Poetic Justice (13 page)

“And in the men’s room,” Hankster said. “Let’s face it, anyone could have switched those pills, if murder were the intent. I don’t believe it was. I think someone copped what he thought were a couple of aspirins, and then returned others, unaware of their lethal qualities for Cudlipp.”

“Then,” Castleman said, “we’ve got to find him—the innocent aspirin-changer.”

“Perhaps he will confess,” Frogmore said. “Let us hope so. Meanwhile, I would like to know what the next move is—for University College. Whether or not we can find the person who caused Cudlipp’s death, we can certainly determine the effect of the death on us. O’Toole will be taken up with running the College. Clemance, while not our advocate, seems actually to have some decent sense of reticence about wiping us off the face of the map. The Graduate English Department, from what I can gather, is all for promoting our assistant professors from the English Department, helping themselves and doing the College in the eye at the same time. I think we ought to move.”

“Move cautiously,” Castleman said, “but move—I agree with you. Let’s discover, in an informal way, how the administration feels.”

“I thought we were clean out of administration,” Kate said.

“The Administrative Council is still functioning,” Frogmore said, “and will go on until we get the Senate. The Acting President has promised that a statement of confidence in the viability of University College, and instructions to departments to promote its qualified faculty to tenure, will come before the next meeting of the Administrative Council.”

“Which is when?” Hankster asked.

“In three weeks, and every hour of that time has to be used to get us the votes we need—not only in favor of the motion, but also against a motion to table for any reason whatsoever—for example, so that all undergraduate
education at the University can be studied. Because if the Administrative Council doesn’t give us its mandate we’re as good as finished. By the time we get a Senate and a new President it will be a whole new ball game—as Cudlipp knew.”

“So his being out of the picture will make a difference?”

“Oh, yes,” Frogmore said, “all the difference in the world. Cudlipp had a lot of favors to trade, and now isn’t around to trade them.”

Kate walked from the meeting with Hankster; she fell in step beside him so that, without being rude, he had no choice but to proceed at her side—and Hankster was never rude. He had, since the spring, acquired a reputation for devoted radicalism; yet,
tête-à-tête
with him, one found it hard to believe. Not only the scarcely audible voice—the intimation was that he was unable to speak loudly, though Kate suspected strategic rather than physical inhibitions—belied the drama of radicalism. He was a gentleman, from the top of his sleek head, past the elegant clothes, to the tips of his beautifully made shoes. Kate, because she had come from his world, understood him, and knew better than most that there are those who cling to the finger bowls, those who dismiss them with a shrug but not without nostalgia, and those like Hankster whose life was devoted to smashing the finger bowls against privy walls.

“What did you talk about with Cudlipp, if I may be forthright enough to ask? If you don’t want to tell me, don’t; spare me the gentlemanly circumlocutions.”

“I’m honored,” Hankster said. “As I have gathered,
you’re often peppery, but seldom rude. You dislike me very much, don’t you?”

Kate stopped a moment, with Hankster waiting patiently by her side. “Yes,” Kate said, “I do. I think I always dislike people who are destroyers by principle, though I never really faced up to it, until this moment. Sorry. I’ve no right to ask you any questions at all.”

“Sure you have. You really think, don’t you, that we’ve seen the last of the troubles. That from now on, we just rebuild our university, better than before but not fundamentally different.”

“Oh, I expect students will sit in buildings, or whatever the new ploy is, again this spring. But I don’t think it will make any real difference; not here. We’ve had our moment of awakening. This spring, it will be other universities who have the uprisings; don’t you agree?”

“Perhaps. But the whole system’s finished all the same. Sure, you’ll have your Senate, which will bring students and junior faculty into the system, and will perhaps keep an antediluvian administration from making the kinds of mistakes which, in any case, they aren’t going to make anymore, because no university will ever again have so basically stupid a president as this university had. But it’s only reaction you’re institutionalizing. Administrators on the whole, you know, are more up-to-date than the senior faculty. That’s where the bastion of conservatism is, if you want to know. And this Senate will simply give them more power. So—when the big break comes, it will be a lulu.”

