The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (32 page)

Meanwhile, over fried sausages, red-apple rings, fried potatoes, fried chicken, fried onions, in the coffee-shop of the old hotel, the poets who were still on schedule were relenting somewhat toward the conference. The old mountain town was very picturesque, with red-brick dwellings, trimmed in white, with green shutters, fronting directly on the single street, which, from its open end, looked out onto rolling farm country, stone houses and great barns, as onto the land of Canaan seen from Mount Nebo. The young poets were insensible to scenery and to the spirit of history, as well as to good farm-style cooking, but the older poets’ lyres were more attuned to the atmospheric. The resemblance to the Promised Land, first pointed out by Miss Mansell, tempted them into speculations on the influence of the Old Testament on American history. They wondered whether this likeness to the prophesied Canaan had not been seized upon by the early settlers as a form of verification, which had led them into the theological controversies so characteristic of this region, and so much more prolonged and literal than the theocratic rivalries of New England—“These people,” proclaimed the red-faced poet, with a billow of the arm that included the startled waitress and the cashier, “still imagine that they are living in the Bible.” “And up there on the hill, we still imagine it, in our own fashion,” edged in Furness, with a plaintive smile, trying to draw the conversation back to Jocelyn itself. “Our progressive methodology,” he announced, “with its emphasis on faith and individual salvation, is a Protestant return to the Old Testament.” Miss Mansell turned to look at him politely, but the others went on eating, as though he had not spoken. “And our presidents, poor fellows,” he continued, on a diminishing scale of assurance, “live the dishonored life of prophets, a life of exposure and contumely, for trying to put into practice literally the precepts of a primitive liberalism.” The poets still ignored him, except for the whiskered poet, who threw him a glance of fiery rebuke—this was the sort of observation that the poets were supposed to frame, and it was unseemly to have it supplied, ready made up, by jackanapes on the faculty.

The poets had no interest in Jocelyn or its President, whom they took for granted as the usual money-raiser, not too successful, to judge by the size of the fee. The President they knew generically, and this was sufficient. At a given point in the afternoon’s proceedings, he could be counted on to rise from his seat and put a question that had long been bothering him—why did not modern poetry communicate to
him
? Somewhat more perplexed than the publishers, but vigorous and manly, he would call on modern poetry to step down from its pedestal and meet with the ordinary man in the marketplace; he would ask for a positive contribution to the vexed debates of our times. This speech, which was not yet known to the President or his faculty, was foreknown to the poets down to the last metaphor, just as the red-faced poet’s extempore speech attacking Eliot was as well known to his confrères as it was to his own wife. And they could anticipate with equal lucidity the attack on themselves that would be launched from some unexpected quarter in the Literature department, an attack which would be backed up, since this was a progressive college, by a sudden foray of students from the audience who would hurl a daring question or two and then fall into silence, nudging each other vainly to start the assault again. The deadly animosity between the professor and the poet was somewhat muted here by the fact that, strangely, there appeared to be only two literary careerists in the Literature department, the young versifier, Ellison, and his ally, Mulcahy, whose empty place still gaped at the long table—both of whom, naturally, were supposedly managing the conference, for ends of their own that had not yet become manifest but which, predictably, had something to do with a power-struggle within the department and a drive toward prestige in the literary world outside. Of the two, the poets preferred Mulcahy, who was a man of some acuity, but they did not indicate this, any more than they gave way to the natural attraction they felt to the little Rejnev girl and her friend, Mrs. Fortune—they had learned not to take sides, even with the losers, which in this case was their instinct. They came to Jocelyn in the same spirit that dentists or doctors attend a professional convention, knowing that the public speeches would be, on the whole, very tiresome, but that, if they could keep out of the way of the faculty, they could drink and visit with their friends. The more experienced they were, the more they considered the whole project to be an affair of mutual exploitation—a contract, like any other, in which they did not intend to be worsted. They gulped their caffeine tablets, therefore, and smiled encouragingly at the little Rejnev girl, who looked very white at the prospect of taking the chair. The red-haired man, Mulcahy, was still absent, which they put down as a black mark in their book.

An hour and a half before, the President had had a shattering experience that altogether eclipsed the poetry conference from his mind, so that he did not, as it happened, make the speech that he would certainly have made under normal circumstances. Without knocking, brushing by the secretary, as she explained later, Henry Mulcahy had burst into the President’s private office, white-faced, malevolent, trembling, and demanded to know what the President had meant by interrogating a visiting poet about Mulcahy’s political affiliations. A shocking scene followed. Mulcahy, as Maynard told Bentkoop, as soon as he could get him on the phone, literally shook his fist in Maynard’s face, threatened to expose him to the A.A.U.P., and to every liberal magazine and newspaper in the country. He was going to write a sequel to the President’s magazine article that would reveal to the whole world the true story of a professional liberal: a story of personal molestation, spying, surveillance, corruption of students by faculty stool-pigeons. A girl-student, he shouted, had already confessed to him in his office, when he faced her with it, a sordid tale of spying assignments given her by the White Russian, Miss Domna Rejnev.

