Poetic Justice (2 page)

T
HAT
classes at the University began, as they were scheduled to, on September 17, was a matter of considerable astonishment to everyone. There was not a great deal to be said for revolutions—not, at any rate, in Kate’s opinion—but they did accustom one to boredom in the face of extraordinary events, and a pleasant sense of breathless surprise at the calm occurrence of the expected. Kate said as much to Professor Castleman as they waited for the elevator in Lowell Hall.

“Well,” he answered, “I might have found myself even more overcome with amazement if they had not managed to put my course in historical methods, which never has less than a hundred and fifty students, into a classroom designed to hold ninety only if the students sit two in a chair, which, these days, they probably prefer to do. Though come to think of it,” he added as
the elevator, empty, went heedlessly past, apparently on some mysterious mission of its own, “I don’t know why students should expect seats at lectures, since audiences can no longer expect them at the theater. We went to a play last night—I use the word ‘play,’ you understand, to describe what we expected to see, not what we saw—and not only were there no seats, the entertainment principally consisted of the members of the cast removing their clothes and urging, gently of course, that the audience do likewise. My wife and I, fully clothed, felt rather like missionaries to Africa insufficiently indoctrinated into the antics of the aborigines. Shall we walk down? One thing at least has
not
changed in this university: the elevators. They have never worked, they do not now work, and though an historian should never speak with assurance of the future, I am willing to wager that they never will. Where are you off to? Don’t tell me, I know. A meeting. What’s more, I can tell you what you are going to discuss: relevance.”

“That,” said Kate, “would be the expected. As a matter of fact, I have a doctoral examination: the poetry of W. H. Auden. He wrote a good bit of clever poetry to your muse.”

“Mine? Gracious, have I got a muse? Just what I’ve needed all these years. Do you think I could trade her in for a cleaning woman, three days a week with only occasional ironing? My wife would be prostrate with gratitude.”

“Trade Clio in? Impossible. It is she into whose eyes ‘we look for recognition after we have been found out.’ ”

“Did Auden write that? Obviously he’s never been
married. That’s a description of any wife. I thought you were in the Victorian period.”

“I am, I am. Auden was born in 1907. He only missed Victoria by six years. And don’t be so frivolous about Clio. Auden called her ‘Madonna of silences, to whom we turn When we have lost control.’ ”

“Well, get hold of her,” Professor Castleman said. “I’m ready to turn.”

The dissertation examination was not, in fact, scheduled for another hour. Kate wandered back toward her office, not hurrying, because no sooner would she reach Baldwin Hall, in which building dwelt the Graduate English Department, than she would be immediately accosted, put on five more committees, asked to examine some aspect of the curriculum about which she knew nothing (like the language requirement for medieval studies) and to settle the problems of endlessly waiting students concerning, likely as not, questions not only of poetry and political polarization, but of pot and the pill as well. Kate strolled along in the sort of trance to which she had by now grown accustomed. It was the result of fatigue, mental indigestion, a sense of insecurity which resembled being tossed constantly in a blanket as much as it resembled anything, and, strangest of all, a love for the University which was as irrational as it was unrewarded.

She would have been hard put to say, she thought looking about her, what it was she loved. Certainly not the administration (had there been one, which, since they had resigned one by one like the ten little Indians, there
wasn’t). Not the Board of Governors, a body of tired, ultraconservative businessmen who could not understand why a university should not be run like a business or a country club. The students, the faculty, the place? It was inexplicable. The love one shares with a city is often a secret love, Camus had said; the love for a university was apparently no less so.

“Kate Fansler!” a voice said. “How very, very nice. ‘I
must
telephone Kate,’ I have said to Winthrop again and again, ‘we must have lunch, we must have dinner, we must meet.’ And now, you see, we have.”

Kate paused on the steps of Baldwin Hall and smiled at the sight of Polly Spence. Talk of the unexpected! Polly Spence belonged to the world of Kate’s family—she had actually been, years ago, a protégée of Kate’s mother’s—and there emanated from her the aura of St. Bernard’s—where her sons had gone to school—and Milton Academy, the Knickerbocker dancing classes and cotillions.