“And you look forward to it, hope for it, will work for it?”

“It will happen whatever I do, though I’ll lend a hand if I can. I don’t know what revolutions you’re dreaming of, Professor Fansler, or hoping for, or fearing.”

Kate laughed. “You’re accusing me, in your ever-polite way, of being like the dreaming lady in an anecdote of Kenneth Burke’s. She dreamed a brute of a man had entered her bedroom and was staring at her from the foot of her bed. ‘Oh, what are you going to do to me?’ she asked, trembling. ‘I don’t know, lady,’ the brute answered; ‘it’s your dream.’ ”

Hankster laughed. “It is delightful to talk to someone who enjoys one’s point, even against herself.”

“I know. It’s our guilts and our hidden desires that you work on most, you radicals. We shall destroy ourselves in the end, whether because we understand the radical students too well or too little.”

“But it’s not just the radical students; it’s all students. There simply is no longer any reason for their being in college—not the smart ones, anyway. The engineering students, those on their way up the social ladder, the blacks—college has some point for them. But for the bright kid who’s been to a first-rate high school, what’s he got to learn at college? He no longer comes to college for his first drink, his first woman. Until college becomes a privilege again.…”

“But that’s the point of the University College—for the older students. Education is again something they’ve had to earn.”

“The University College, and places like it, are the future. Whether this University has the sense to see that or not is important only to us here, now, but in the end
it will make no difference. The question is not
if
the state will take over this University, but when. Every year, also, fewer kids make it through undergraduate education uninterrupted. To leave college is the norm, not the exception now. The whole picture’s changing. That, if you want to know, is what I talked to Cudlipp about at lunch. Since I teach in both the adult and the boys’ colleges, he wanted to know where my loyalties lay.”

“And what did you tell him?” Kate asked.

“That I was a smasher of finger bowls. But ask your colleague Emilia Airhart. She joined us near the beginning.”

“How come?”

“I met her and asked her to.”

“Didn’t Cudlipp mind?”

“Horribly. He dislikes women if they are not beautiful, not slender, not stupider than he—or willing to pretend they are—and not flirtatious. Mrs. Airhart made a clean sweep. You would do better, or would have done; we will never know now.”

“I am quite past deciding if that is nasty or nice. Anyway, I like Emilia Airhart.”

“So do I. And if you ask her, she will tell you that Cudlipp tried to co-opt me and I said no. The system’s finished. You and I came out of the same world, but only one of us dreams of going back.”

“I know I can’t go back,” Kate said. “I just don’t hate the memory. What’s Frogmore going to do now?”

“What everyone must do: reach every member of the Administrative Council; tell each one a vote for University College is a vote against the growing power mania
of
The
College. We’ll come through now. It’s truly amazing what aspirin can cure, wouldn’t you say?”

Kate found Emilia Airhart in her office riffling, as one seemed to do these days, through mimeographed pages. “Come in,” she called to Kate. “I was just about to write you a note. One less dirty piece of paper, thank God. I knew I had lost my interest in revolution when I lost my interest in mimeographed announcements from every splinter group on campus demanding this, foretelling that, condemning the other. There is now even an organization for liberating women—utter nonsense. Women are liberated the moment they stop caring what other women think of them.” With a gesture of great delight she dumped the whole package of papers into the waste basket. “I hear you’re an admirer of Auden’s and have just sponsored a brilliant dissertation on him.”

“Yes, though the less said about the dissertation defense, the better. There was a moment there when I feared for the whole future of the academic world.”

“Do tell. Professor Pollinger mentioned it as the most interesting dissertation defense he had been to in years. What
do
you admire about Auden, by the way, if you can enunciate it in several well-chosen sentences—a talent of yours, I’m told.”

