The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (29 page)

The second and final speaker of the evening was a very old poet, clean and fresh as a rose, a bank president in private life, very mild and courteous, with a gentle quavering voice and a tight set of the long soft lips, like a Presbyterian pew-holder. He had a style of old-fashioned, elaborate compliment, in which there could be detected the flourishes of an antique penmanship and the scratching of a bookkeeper’s quill. He began his address with a series of tributes, to Mrs. Fortune, “our gracious Janeite,” to the President, the student-body, the college as a whole, and to each of the poets on the platform, individually, with a special gallantry toward the two ladies; as his keen powder-blue eye passed over the audience, he did not omit favorable mention of “our audacious friend, Dr. Mulcahy,” or of “our young friend, Mr. Herbert Ellison,” or of Miss Domna Rejnev, “whose verses we have been reading with astonishment.” These compliments, under which some of the recipients could be seen to bridle, amazed the student-body, which was given the illusion of having been inducted, personally, into some venerable temple of commerce, treading, like new depositors, reverently behind the soft, padding footfalls of the manager of this very old and reliable firm, which kept nevertheless a spry pace with the times and for which, as the slogan had it, no account was too small. The President, however, shifting uncomfortably on his haunches on the cushionless bench and smiling an appreciative smile, felt a country boy’s wariness of this old party, who reminded him of the original John D. Rockefeller dipped in attar of roses; he made a jovial note to watch his mental pocketbook in the transactions to follow.

The lecturer, pinkly smiling, announced that he would speak on Lucretius, which caused a flurry of interest among the poets on the platform: was this the long-awaited beginning of a new phase? They leaned forward tensely, alit with professional excitement. In the audience, the President frowned; the faculty was uneasy. Had the poets conspired among themselves to make game of the students? Feeling the President’s eye on him, Furness turned and flung out his hands in a gesture that pleaded his innocence. He, like many of his colleagues, was recalling, with some disquiet, the old poet’s bland question at the sherry party—“Is this the fabled college where everything is run backward?”—and the air of gentle disappointment with which he bore the news that no, indeed, it was not, that the courses ran normally from the immediate past to the present, Mrs. Fortune interjecting, proudly, that
her
modern novel course, as distinguished from Mr. Van Tour’s and Mr. Furness’, began with Jane Austen and stopped with Henry James. Yet the idea that Jocelyn was being “had” subsided in all minds but the President’s as the lecturer proceeded to block out his subject with the greatest care for the students’ understanding. He read his speech from a prepared manuscript, looking up from time to time to insert a date or an historical footnote, and making no sorties into the original text. Indeed, he admitted to an “otiose” preference for reading the philosophers in translation, a side-remark that made the President long to tell him to take his tongue out of his cheek and put it where it belonged, into his utterance. For the truth was that, contrary to all expectations, which were based on the notorious “difficulty” of his verse, the poet’s essay had an innocuous and guileless character, like a schoolboy’s précis or a junior-encyclopedia article on its subject—there was nothing new in it, as the Literature department began to murmur among itself, with puzzlement. His talk was, in fact, so clear that the best disposal the Literature faculty could make of it was to assume that they had not understood it, that of the proverbial four levels of meaning that they so stringently enforced on their classes they themselves had seized only on the literal and had failed of the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical. Or had Consy Van Tour seen something of the second in the allusion to Democritus and the atom? Was the poet, as Consy divined, suggesting that the atomic bomb represented today’s most promising theme for a philosophical epic? Like Dr. Muller with Miss Mansell, Consy could hardly wait for the speech to end in order to tell the speaker of the interesting work being done in his radio verse drama seminar on the hydrogen bomb, bacillic warfare, interplanetary rockets; he turned full around in his seat and nodded triumphantly at his friend, Ivy Legendre, of the Theatre, who had been trying to persuade him that science fantasy was hick.