“I know,” Polly Spence said, “my instincts tell me that if I wait here patiently you will say something, perhaps even something profound, like ‘Hello.’ ”

“It’s good to see you, Polly,” Kate said. “I don’t know what’s become of me. I feel like the heroine of that Beckett play who is buried up to her neck and spends every waking moment rummaging around in a large, unorganized handbag. Come to see the action, as the young say?”

“Action? Profanity, more likely. Four-letter-word-bathroom, four-letter-word-sex, and really too tiresome, when I think that my own two poor lambs were positively
glared
at if they said ‘damn.’ It’s not an easy world to keep up with.”

“But if I know you, you’re keeping up all the same.”

“Of course I am. I’m taking a doctorate. In fact, I’ve almost got it. Now what do you think of that? I’m writing a dissertation for the Linguistics Department on the history of Verner’s Law. Please look impressed. The Linguistics Department is overjoyed, because the darlings didn’t know there was anything new to say about Verner’s Law until I told them, and they’ve been taking it like perfect angels.”

Kate smiled. “I always suspected an extraordinary brain operating behind all your committee-woman talents, but whatever made you decide to get a Ph.D.?”

“Grandchildren,” Polly said. “Three chuckling little boys, one gurgling little girl, all under three. It was either hours and hours of baby-sitting, to say nothing of having the little darlings cavalierly
dumped
upon us at the slightest excuse,
or
I had to get a job that would be absolutely respected. Winthrop has encouraged me. ‘Polly,’ he said, ‘if we are not to find ourselves changing diapers every blessed weekend, you had better find something demanding to say you’re
doing.
’ The children, of course, are furious, but I am now a teaching assistant, very, very busy, thank you, and only condescending to rally round at Christmas and Easter. Summers I dash off to do research and Winthrop joins me when he can. But you look tired, and here I am chatting away. Let’s have lunch one day at the Cosmopolitan Club.”

“I’m not a member.”

“Of course not, dear, though I never understood why. Why
are
you looking so tired?”

“Meetings. Meetings and meetings. We are all trying, as you must have heard, to restructure the University, another way of saying that we, like the chap in the animated cartoons, have looked down to discover we are not standing on anything. Then, of course, we fall.”

“But everybody’s resigned. The President. The Vice-President. We’ve got an Acting President, we’re getting a Faculty Senate, surely everything’s looking up.”

“Perhaps. But the English Department has discovered there is no real reason for most of the things they have been happily doing for years. And the teaching assistants—where, by the way, are you being a teaching assistant? Don’t tell me the College has reformed itself sufficiently to be hiring female, no-longer-young ladies, however talented …”

“Not them; not bloody likely. I’m at the University College.
Very
exciting. Really, Kate, you have no idea.”

Kate, looking blank, realized she hadn’t.

“Really,” Polly Spence said, “the snobbery of you people in the graduate school! We’re doing
splendid
work over there …”

“Didn’t the University College used to be the extension school? Odd courses for people at loose ends like members of labor unions who only work twenty hours a week and housewives whose children are …?”

“That was a hundred years ago. There are no more courses in basket-weaving. We give a degree, we have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and our students are
very
intelligent people who simply don’t want to play football or have a posture picture taken.”

“Forgive me, Polly. As one always does when one speaks from ignorance and prejudice, I’m sounding a lousy snob.”

“Well, you’ll be hearing more from us, just you wait and see. Meanwhile, you must come and have dinner. When I tell Winthrop I’ve met you, he’ll insist. He always finds you so entertaining, like Restoration comedy.”

“And about as up-to-date. I’m faltering, Polly. If you want to know the truth, I’m thinking of taking up bridge, if not palmistry, astrology, and the finer points of ESP. One of my students has offered to introduce me to a medium with electronic thought waves.”

“There is no question about it,” Polly said. “We must have lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club. It reassures one.”

Kate, walking up the stairs of Baldwin, waved a dismissive hand.

“Kafka,” Mark Everglade said, meeting her in the hall outside her office, “where is thy sting?”

“I take it,” Kate said, “that is a perpetually appropriate remark these days.”

“Perpetually. Would you mind teaching a text course next year in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton?”

“You have to be joking. And what, while I’m doubled over with hilarity, is a text course?”

“One that uses books, of course. I know we’re all tired on the first day of the semester, Kate, but surely you could have seen that. You remember books? They’re what we used to read before we began discussing what we ought to read. The students have spent the entire summer reforming our course offerings, and it’s now to be text courses.”

