumpery charges, but Furness’ blue eye gave him a look like a nudge, which he interpreted as an encouragement to turn the tables on his accusers. “You hear these things from the students, Alma?” he said gently. “It surprises me that you believe them unless there’s a prior wish in you to take me at a very low valuation. I understand all too well the mechanism that makes this possible. You defended me once in a crisis and now you fear that I may not have been worth defending, so that you take at their face value the first ugly stories you hear that seem to corroborate this little fear. In a word, you now feel responsible for me, all of you good people, and there’s no richer soil for mistrust than an awareness of responsibility.” He smiled. “Didn’t it occur to you to doubt the veracity, I won’t say of the students, but of those who fed them this rubbish to regurgitate back to you?”

Domna suddenly spoke out. “Henry,” she said boldly, “the one who fed them this rubbish is you. We have it from students who heard the plan for the conference from your own lips, in confidence. We did not seek this information. It was brought to us by students who felt that what you were planning was not fair to the poets and a bad thing for the college. They felt someone should be warned.” Henry moistened his lips. “How many students?” he demanded, quickly, to catch her off her balance. Domna’s eyes calculated. “Three,” she replied, obviously lying—he set it down at two. He himself made a rapid calculation. “I would like to be confronted with the students who so valiantly abused my confidence.” He sat back in his chair, smiling, arms folded; a disobedient muscle twitching in his soft cheek.

Furness shook his head. “No,” he remonstrated. “Nix on that stuff, Hen. Come off it. There’s no accusation. The department’s merely asking you to take it into your confidence. A report from the conference committee. What has it got up its sleeve?” The pleading note had come into his voice again, a strange raucous sound, like that of an itinerant hand-organ. Ellie Ellison looked up. “If you wish to know who posted the placard—if that is what this meeting is about—I can tell you. I did.” Everybody swung around to stare at him, Mulcahy along with the others. At the boy’s self-possessed words, he felt tears of relief and admiration well into his eyes. “Why?” demanded Alma, shrilly. “I think it’s outrageous,” said Considine. There was a babel of curiosity and reproach. But Furness’ white teeth flashed in a smile of complaisant understanding; his love of mystifications was fired. “It seemed an appropriate device,” explained Ellison, “for stirring up interest in the conference. There can be no proper debate if the passions are not roused. You mistake what Hen and I have been doing, sowing fear and anticipation among the students. They’re being taught to take poetry seriously, like a baseball game.” His look lightly dropped on Domna. “Choosing up sides. It’s the only way to run these things, to give them the quality of a mythic contest. We intend, by all means, to have a poet of the masses, if only for our private scapegoat. But first it seemed advisable to create a demand for him. I should not wish to be held responsible for inviting one for poetic reasons; they all write so badly that they can be interesting only as specimens, embodiments of a class myth.” His tone was matter-of-fact and serious; he looked startled when Furness laughed. He drew a paper from his hip-pocket and handed it to Furness. “Here’s the invitation list,” he said and looked on, detachedly, while the department gathered round and peered over Furness’ shoulder. There were four or five well-known names followed by five or six others, belonging, for the most part, to friends of his, whom Van Tour and Alma had never heard of. “That is the most important poet writing today,” he remarked, casually, pointing to one of them. “This is the greatest poetic talent, which may or may not realize itself.” His forefinger tapped a third name. “That’s the poet of the masses. Like so many of his inspiration, he lives out West, in Carmel, but I think we shall be able to get him if we simply pay his bus fare.” He folded the list and put it back in his pocket.

Mulcahy eyed him with trepidation. He was conscious of being out of touch himself with contemporary poetry, owing to the perplexing fact which often troubled him in his friendly relations with Ellison: most “new” poets were hostile to Joyce’s work. Even in Eliot’s recognition, duly paid out like a tithe, he sensed something official and perfunctory, cautiously charitable and concessive. The true attitude of Eliot, he suspected, was manifest in his disciples, who in all their voluminous New Criticism had given Joyce scarcely a word of exegesis. Auden could shed a tear on the grave of James at Mount Auburn; a whole band of singers could hymn the dead Fitzgerald; but where was the
Lycidas
for the blind minstrel who was the greatest voice of all of them? The pipes of Ransom were silent and the reed of Tate was hollow. The envious neglect of the “new” poets had embittered him against their verses, perhaps unjustly so, for he could see in Ellison’s new poem, for example—an experiment with a modern epic form, based on the heroic couplet, but relying on assonance and a syllabic line—unmistakable evidence of the influence of
Ulysses,
whatever Ellison himself might choose to say about it. The poem dealt with the life of Jocelyn in a mythic semblance, using the plot of the Epigones, that is, of the Seven who came after the Seven, and the structure of the whole was that of a series of Epicycloids arranged around a fixed circle. Mulcahy, who was going to figure as Adrastus, was enchanted with the conception of the poem and with the few lines he had heard of it—a thing which had made him trust more willingly to Ellison’s judgments of his contemporaries in drawing up the list for the conference. Between them, they had elected to give an interesting version of the pocket-veto to certain stuffy figures whom the department had insisted on inviting: Ellison had disposed of them with his usual economy by deciding not to write to them at all, but Mulcahy had had a safer idea—he had written without mentioning any honorarium, which had achieved the desired effect in all but one instance, where the poet had accepted with joy, not even inquiring about the railroad fare, and had sent on several of his records as a gift to the college library.

Yet now, in the presence of the department, Mulcahy experienced misgivings. Would the department swallow these poets, whom, to tell the truth, he himself had boggled at somewhat until Ellison had reassured him? He cast a curious look at Domna and at Furness, who appeared to be struggling with what he could not help but recognize as a desire to laugh. “Herbert,” said Furness, in a muffled voice, “the purpose of this conference is not to emulate Columbus. We need a few of the old landmarks
—you
know, Stevens, Dr. Williams, Miss Moore—to give the students their bearings.” Domna gave a delighted laugh. It was plain to Mulcahy that he and Ellison had erred, since she did not seem at all offended but truly and spontaneously amused. “The list,” she cried, “is perfect to be buried in a time-capsule. In twenty years, we will dig it up and find whether the promise has been fulfilled.” Ellison regarded her calmly. “You find bliss in your ignorance,” he stated, like one making a scientific discovery. Domna opened her mouth sharply to answer, but on a sudden placatory impulse Mulcahy intervened. “Who would you like to ask, Domna?” he queried, with an anxious, appealing smile. “Have we overlooked somebody whom
you
think important?” Furness’ smooth jaw dropped; he stared; everybody’s gaze followed his to Domna, who looked nonplussed and yet touched.