The Professor of Truth (8 page)

“He certainly alienated me,” I said.

“So I gather. Be that as it may. You’d be an excellent successor to Professor Pritchley, Alan, not least because you are so unlike him.”

What they wanted, obviously, was not a brilliant mind but a safe pair of hands. How Harold Pritchley would have sneered.

“You are greatly respected, you know,” the Dean said, somewhat too late.

I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t even flattered to be asked. I could see why the Dean’s words fitted me and why the Dean thought I would fit the job. A generalist: that was me all right. Most of my colleagues specialised. Some of them had areas of special interest so special that nobody else was allowed in. I, too, had once specialised, that is to say I had written my PhD thesis, but since then I had dabbled in and hovered over several centuries of great and mediocre writing, with the result that I knew more about everything but less about anything than anybody else in the department. My
knowledge of literature
was
convincing, but also—that old feeling again—fraudulent. There is a famous campus novel in which literature academics play a game called “Humiliation,” the winner being whoever admits to the most shameful omission in their reading. An American professor wins by confessing to having not read
Hamlet
. I am not like that—I am the opposite. I
have
read everything, from Shakespeare to the Modernists and beyond. Fiction, plays, poetry—I can’t, now, quite imagine the
years
of reading this has entailed, but I know they have happened—yet I remember very little about any of it. Perhaps the detail was overwhelmed by the sheer volume. Nevertheless, I can when required comfortably sustain a long conversation about most authors and their works, whether in a professional or social setting (the two usually overlap). And I can, in my lectures to first-year students, express an opinion on just about any literary work without betraying the overwhelming blankness of my memory of it. This, it seems to me, is a worse crime than not having read it in the first place, a far worse form of obscurity than possessing knowledge so profound that nobody else can understand you. Without Emily to embolden me, I would never have taken the Chair, even if I had wanted it, for fear of being found out.

Since the bombing, people have seldom challenged either my opinions or my ignorance: they are anxious not to hurt my feelings. Nobody, as far as I am aware, dislikes me. Harold Pritchley disliked me, but then he disliked everybody and everybody disliked him, and anyway he is long gone now, supercilious and drunk in Cambridge. There
are two other people in our department who are generally disliked. They either offend their colleagues’ political or gender-related sensibilities or simply have unprepossessing personal habits. They are probably the cleverest of us all—another reason for their unpopularity. Neither of them, I am sure, was invited to apply for the Chair vacated by Professor Pritchley, which was in the end filled by an outsider, bland and bureaucratic, who is still in it eighteen years later.

Sometimes it takes me a minute or two to remember what my own PhD was actually about. Very occasionally I open my bound copy at random, and it is like reading something written by someone else. There it is, 65,000 words, typed and bound, and a sentence or a paragraph may come back to me, more or less intact, but the actual writing of it is a lost mystery. True to the advice of my supervisor, I took a broad theme and applied it to a number of works by different authors (I played safe—Conrad, Kipling and Buchan are all in there) and everybody was happy with that. If my arguments had gaps, I wrote with sufficient confidence and wit to cover them. As Emily found when I gave my paper in Philadelphia, if you stand back a bit I can be rather impressive. Later I rehashed and expanded the thesis and published it as
Romance and Cynicism at the Height of Empire
. For a while it was an Open University text.

My forte is the sweeping statement, the summarising paragraph suggestive of much learning, the conclusion that looks like a distillation of years of accumulated knowledge. I am perfect for delivering the lectures in the first- and second-year survey courses. These lectures are popular
because they are entertaining and fast-moving, and name-check so many writers, famous and obscure, that everyone’s favourite author is guaranteed a mention. In order to refresh my lecture notes I have made occasional investigative forays which might lead to more serious research, but have usually become bored before any detailed study is underway. Sometimes as a result I have had a paper accepted by some journal or other, so my publications record is quite respectable. I am a kind of authority, if anyone needs one, on semi-neglected, unfashionable Edwardian writers such as Chesterton and Galsworthy.

My task on sabbatical was to write a monograph on a little-known novelist, David Dibald. Although Dibald lived almost all of his life in Sussex and is regarded (insofar as he is regarded at all) as an English writer, he was born in this town, and for this reason his papers were gifted to the University’s library by his daughter in the 1970s. Perhaps she felt that this would be good for the University, in the same way that the Dean of Faculty felt a Professor Tealing would be good for it. Apart from by myself, however, the papers do not seem ever to have been looked at.

Dibald wrote four moderately successful novels between 1906 and 1914 and was killed at Ypres the following year. I find the books quietly moving. Dibald was concerned with continuity in life, with patterns, with those things of the world that may be described as “recurring” or “unchanging”: the annual cycle of birth, death and rebirth in nature is often referred to, plants and animals are carefully observed, as too is the work of humans that goes with the turn of the seasons—ploughing,
planting, reaping. Another theme focuses on the way men and women of his time were of the land while the land, at least in its wilder aspects, retained its independence from them and kept its own timescale, dwarfing the timescale of a human life. Each of his novels suggests that knowledge is gathered only slowly, with the passing of years, and that even then no single person, not even if he or she should live to a great age, can ever acquire complete knowledge. Dibald, ironically, tried to articulate this when very young, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, and then the war came.

There are obvious reasons why all this, from a completely forgotten writer, might appeal to a man like myself, a man in my position. I do not need to rehearse them, but in addition I like the fact that Dibald expressed no interest in literary movements or theories, but wrote in a consistently unpretentious style about unremarkable lives, before his own (for the time) unremarkable death. He was one of the also-rans of that generation, or of any generation. “Showed promise, largely unfulfilled,” his literary obituary might have read.