To the Natural Science Division the talk was not, per se, objectionable. Lucretius, Democritus, Pliny—these were names of honor with them; and they sat back contentedly, once they had made sure that the speaker was not going to use Lucretius to attack modern science, something always to be feared when the names of the ancients were invoked. They were glad, moreover, to be able to give their tolerance to at least one part of the conference, for they found themselves in a peculiar position
vis-à-vis
their best students, who were enthusiastic about literature and rated very high in it on the achievement sheets. This strange morganatic alliance between the Literature faculty and the top science majors, most of whom were boy prodigies, was always upsetting to the professional scientists, and at no time more than now when to their discomposure, as they applauded, they heard their young physicists and chemists pronouncing the talk elementary. But this was a minority judgment. The majority, hearing the poets’ applause, more prolonged and respectful than what had been given Miss Mansell, concluded, like their teachers, that something must have been lacking in their own understanding.

This led to an unfortunate incident during the question period. A very literal-minded girl, the terror of her instructors, with pink snub nose and flaxen braids, dressed in a laced bodice like a peasant in an operetta, got up and boldly asked the poet whether he was a primitive. “A primitive, my dear young lady?” pondered that Mr. Turveydrop. “What
can
you mean?” He looked quizzically around him, as though for assistance. “Do you wish to know whether I am an aboriginal or a savage?” The poets laughed. “Or do you mean to imply that I am primordial, that is, ancient?” The President ground his teeth, but the girl, blushing in great red disks, stood her ground, as she had stood it in a whole series of Sophomore Orals. “No,” she said firmly. “I meant that your lecture was very simplified, like a primitive painting. And I thought you might like to tell us whether this was deliberate.” In the front row, Furness groaned.
“Touché!”
exulted Domna Rejnev, beside him. Mulcahy caught her eye and winked. Across the whole short front row that was the department passed a sudden smile of pride: one of their worst students had just voiced the question that no critic, for twenty years, had dared voice even to himself. A red-faced, white-haired poet on the platform unexpectedly slapped his knee, but the majority looked frostily disapproving. “Deliberate?” repeated the poet, rather angrily. “I’m afraid I cannot tell you. But there is nothing in art which is not studied.” The girl opened her mouth again and struck a rather “cute” pose, putting one finger to her open mouth and scuffing her ballet-slipper along the floor, a pose which the department sadly recognized as the sign that she had outlived her moment. Alma Fortune rose from her chair on the platform. “Sit down, Gertrude,” she ordered, but kindly. “We mustn’t tire our speaker.”

Howard Furness, smiling, got up to propose that the poet might read some of his famous poems, which were already known to the students through the college record library. But the old man was disinclined; on his stiff, thin legs he moved out of the limelight and sank into a chair at the back of the stage, where he sat, chafing his hands. The audience began to clap in unison for his return; it was felt that he had been offended, and there was a general friendly desire to pay him homage for poems that had given pleasure in the past and that remained, even now, in the modernist canon, preserved, like his fresh complexion. When the old man continued to refuse, the poet who had been dubbed by Ellison the poet of the masses, a middle-aged, heavy-set man with a scarred prominent jaw, wearing a red flannel shirt and heavy boots, stood up suddenly in his place, at the very end of the bench, and declared that he would read them. There was a movement of incredulity among the poets; it was not supposed, obviously, that this person, smelling of beer and doubtless of sweat—for he boasted of having been seven days on the hoof—was familiar with the old man’s frail, difficult poems, which had emerged from the Imagist movement, convoluted and pale, like sea-shells. Throughout the whole audience, in fact, there was a feeling of alarm as the red-shirted poet, without waiting for an answer, made straight for the lectern, like a worker resolutely moving to seize the power-switch in a factory. It was feared that he would read his own poems or somehow do the old man outrage. But to everyone’s surprise, when the old man’s books were not forthcoming and a student was sent out to look in Furness’ office, the proletarian poet began to recite from memory those forty-year-old verses written in the counting-house, on the backs of checks and deposit-slips, celebrating merchant princes and their ladies and the life of the summer hotel. To these crabbed and yet fastidious verses, the proletarian poet’s delivery added something uproarious and revivalistic, hell-and-damnation thunder lit up with a certain social savagery and wide-open bohemianism, which suggested a good deal of the atmosphere of
The Outcasts of Poker Flat.
“Preserve us from our admirers,” whispered a young poet, sardonically, to his ally. Yet an obscurity in the old man’s poems, or rather the uncertainty as to how he had meant them hit upon by the student, Gertrude, made this dramatic interpretation possible, and though the old man sat picking at his buttons throughout the recitation, it was a manifest success with the students, the boys in particular, who stamped on the floor and called out for more, until Mulcahy, at a cue from Ellison, whispered to Alma to put a stop to the reading. The poets, it seemed, were displeased.