“I have never read Bulwer-Lytton. I have never even discussed reading Bulwer-Lytton, except with some strange student who used to turn up every seven years with another thousand pages on the development of the historical novel. Ah, I see,
The Last Days of Pompeii
is now considered relevant. Perhaps it is, at that.”

“If only,” Mark Everglade said, “a volcano would come and cover us all with dust. We have done away, as you would have known if you had ever listened at all those meetings this last summer, with lectures and seminars. We now have text courses, preferably in texts nobody ever heard of before, like Bulwer-Lytton and the literature of the emerging African nations. While I think of it, we are in the market for someone who reads Swahili, if you should ever hear of such a person.”

“So mysterious,” Kate said. “No doubt there are scads of fascinating literary works in Swahili. But I spoke just the other night to someone returned from Africa. He said that in Ethiopia, for example, there are seventy-five different dialects, and that the tribes can only converse with each other in English. In Nigeria, I understand, there are two hundred and twenty-five languages, with English again the common tongue for conversation. Why don’t we train people to teach English in Swahili, instead of training people to teach Swahili in English, or is that a particularly reactionary observation?”

“Not only reactionary,” Mark said, “but probably in itself grounds for occupying this whole building. Now as to the catalogue …”

“Why are we discussing next year’s catalogue on this year’s first day of classes?”

“As you will see when you meet with the student-faculty committee for finalizing the revisions of the catalogue, everyone keeps changing his mind, so that we’ve got to get the damn catalogue for next year into print so that no one can change it and we can argue about the year after.”

“I am not on the student-faculty committee to finalize anything, and I will not serve on any committee with so barbaric a word as ‘finalize’ in its title, and that’s final,” Kate said.

“The title is open to discussion,” Mark said, “but I’m afraid you’ve absolutely got to be on the committee because you’ve been on it all summer and are the only one who knows what’s going on.”

“ ‘We have no means of learning what is really going on,’ Auden says.”

“I had no idea Auden was so relevant; the ultimate compliment.”

“Well, he may be,” Kate said, “but I’m not. Do you think that could be my whole problem?”

“It’s the problem all right. We are not only magnificently irrelevant, but are prevented, mysteriously, from enjoying the fruits of irrelevance, which are frivolity and leisure.”

“I wish I were an African nation,” Kate said. “It must be so comforting to think of oneself as emerging.”

Kate had time only to dive into her office, add the mail she had collected from her box downstairs to that already on her desk unopened, grab the dissertation on Auden, tell three students who appeared from nowhere
that she was
not
having office hours or consultations of any sort, and listen, with perfect impassivity, to the ringing of her telephone. Kate did not claim to have learned much during the previous spring’s disruption or the summer’s hard committee work, but she had learned one thing: it is not necessary to answer one’s telephone, One can always suppose that one is not there. This vaguely existential decision meant, therefore, that Kate avoided for another two and one half hours what her governess used to call a rendezvous with destiny. A nice phrase. But Kate had early on discovered (though considerably after the reign of the governess) that one cannot “avoid” a destined rendezvous. Rendezvous are either inevitable or impossible.

It was by no means usual for the dissertation examination, the final examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, to be held on the first day of classes. In fact, like so much else now going on, it was hitherto unheard of. But the spring revolutions had meant the inevitable postponement of many doctoral dissertation examinations, partly because the Committee of Seven appointed by the Dean of the Graduate Faculties could rarely be collected (most of them were either wrestling with plainclothesmen at the time, examining identification at the University gates, or begging the mayor to intervene in the University’s problems). And even had it been possible to get all seven in one place, it was not possible to find the place. The head of the Graduate English Department, a man for whom, Kate had decided over the summer, the term “long-suffering” was meiosis, had
held several examinations in his living room (to the evident distress of his children, who had planned to watch television at the same time), but after a while all such efforts were given up. When it reached the point where one examination committee (which fortunately included no lady members) met in the men’s room of the Faculty Club, and two of those who had been asked at the last minute to serve had never, it soon became evident, heard of the subject under discussion, the office of the Dean of Graduate Faculties declared itself officially closed. For one thing, with all the student raids on the administration buildings, the secretarial staff became so unnerved at the necessity of shoving all records and dissertations into the safe at the threat of occupation that they flatly refused even to come to the office until things had “quieted down.”