Too many people write books, in my view. Far, far too many people write novels. Libraries and second-hand bookshops are stuffed with their outpourings. What I find attractive about Dibald is the total absence of signs of arrogance or ambition. He seems just to be having a stab at writing down his take on life, disguising it as fiction. All novelists do that of course—do it bravely, or arrogantly or stupidly, or well or badly—and in most cases within a few months of publication, or five years later, or perhaps five years after death, nobody gives a damn what their “take” was and nobody is
reading their books. But here was I, nearly a century on, reading David Dibald, reading him and liking him and thinking that he was pretty good, and that if he hadn’t been killed so young he might well have become famous.

Fame isn’t the point, though. Survival, is that it? No, because none of what anyone writes or thinks or feels or believes, none of it survives for long. You survive only through your children, and I have no child and Dibald’s daughter donated her father’s papers to the University probably knowing that if she didn’t they’d be chucked on a bonfire or into a skip when
she
died. She saved her father, but for what? To be read by a lecturer who doesn’t think literature has anything to say, but who nevertheless goes on, year after year, telling his students that it does.

And now I am supposed to be writing a book about Dibald. A publisher has expressed interest—more interest, in fact, than I have in my subject. I know, at bottom, that I don’t want to tell the world about David Dibald. Dibald is mine, a calm, solitary backwater in which I can drift undisturbed. If I actually write the monograph, I will only have to find somewhere else to drift. I might even have to confront that feeling which increasingly threatens to overwhelm me, that my work, my life as an academic, the very stuff of my learning, all those hours and days and years of reading, the thousands of books I have devoured—literature, in its entirety—all of it is utter futility and a complete waste of time.

Perhaps one day I will have the courage to say that, out loud or in black and white on paper, and have done with the whole bloody charade.

OU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED,” NILSEN
said. “Sure you do. You’ve been outspoken about it. It’s your honestly held, reasonably argued opinion that there was a miscarriage of justice. That a man was found guilty of something he didn’t do. And behind that, you’ve said, there was subterfuge, suppressed evidence, political pressure, conspiracy …”

“I’ve never used that word,” I said. “I’ve always been careful to avoid it.”

“Nevertheless …” Nilsen answered, baring his teeth in the unlovely smile. He was echoing me from some distance back in the conversation, and we both caught the echo but only he smiled. “That’s what your theory of events amounts to, a conspiracy. In the absence of proof, that is.”

“The absence of proof isn’t my responsibility,” I said.

“Well, let’s not go there. Let’s, as you requested, get to the point. You think a whole lot of things happened. I’ll tell you what
I
think. Let me go through it, and you listen. You don’t have to agree with me. Just listen till I’m done.”

“If you imagine I’m going to sit here nodding like a poodle—” I began, but Nilsen stopped me with a completely different word and a different tone.

“Please,” he said. And then again, more quietly, “Please.”

I’m not sure I knew how I’d been going to finish my sentence, but I didn’t finish it.

“I’m going to level with you,” Nilsen said. “That’s why I’m here, to take a load off of my conscience. I told you outside, you can help me and I can help you. So please, listen to what I have to say.”

“What is it I’m about to hear?” I said. “What you
think
happened, or what you
know
happened, or what happened? Because I really don’t need any more theories.”

“Just listen,” he said.

I thought of the work I’d been doing before I went out to clear snow, the work I should be doing now, the pointless, impractical work on David Dibald that was the reason for my being on sabbatical and that I wasn’t really getting done and that was of no importance. Literature makes nothing happen, I thought. Auden said that, or something very like it. In my other life, when Emily was with me, I would have contested it. She certainly would have. She’d crushed that niggling insecurity in the old, young Alan Tealing so that I’d hardly felt it, and then she had died and it had come back, stronger than ever. So now there wasn’t anything I would rather be occupied with than listening to Nilsen. I didn’t doubt that I would have heard before whatever he had to say, but what was to be lost by hearing it again? There wasn’t anyone in my life as it was that I’d rather have seen sitting where Nilsen was. Not Carol, not Jim Collins, nobody. So I emptied the last of the coffee
from the cafetière into our cups, and put the kettle on to make more, and I let him talk.

“In the days immediately after the event,” Nilsen said, “various claims of responsibility were made, some of them plausible, some not. Within a week we knew for sure what we’d believed from the start, that it was a bomb. The wreckage confirmed it. Very soon we had some pretty strong theories as to who had done it. British intelligence were thinking along the same lines. The police were doing their thing too, progressing the investigation.” He weighted that last phrase with something that might have been contempt. “We were all sharing information, and we were coming to the same conclusions. After about three months we knew a lot, and after six we knew so much you could say we were certain. One theory was so far in front of all the others it stopped being a theory. It became what we knew.

“The police had identified the suitcase that contained the device. We knew where it had been located in the aircraft hold. We had fragments of clothing, recovered at the crash site, which had been in that suitcase. The clothing had most likely been packed round the bomb. We knew the item the bomb had been loaded into, a radio cassette player, we knew the make and model. We knew that the bomb had detonated thirty-eight minutes after take-off and that pointed to a particular type of timer, and when we put that together with the cassette player we got scared because we
recognised the combination. There was a Palestinian group based in Germany. The German police, with our assistance, had broken it up a month before the bombing. That group had been making devices designed to bring down airplanes just the way this one had been brought down. Maybe there was a connection. We didn’t know how the bomb had been ingested into the baggage system but we were working on it. So we had all this. What else did we need?”