This did not arise, as might have been thought, from professional jealousy, but from a deeper feeling, the natural antagonism between the poet and his audience that now began to be exhibited at the Jocelyn poetry conference. It was a profound, suspicious, almost animal antagonism, without necessary basis in outward circumstance but arising, as it were, from the skin, from a bristling of the hair on the nape of the neck, and the proof that the proletarian poet was not really a poet was the fact that he did not appear to feel it. The true poet, unlike the prose-writer, explained Howard Furness in lowered tones to the President, does not care to be admired or even to be read, except by a few chosen fellow-poets; a taste for public admiration in a poet is already, as he himself knows, the fatal sign of his deterioration; he has ceased to be proud, protective, and fiercely possessive of his work. Hence—he airily continued, while the President listened, aghast—all attempts, on the part of well-meaning academics, to persuade the poet that he is loved are futile and self-defeating, for the poet does not wish to be loved and flocks to symposia on the Contemporary Neglect of Poetry to be reassured that he is not. And the spontaneous applause, just now, accorded the proletarian poet’s rousing reading of the old man’s work, was, from the point of view of the poets on the platform, an unmitigated disgrace and catastrophe. Even Domna Rejnev—he pointed out, guiding the President’s attention to where she stood in the front of the hall, nervously talking to the proletarian poet, whom everybody else was shunning—was finding her libertarian principles sorely put to the test; and, in fact, as they watched, she slipped away from the poet and took neutral refuge with Alma Fortune, who was chatting with Miss Mansell. The President was shocked. “Why, it’s like the old Greek ostracism,” he commented, reaching into his pocket for his pipe.

An impulse of hospitality led him to start through the emptying hall to where the proletarian poet was standing, alone and conspicuously abandoned, scratching his jaw. Senior girl-students were passing punch and cookies; the poet took a cookie from the tray and made some remark to the girl, who blushed and hurried on with her duties; this particular student, as the President recalled from her advisers, was unfortunately very shy. Before the President could get to him, however, the poet, with his mouth full of cookie, suddenly reached out and seized the arm of Henry Mulcahy, which was hovering over the refreshment tray. Mulcahy, observed the President, was in very good form this evening; the continuation of his appointment seemed to have put a little weight on him; the fixed, precise smile had lost its baneful character, and he diffused an air of good fellowship. Up on the platform, Cathy, accompanied by Ellison, was the center of a little group; her rich laugh rang out. The poet grasped her husband’s hand and shook it. “Hello, old friend, don’t you know me?” Mulcahy paled under his freckles; he peered at the poet mistrustfully and endeavored to withdraw his hand. “I don’t believe so,” he said coldly. “I know your work, of course.” He started to veer away and caught the President’s eye, in full rebuke, resting on him. “At Brooklyn College in the old days,” reminded the poet. “In the old John Reed Club. I was using my Party name, then.” Furness, who had caught up with Maynard, threw the President a quick look of interrogation and wonder. Both men, by common consent, moved closer. A pair of curious physics students, noticing this, nudged each other and edged up; Alma Fortune’s attention was caught; Miss Mansell’s body slowly turned. “And what
was
your Party name?” inquired Henry, with a faint smile of derision. “John Marshall,” chuckled the poet. “
Now
do you remember?” Henry bit his white underlip. “Indistinctly,” he admitted. “I’ve changed,” conceded the poet, with a sudden note of bitterness and significance. “In more ways than one.” He touched his chin. “I got that in a San Francisco dock-strike. With the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. That was after I broke with the Party.” He laid a finger on his broad, thick-flanged nose. “When I broke with the Party, they broke that for me. Twice. When I was laid up in the hospital, my new life began. New name. New ideas. I began to do some reading. I went into the hospital a Trotskyite and came out an anarchist, thanks to an old Wobbly working-stiff who used to bring me books.”