Poetic Justice (7 page)

“Some of Auden’s anecdotes are unprintable, though of course I’ve seen them in print. I especially appreciate the critic who said of Auden that he is able to write prolifically, carelessly, and exquisitely without seeming to have to pay any price for his inspiration. He is the only poet I know of whom that is true—good poet, that is.”

“I thought you didn’t read critics on Auden.”

“I don’t; coming on that was just a bit of serendipity.”

“Do you know Auden’s explanation for today’s educational difficulties?”

“I can’t imagine. Not enough statues to defunct chefs?”

“You’re close: not enough luncheon parties given by undergraduates in their rooms—of the sort Auden had at Oxford.”

“Oh, yes,” Kate said:

Never having had lunch in my room, I wouldn’t know. But Auden and I do have one oddity in common: we both grew so accustomed, as children, to being the youngest person present that even today we are likely to feel the youngest person in the room even if, as frequently happens, we are the oldest.”

“Speaking of news giving one the glooms, as I suppose
we must sooner or later,” Clemance said, “I gather that you are supporting this University College, which I’m afraid I have always thought of as an extension school. I’m told that, unlike my colleagues Professors Cudlipp and O’Toole, you actually think the University College has greater value than the undergraduate college which I attended and where I teach. Cudlipp and O’Toole are both convinced that an undergraduate college for, as they put it, dropouts will undermine the value of any other undergraduate degree given in this University. I take it you don’t agree with that?”

“No,” Kate said, “I don’t. Why should you have thought I would?”

Clemance laughed. “A good question,” he said. “Why indeed? Kate Fansler, if I were to ask you, very rapidly, what you remember first of all, right off, about your childhood, what would you answer? You know, answer as in those association games we always used to hear so much about.”

“Rose petals,” Kate said.

Clemance looked surprised.

“Yes, odd as it may seem, and not for the world would I admit it to my revolutionary students, but I remember rose petals in the bottom of finger bowls, even at Nantucket where we spent the summers. When I was a child growing up, there was a depression and then a war; yet it might have been the Edwardian era, when, as everyone knows, the sun always shone. We had a cook in the house in New York and in Nantucket, a laundress who sat for hours at a mangle, maids running up and down the stairs, and finger bowls at dinner with rose petals in
the bottom. My brothers were away at school, and then at war; I had a governess. Does all that matter?”

“It’s very Proustian.”

“So I’ve begun to think. Although the Duchess of Guermantes would always have been strange to me, I could have known Aunt Leonie and the two country walks, and the hawthorn blossoms. Does this have some connection with University College that I don’t understand?”

Clemance sat forward in his chair and pursed his lips in thought, evolving one of his deliberate sentences which would emerge only slowly. “I went to a public high school for bright boys,” he said, “and when I came to the College it was only because I got a partial scholarship and could live at home, and because my parents had carefully saved money over the years so that I might come here rather than to City College. I know that the City College classes of my time and later produced some of the most brilliant men in our country, but there was something here I cherished which I can only call graciousness, and a kind of excellence which was not alone determined by ambition. I find I am offended by the manners, by the lack of culture in the deepest sense of the word, prevalent today. I think in order to give everyone an opportunity, we are sacrificing our gifted people.” Clemance made an impatient gesture with his hand. “I’m rambling,” he said. “I can’t think why I should have imagined you would know what I’m talking about.”

“The instinct was quite correct,” Kate said. “I can’t bear bad manners and being called by my first name by strangers, yet I also realize that superficial good manners
may cover the most appalling nastiness and hostility. My brothers have excellent manners, but they are basically the rudest men I have ever met. You see, I’m rambling too. My rudest graduate student went through Princeton on a complete scholarship, and as far as I can see he communicates either in dialectics or exponibles, part of a ‘mechanized generation to whom haphazard oracular grunts are profound wisdom.’ Do you suppose the University College students to be ruder than those in your own college? That isn’t my impression.”

“Perhaps I don’t mean to talk about manners. Perhaps I mean to talk about excellence.”

