The Ninth Wave (13 page)

His followers were almost all girls and most of them came to Stanford from
Catholic preparatory schools. Although he was profoundly anti-clerical
and most of the girls in his classes had long ago renounced Catholicism,
he and they were convinced that only the rigors of a Catholic education
could provide the preparation for the type of intellectual exertion that
students must make under Professor Moon's direction. Only those who had
endured the doctrinaire training of nuns could appreciate that Boethius
made St. Thomas clear; that Berdyaev contained all of the mysteries of
Lenin and Stalin's political behavior; that the vulgarities of Kant
were made meaningful by the works of Moritz Lazarus. Professor Moon
was only thirty-five, but already he was engaged in writing a book
which he had entitled "The Daemons of History," and which was to be a
history of the little-known, anonymous, but critical people who in the
interstices of history had really formed the ideas which less gifted,
but more distinguished men had made popular. The book was slow work and
Professor Moon smiled wistfully when asked about its progress. He had no
optimism as to when it would be finished. His following was convinced
the work would be published posthumously and they shared a peculiar
pride because of this knowledge.
Professor Moon looked up from his lecture notes and caught sight of
two figures walking across the Quad. The glare of the sun was so bright
that the two figures were black and featureless, edged by light. As the
spectral figures walked into the shade of the corridor, they regained
their identity and Professor Moon could see that one of them was Mike
Freesmith and the other was Hank Moore. He looked back down at his lecture
notes and hoped the boys would walk by his office. In a moment, however,
there was a knock on his door. Professor Moon hesitated only long enough
to put his lecture notes in a drawer, take out a small book on Hugo
of Saint-Victor's, "Summa Sententiarum," and then he called softly,
"Come in."
"Hello, Mike; hello, Hank," he said as they came in. "Sit down. To what
do I owe the honor of this visit?"
"Just passing by and thought you might be in," Mike said. "Have you got
a minute?"
"A minute? Lots of minutes. As Milton said, 'Immovable, infix'd and
frozen round, Periods of time,' and I have plenty of them to spare,"
Professor Moon said. "A much overrated poet," he muttered almost to
himself and smiled at his visitors.
Mike sat down in a chair across the room and put his feet up on an empty
bookshelf. He was wearing blue jeans and moccasins and a T-shirt. Hank
stood beside the door, leaning against the wall.
"I heard your radio lecture the other night," Mike said. "It was pretty
good. 'Good Men and Bad Taste,' that was a good title."
"Yes," Professor Moon said. "Not much to it, you know. Doubt if they'll
ever ask me to do it again."
He had been invited to give one in a series of radio lectures by university
professors on whatever subject the speaker wished to discuss. Most of the
other speakers had attempted to give a popular version of their specialty.
But Professor Moon had resolved to keep the same standards he employed in
the classroom; indeed, he made the lecture somewhat more difficult. It had
been heavy with allusions to little-known artists, poets, and writers;
the sentences had been models of difficult, precise language. The station
manager had blinked at him in astonishment when he was through and this
had rewarded Professor Moon for his labors.
"A few things you said I didn't understand," Mike said. Professor Moon
watched Mike's legs. Mike's blue jeans were tight and the muscles of
his calves bulged solidly and then flattened as he pushed himself back
and forth in a short arc. "You said that everyone had good taste, but
that modern society had corrupted the natural good taste that every man
possesses. Wasn't that it?"
"Yes, that was it. The argument was a bit complex, but that was the
essence of it," Professor Moon said. He was vaguely irritated by the way
Mike simplified the discussion; it was almost as if the boy wanted to
take away the elegance of words, to reduce them to hard, flat statements.
"Well, you don't really believe that, do you?" Mike said.
Professor Moon looked sharply away from Mike's legs, over Mike's face,
and then down at the book in front of him.
"Of course I do," he said.
"Why?"
"There is a good deal of evidence that when people have not been told
what to like or their taste has not been corrupted they will choose
the most beautiful thing in a completely natural way. Primitive tribes,
for example, will prefer Beethoven to boogie-woggie if you give them a
chance to express a preference."