“I can’t imagine by whom. As a matter of fact, I babble on, hitting the truth occasionally by happenstance which inspires students by the sheer surprise of it; the rest of the time they just feel comfortably superior. As to Auden, he’s interested in squares and oblongs, rather than in sensory effects, which I like; that is, he understands that men always have moral dilemmas,
which makes him intelligent, and he is able to present these structurally, which makes him an artist. The structures he uses are patterns of words, which make him a poet. He’s conceptual rather than descriptive, and he always sees objects, natural or not, as part of a relationship. He knows that, first and last, a poet has to express abstract ideas in concrete forms, his own words, as it happens. How’s that for a one-minute lecture?”

“Brilliant.”

“Thank you. I stole it from Richard Hoggart’s introduction to Auden’s poems, which Mr. Cornford in turn quoted in his dissertation. If you want to know what I personally admire, well, Auden knows that poetry ‘makes nothing happen,’ though it is of supreme importance: the only order. And Auden is the only poet I know whose poems are serious and
fun.
He refuses to let poetry be pompous
or
empty. That’s why he appreciates Clio, and leaves the other muses alone. Clio ‘looks like any girl one has not noticed,’

Think of that in connection with Cudlipp for example. An explosion of sorts conquered him, but can you think of him as filled by a lover’s Yes?”

“Now that you mention it, no. He was always empty
and scorned girls one had not noticed. I’m wondering, actually, about the plays Auden wrote with Isherwood.”

“Must you?”

“Duty calls. A student wants to work on them, and who am I to say him nay? Will you kind of advise on the Auden part?”

“All right. But I don’t look forward to the dissertation defense.”

“Our examinations are all wrong. In Sweden, the whole thing is done what I call properly. There’s a professor who attacks the work, a professor who defends it, and a third who makes humorous remarks, which of course we’re all dying to do but never can do properly in this country. Then when it’s over the candidate gives a ball, white tie and long dresses. I’m thinking of emigrating.”

“It’s true,” Kate said. “When formality went from life, meaning went too. People always yowl about form without meaning, but what turns out to be impossible is meaning without form. Which is why I’m a teacher of literature and keep ranting on about structure. Perhaps it’s different in the drama.”

“On the contrary. When a culture no longer agrees on form, it loses drama. Certain ardent souls, to be sure, try to get effects by undressing on the stage, having intercourse in front of the audience, perhaps even getting the audience to join them, but it won’t work. That’s why films are the thing today—perceived in loneliness, like novels.”

“I thought the young were all mad for filmmaking today—quite ritualistic and groupy.”

“Making them, perhaps. But one
sees
a film in the
dark, alone. Isherwood and Auden plays, though, could count on an audience of the left.”

“Sure—like today. The bad guys were in, and the good guys wanted to get them out. Things were simpler then, though. I have often wished I were not among the Epigoni:

Which reminds me, what about your lunch with Hankster and Cudlipp?”

“Well, Cudlipp disliked me, and Hankster disliked Cudlipp and wanted to make him uncomfortable. It was one of those situations no one could get out of without being brutal, and so far one doesn’t openly snub a colleague in the Faculty Club. In short, Cudlipp wanted Hankster to admit he was a gentleman and come in with the College in some grand though unspecified position; Hankster declined.”

“Was Hankster alone with Cudlipp at all in the Club that day?”

“They were at a table together before I came—not for long, I think. They were together in the men’s room, one supposes; I was in the ladies’ room and can’t be sure. I was alone with Cudlipp for a minute; I ought to tell you that. Hankster got up in search of a bottle of ale, the waiter having apparently gone on some extended errand in another part of the forest, you know how it is in the Faculty Club. When are you getting married?”

“I don’t know. Reed says we’ll talk about it tonight, if we can get our minds off Cudlipp’s aspirin. Emilia, did Cudlipp ever promise you anything to get your support for the College?”

“Yes. He promised me positions for women in the College, which he thought dear to my heart. What does it matter now? Anyway, why shouldn’t you have your University College? A new experience, like getting married.”