“What could I do, John?” pleaded the President. “The man is quite mad. My first idea, naturally, was to throw him bodily out of my office. But then, God forgive me, I hesitated. I saw very clearly that he had me in a vise of blackmail. The campus was full of outsiders—these poets, other teachers, publishers, parents. What was I going to do? Fire him? I
can’t
fire him. He has a contract. I would have to show cause and that would mean, in all probability, a lawsuit. The college can’t afford it. The terrible thing, John, is that, on the surface, everything he says is true. We
did
interrogate the poet; the people in the Literature department
were
keeping tabs on him. It’s all twisted, of course, by his warped imagination to give a sinister meaning, but still those things
were
done. I sat there looking at him and I lost all faith in the power of my denials to convince anybody, even myself. Maybe our behavior did have an ugly little kink in it:
I
don’t know; I’ve lost the ability to say. Tell me, John—you believe in religion—what am I being punished for?” John made an indeterminate sound. “At that moment,” continued the President, his voice desperately rising, as he tried to laugh, “I looked out the window and saw nuns,
nuns
on Jocelyn’s driveway, going into the chapel. I thought I had gone mad.” John laughed. “They came for the afternoon session. One of the poets is a convert.” “I know, I know,” said the President, impatiently. “But listen to me, John. Then I said to myself, ‘I will bribe him.’ I actually thought of offering him five years’ salary to leave the campus today. But then of course I saw that that was what he wanted. He would have a club over me for life. He could always say, with truth, that I had tried to bribe him into silence.”

“So what did you do?” said John, as the President’s voice died away. “I didn’t do anything,” retorted Maynard. “I just sat there. Miss Crewes opened the door a crack to find out what was going on and she saw me sitting there, with my head in my hands, and Hen sitting opposite, cool as a cucumber. She thought I had had a nervous breakdown or a stroke, like the last president, till I looked up and told her to go away.” John laughed. But the President was beyond resentment. “Finally, I raised my eyes and I said to him, ‘What is it you want of me, man? Do you merely want to ruin me or have you an ulterior purpose? Tell me that, please,’ I said, ‘just as a matter of interest, just between ourselves. Are you a conscious liar or a self-deluded hypocrite?’” Over the wire, John whistled. “You know what he answered?” asked the President. “He quoted the famous old paradox, the paradox of the liar. ‘A Cretan says, all Cretans are liars.’ That was his answer. As for interpretation, he informed me that the problem was subjective. ‘We’re none of us certain of our motives; we can only be certain of facts.’ And these facts, which he’d already enumerated, could not be denied by me.” John sighed. “Then,” said the President, “he quite changed his tune. ‘I’m not concerned with truth, Maynard,’ he said to me, very straightforwardly. ‘I’m concerned with justice. Justice for myself as a superior individual and for my family.’”

The President’s voice sounded weary. “He claimed the right to pursue his profession, the right to teach without interference or meddling, the right to bring up his family in reasonable circumstances. What could I say? I spoke of my own rights and duties, to the trustees, to the student-body. And he snapped me up immediately. ‘And does that include the duty to interrogate visiting poets on my political affiliations?’” Maynard laughed. “I admitted that that had been misguided, and he offered, very sweetly, to accept my apology.” There was a protracted silence. “So?” said John, anxiously. “So,” replied the President firmly, “I concluded that it was best for me to resign.” He heard the young man gasp. “Yes,” he asseverated, with something of his old buoyancy. “I saw that I was too much incriminated. The college would never get rid of him as long as I was at the tiller. With another skipper, who can’t be blackmailed, there’s a fair chance of getting him out. I confess I thought of Samson, bringing down the temple on the Philistines and himself.”

“Maynard,” cried the young man, protestingly. “You haven’t told him?” “No,” said Maynard. “But Miss Crewes knows and Esther. We’ve already sent off a letter to the head of the board of trustees.” He sighed. “Are the poets gone, by the way?” “I don’t think so,” said John. “I think the party at Howard’s is still going strong.” The President chuckled. “That Miss Mansell, you know—I think she had something to do with giving me courage to do it.” John made an inquiring sound. “I used to be quite a classicist,” said the President, “when I was a kid in high school. I wanted to be a lawyer and Cicero was my hero. That talk on Virgil and that reading brought it all back to me. It was running through my head all the time I was talking to him and he was quoting paradoxes at me. ‘You damnable demagogue,’ I kept cursing him under my breath as I watched him. And then I felt guilty. A demagogue—what does it mean? A leader of the
demos
or the people. I suppose, in a certain sense, I must be saying farewell to progressivism. At any rate, John, at the very end of our talk, I just looked at him and declaimed the first line of the first Catiline oration.” Taking a firm grip on the telephone, he threw his handsome head back and brave tears of oratory rose into his forensic eyes. “
‘Quo usque tandem, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra?’
‘How far at length, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?’” At the other end of the phone, the young man signaled to his wife, who crept up and put her ear to the receiver as the President’s noble voice rolled on.

T
HE AUTHOR WISHES TO
thank
The New Yorker
for permission to reprint Chapter One, and the Guggenheim Foundation for the fellowship that made some of this work possible.

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963
New York Times
bestseller
The Group
.

McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and
How I Grew
(1987).

A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in
The Group
. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the
Partisan Review
circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and the
New York Review of Books
.

In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled
The Company She Keeps
(1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book,
The Oasis
, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the
Partisan Review
intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine
Horizon
’s fiction contest in 1949.