"But it doesn't prove anything. What does it mean to say that an isolated,
natural individual likes Beethoven more than boogie-woogie? I remember
in the lecture you said that almost everyone at birth has a sense of
color that is as good as Van Gogh's."
"But the society corrupts the natural capacity for good taste," Professor
Moon said.
"That's the point," Mike said. "Everyone, everyplace, lives in some
sort of a society. There are no isolated, natural individuals. Everyone
lives in a group. What difference does it make if everyone has natural
equipment as good as Van Gogh's? The minute they're born it starts to
change; the group bangs it around, alters it, modifies, corrupts. By
the time a kid is three years old his color appreciation is as good as
the group around him. And most of the time that's pretty awful."
"The taste of the group doesn't have to be bad," Professor Moon said.
"There is no reason why the society has to brutalize the individual. What
I mean is that there are real standards of beauty and the society could
help the individual to see these clearly if the society were properly
organized. Why does a society have to insist upon bad taste? Why can't
it insist upon good taste? That's the point, Mike. If it's true that
simple and unsophisticated people have good taste, why can't society
just let that taste develop instead of insisting that everyone have very,
very bad taste?"
Mike leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. The sunlight
outside was bright and clear, but it was so broken and diffused by
the dull sandstone walls, the dusty grass and patches of shade that
it entered the office as a golden haze. The light shifted and moved;
was made tangible by motes that hung motionless in the still air. A
beam of light fell on Mike's bare arm and surrounded each hair with a
minute glow. Professor Moon watched Mike's hand curl into a fist and he
flinched. But Mike only tapped his kneecap gently with the fist.
"But there aren't any simple unsophisticated people around any more,"
Mike said. "Maybe every person has the potential to become a Michelangelo,
the nerves, eyes, color sense, imagination. If you say so I'll believe
it. But the fact is that they don't all become Michelangelos. The great
mass of the people just don't care about taste or beauty or whatever
you want to call it. Look, the mass of people don't even determine what
popular taste is. Do you think the mass of the people determine what
kind of beautiful cars they are going to buy? Hell no. A little group of
men is busy right now in Detroit deciding what we are going to like and
admire in new cars ten years from now. If it's beetle shaped and squat
and dripping chrome, why in 1949 we'll stand around and admire it and go
in debt to buy one. But we don't determine what is beautiful or ugly.
All we do is wait to be told what is beautiful in cars and then fight
like hell to buy one."
"You're right, of course," Professor Moon said. "Popular taste is
incredibly bad now, but that is because it had to be weaned away from
a sense of taste and beauty that was once almost perfect. Whenever the
awful hand of industrialism and commerce has touched anything it has
become tawdry and distorted."
"Do you really believe that?" Mike asked.
"Of course. That's why I'm partly communist and partly Catholic. The
communist is right in de-emphasizing private property. If the mass of
people weren't driven to own property, to blindly acquire more and more,
they could be interested in what is beautiful and tasteful. If private
property were eliminated, then the natural law of the Catholics would
make sense. Either doctrine by itself is senseless, but if private
property were eliminated, then Catholicism would make sense."
Professor Moon looked anxiously at Mike. He had a nagging doubt that he
sounded childish or sentimental when he talked to Mike. He wanted very
much to sound convincing.
"It narrows down to two issues," Hank said. Mike and Professor Moon
swung their heads around to look at him and he flushed and spoke very
rapidly. "One, does each individual really have the natural capacity
that Professor Moon thinks he has? Second, if each individual does have
a high natural capacity why doesn't he develop it?"
"O.K., I'll buy that," Mike said. "I think people may have the natural
capacity. Probably you can make a statesman out of a kid born in the
slums if you start soon enough and work hard enough. So it comes down
to the second question. Why don't these wonderful individuals live up to
their potential? Everyone agrees they don't. Professor Moon, John Locke,
Thomas Hobbes, everyone. They all look around and think the men they
see are pathetic, inadequate, scared, shameful."