“There I am with you. But Professor Clemance, academic excellence is not that easily measurable. More and more students are getting perfect scores on college entrance tests—my graduate student with the oracular grunts scored very high indeed—but excellence is otherwise measurable, provided one maintains a minimum admissions score. The graduates of University College go on to graduate school in large numbers, astonishingly large numbers if one remembers the average age of the students. I know that some of those older students, especially the older women students, bore the boys in your college if they turn up in the same classes but, to be frank, the boys in your college bore me. I have never found youthful male arrogance, even when combined with great talent, especially appealing, while you, of course, have. In that, I suspect, we don’t agree at all.”

“You are accusing me simply of prejudice.”

“Oh, yes, quite simply. And as to manners, your college boys have fewer of those. They were the original, urinating-on-the-President’s-rug revolutionaries who
called policemen pigs and the administration a double-barreled epithet I will not embarrass either of us by repeating. What I find difficult to understand is what it is you fear so about the University College—all of you, I mean. Those who are not satisfied to hurl from prep school through college and graduate school into the family law firm or whatever seem to me intelligent; it is surely the better part of wisdom to take time to think, and a country like ours should have a college for those who have gained wisdom and decided on a later, different college, or on a chance for a second life.”

“Miss Fansler, could your University College have produced Auden?”

“No. And neither could your college, Professor Clemance.” (Kate, as an inheritance from days when children were “brought up,” found she could not bring herself to call Clemance “Frederick,” a difficulty which Reed, who had never had a governess, thought preposterous.) “Oxford didn’t produce Auden, even if it did allow him luncheon parties; neither did his doctor father, from whose books Auden used to learn the facts of life he diagrammed on the school-room blackboards, nor his mother, whom he loved and resembled. What produces an Auden? Having a friend like Isherwood when you are young?”

“Wouldn’t you like it if Auden were to dedicate one of his poems to you?”

“I’ve given up daydreaming. No, I should always be so hideously frightened, with Auden, of being a bore or a hideola. Imagine afterward; one would have to drown oneself to avoid the memories.”

“He’s not as forbidding as all that; he’s a superb teacher, you know.”

“All I know about his teaching is another peculiarity we have in common: we are the only two teachers of literature who have ever admitted in class that we have never read
Don Quixote
through to the end.”

“It is a good thing I didn’t know that before I voted for your tenure.”

“Professor Clemance, I have often wished for the opportunity to tell you that you taught me more—about literature, something I can only call morality, and about the honor of the profession of letters—than anyone else in the University. But you seemed to wish only for young male followers, and I did not wish to burden you with an older female disciple. Surely you must know, however, that no teacher knows where his influence reaches.”

“I remember that you did a paper on
Portrait of a Lady.
I have never especially cared for women students. I think perhaps I was wrong in that. Perhaps there are Isabel Archers at University College.”

Kate looked at him for a time. “Perhaps there are,” she said. “I hope there isn’t anything terribly wrong—with you, I mean?”

“But there is,” he said. “My heart is broken. I have a pain in it.” Kate remembered how he was always able to say dramatic things simply, as though emotion did not frighten him. “This student revolution hasn’t broken your heart, hasn’t affected your love for the University?”

“No,” Kate said. “Much as I loved the rose petals in the finger bowls, I know my brothers too well. I have never cared for playboys or reactionaries, and they were
produced by the same process that produced the finger bowls. I love talent, but do not care for privilege which takes itself for granted. To put it another way, I do not care for a society which has a place for Oblonsky, but none for Anna and Vronsky.”

“What about Levin?”

“Levin without his estate and serfs would have been Anna. We are all Anna now.”

Clemance sat silent for a time. “There is a Departmental meeting on Monday,” he finally said. “No doubt the whole matter,” he waved his hand in a familiar gesture, “will come up.”

“No doubt.”

“Jeremiah Cudlipp and Robert O’Toole feel very strongly about it; very strongly.”