"Right," Professor Moon said crisply. "It's obvious that men don't live
up to their capacity. In my radio lecture I tried to indicate why. I
stated that individuals don't live up to their potential because the
society corrupts them. Change the society and the individuals can live
more fully."
"No, it's more than that," Mike said, speaking very slowly. He sat up
in his chair, took his feet off the desk. "It's not the society. It's
something inside of people. Maybe they've got all the potential for
good inside, but they've also got something else inside of them too."
"Like what?" Hank asked.
"Like a feeling they'd like to bitch everything up," Mike said. "Like
a feeling they'd like to break something up even if they can see it's
good. It's hard to say it. Look, prize fights are more expensive than
symphony concerts. And everyone is always telling everybody else that
they ought to like concerts more than prize fights; their teachers, the
newspapers, the radios. And everyone is always telling them that prize
fighting is cruel and anti-social and vulgar. So why do more people go
to prize fights than go to concerts? I'm not sure. But I've got a hunch."
"I've got a hunch too," Professor Moon said. "The hunch is that there
are more fight arenas around than there are symphony halls."
He laughed, but Mike looked at him without smiling, almost as if he did
not hear.
"No, that's not it," Mike said, going slowly, feeling his way. "It's like
they know that they don't want the best thing. They want something else
. . . they want the thing that isn't best. Because it isn't the best,
because they've been told that they shouldn't want it they want it. Oh,
not all of them. Some little quiet guys go to the opera and hate it, but
they do it because they think they should. And some people, a very few,
actually prefer the opera to the prize fight."
Mike paused. Hank and Professor Moon were watching him. He was
embarrassed. He walked over and looked out the window, watching the
distant whirling of the sprinklers.
"Well, now, Mike," Professor Moon said. "You have a good healthy interest
in the way people actually behave and I must confess that you see such
behavior with much more clarity than most young people. But certainly
it is important to see that people are motivated by other things than
just envy."
"I didn't mean just envy," Mike said defensively. "I didn't say it the
way I wanted."
"But that's what you said," Professor Moon went on. He felt more secure now.
Mike swung around and looked at Professor Moon. He put his hands in the
pockets of his blue jeans and stood with his legs apart.
"Mike is a little intoxicated with history and psychology," Hank said. "He
gets things mixed up and they come out in queer ways."
Mike knew that Hank was trying to take him off the hook. He grinned and
stepped into the center of the room.
"Professor Moon understands about queer ways," Mike said. Professor
Moon's smile vanished abruptly. "He is tolerant about queer ways."
Mike stood with his shoulders hunched belligerently. Professor Moon
looked sharply away from Mike, ran his eyes over the rows of books. His
forehead was very pale and his lips were pressed together.
"Let's go, Mike," Hank said. "We've got to get going."
Professor Moon looked up and his face was collapsed and formless, his
lower lip struggling to regain its shape. The only firm thing in his
face was a tear that glittered sharply in each eye. He automatically
waved to them and his face creased in the smile which he gave students
leaving his office. As Mike and Hank walked by the window of his office
they could hear him sniffling and they knew without looking that he had
his head down on the desk.
They walked by the Japanese gardener and stepped out of the shade of the
passageway into the gathered, yellow, intense heat of the Quad. The heat
flowed from the stones of the buildings, gathered in pools of dead air
that smelled of scorched cement, burnt palm leaves and an utter absence
of moisture. It was an aseptic, crisp hotness. They walked through it as
if it were water; slowed by the density of it; feeling their nostrils
distend as if searching for air. Drops of sweat popped out on their
foreheads and were pulled into the dry atmosphere and in a few minutes
their faces were powdered by small particles of dried salt.
"Hot day. Really hot day," Mike said. "I like hot days."
Hank did not reply. Their feet scraped over the stones of the Quad and
the sound floated over the dead scorched air and came back rounded and
plump off the thick walls. They walked by a small circle of palm trees
and brilliant summer flowers. Above them the bright mosaic work of the
chapel glittered.
"You son of a bitch," Hank said. "You had to let him know that you know
he is a queer. Is that the only reason you stopped by his office?"