“So I have heard,” she said. “Professor Clemance, let me tell you some non-University news: I’m to be married.”

“Are you indeed? I am glad. It is good ‘to be reborn, reneighbored in the Country of Consideration.’ ”

“The Country of Consideration: what a lovely definition of marriage.”

“Yes,” Clemance said. “If one considers it in the middle years, the best definition I know.”

When Kate had parted from Clemance outside the Faculty Club, she walked for a time around the campus; the autumn was her favorite season, she was to have dinner with Reed, she was happy. The campus looked peaceful, benign, perhaps falsely so, but “when was peace or its concomitant smile the worse for being undeserved?” Perhaps, she thought, Reed will be ready early.

She was surprised, though only mildly so, to find McQuire waiting for her at the bus stop.

“More propositions?” Kate asked.

“I am Frogmore’s pander. I promised him I would try to bring you over to the Club for a conversation. We’ve heard the English Senior Faculty Committee meeting is Monday, and we’d like a word in your ear before then.”

“I have only just been at the Club,” Kate said; “inferior lunch, superior quotations. I never even expected to be here Saturday when I took up this line of work.”

“Come back to the Club with me now. I faithfully promise this will be the last time I abduct you.”

“By the way,” Kate said, as they walked toward the Faculty Club, “what’s your great interest in the University College? Surely there aren’t enough beautiful young things to be worth all this bother.”

“Well—the University College these days is an extraordinarily vital place, while the College, let’s face it, is catering first to a lot of boys fed up with work in prep schools whose only ambition for their college years is to get confronted and laid, preferably on alternate days, and second to the college alumni who want Alma Mater to go on unchanged, supporting the same prejudices and enthusiasms they remember, or think they do, from their undergraduate days. As an economist, I’m interested in the economically viable, and in the long run I think that’s an adult undergraduate school. Certainly in New York City. I mean, it may be lovely to go and gambol by the Charles, but the river in this city is not a river but an estuary of the ocean, and it follows the tides of the ocean. I think we should stop trying to be Harvard
or Yale and find our own pattern. I ought to add that St. Jude is my favorite saint: he of the lost causes—or has the Church demoted him along with the others?”

“All causes are lost causes, as e.e. cummings used to say; otherwise, they’re effects.”

Frogmore greeted Kate with all the exuberance of a hostess who had not really expected the guest of honor to appear. “Never mind how goody-good he comes on,” McQuire had said. “It’s no doubt due to an oppressive upbringing. I’ve actually heard him use four-letter words, when driven. I don’t know why University College should be a personal matter to him, but I think he would do almost anything for the sheer joy of seeing Cudlipp’s face when the Board of Governors announce that they have voted to let University College continue.” Today Frogmore (“Call me Vivian,” he said to Kate, who was astonished; it seemed to her that any man named Vivian would stick to last names as a mere matter of survival) did not come on goody-good very long. “You’ll never guess what that son-of-a—I beg your pardon, Kate—has done,” he said. “Managed to get one of his pals in as Dean of the College.”

“From the English Department? Do I know him? Or is his name unmentionable?”

“His name’s O’Toole,” Frogmore said. “Robert J. O’Toole. Ring a bell?”

“I don’t believe it,” Kate said. “Why should Robert O’Toole take a job like that? He’s already a full professor and a leader of what I believe is known as the New York intellectual community, with influence even in certain parts of Connecticut and New Jersey. Why should he take …?”

“Cudlipp has managed it. Of course, O’Toole’s acceptable to the faculty because he’s a name, and has a lot of university and extra-university weight to throw around. The only members of the College faculty who might have objected are those who can’t stand O’Toole’s guts, or those who don’t think he’s quite as good as he thinks he is …”

“Which is impossible on the face of it, from all I hear,” McQuire interjected.

“And these, of course, were quietly persuaded by Cudlipp that it takes a …”

“Conceited, arrogant, insensitive bastard to win this fight,” McQuire happily concluded. “Forgive me finishing all your sentences, Frogmore, but they all have such provocative beginnings.”