Poetic Justice (3 page)

Today four members of the examining committee had shown up, which was a quorum, and an enormous relief to Kate and the candidate, who had flown in from his teaching post in California especially for the examination. All is, thank God, minimally official, Kate thought, taking her place as chairman at the head of the table. To Kate’s right sat the other member of her department, Peter Packer Pollinger, the official sponsor of the dissertation. To her left sat the two necessary representatives of other departments, Professor Kruger from the German Department, and, next to him, Professor Chang from the Department of Asian Civilization. Professor Chang was present as the result of total desperation, but someone else outside the English Department was required, and, after all, Auden, together with Christopher Isherwood, had gone to China in 1938
and written a book about it. The Department of Asian Civilization had told Kate that Professor Chang had never been to China, but one couldn’t ask for everything in outside examiners.

All began properly enough. Kate asked Mr. Cornford to leave the room and told the committee what facts about Mr. Cornford, provided in a special folder by the office of the Dean of Graduate Faculties, seemed relevant: his education, present position, date and subject of his master’s essay. “Perhaps, then, we can ask the candidate in for the examination,” Kate hopefully said.

“Clarification, please,” said Professor Chang.

“I beg your pardon,” Kate said. “I didn’t mean to seem to be rushing. Is there a question about Mr. Cornford? About Auden?”

“Please. I have read dissertation with great interest and attention. But I would like to point out I am not from Department of Asian Civilization. I am from School of Engineering.”

“Engineering?” Kate said faintly. “I’m afraid there must be some confusion.”

“Mr. Auden is most interesting writer,” Professor Chang said, “but are there many limestone landscapes in China?”

“Limestone landscapes!” Professor Kruger said. “It is more a question of the Weimar Republic. Auden does not realize that the love of death and the rejection of authority …”

At this point Professor Peter Packer Pollinger began blowing through his mustache, always a sign, as Kate well knew, that he was about to burst into speech. Professor
Pollinger had only three kinds of speeches. The first was about punctuation, particularly about the necessity of keeping all punctuation marks
inside
quotation marks. He had been known to go on about the unbelievable dangers involved in placing punctuation marks
outside
quotation marks for close on to two hours. His second speech had to do with Fiona Macleod, the alter ego and pseudonym of a turn-of-the-century Irish author named William Sharp. He had managed (William Sharp, not Professor Pollinger, although the confusion did appear to be in some mysterious way appropriate) to get himself so perfectly, so schizophrenically divided between himself and his pseudonymous alter ego (who was, of course, a lady) that he had been known to fall down in a fit if William Sharp and his wife were invited to a dinner party and Fiona Macleod overlooked. Professor Pollinger had for the last ten years devoted himself (he was now sixty-seven) to the collection of every possible datum about William Sharp, and he was delighted, not to say compelled, to transmit whatever he had most recently learned to anyone he encountered. Thus despite a good deal of dodging behind doorways, everyone in the English Department, but particularly the secretaries, who, being rooted behind their desks, were less able to disappear, became authorities on the life and times of William Sharp/Fiona Macleod.

Professor Pollinger also had a third speech, which was unassigned: variable, as the mathematicians say. This speech might happen to do with any experience Professor Pollinger had recently undergone which had
sufficiently caught his attention to be memorable: how a snow drift into which he had absentmindedly walked had overwhelmed him; the way he had heard the sound of the Irish Sea quite clearly in his ears for a solid hour before his wife returned to discover that the tub in the adjoining bathroom had overflowed, leaving Professor Pollinger ankle-deep in water; or, very occasionally, when truly impelled by circumstances, Professor Pollinger would deliver himself of a pertinent fact, which was always, as it was now, alarmingly germane to the discussion.

“Auden was interested in engineering,” Professor Pollinger now announced, blowing through his mustache. “Wanted to be one. When the Oriental languages fellow dropped out, I suggested an engineer.” Professor Pollinger puffed for a moment or two. “Glad to discover they had a Chinese engineer,” he said. “That made it all right, I thought. Couldn’t find you,” he added, looking sulkily at Kate.

Kate coughed. “Then,” she said, turning to the gentleman from Engineering, “your name isn’t Professor Chang?”

“Is,” that gentleman insisted. “Contradiction, please. Is.”

“I see,” said Kate, who didn’t. “Well, then, perhaps we can begin. Will you, Professor Pollinger, ask the usual first question?”

“Certainly,” said Professor Pollinger, puffing through his mustache. “What made you choose this topic, Mr. Whateveryournameis?”

“Please, Professor Pollinger,” Kate said, “if you don’t
mind, don’t ask the question until we get the candidate into the room.”

“Very well,” Professor Pollinger said crossly. “Very well.” Kate, going to the door to summon Mr. Cornford, gave Professor Pollinger a baleful look. She seriously suspected him of putting them all on. Due to retire at the end of this year, he found it suited his peculiar sense of humor to appear gaga, but Kate suspected that a delight in confusion allied with a general resentment of the modern world was chiefly responsible for his eccentric ways. He had, of course, not really directed this or any other dissertation, although he did read right through all of them searching for punctuation outside quotation marks.

“Please be seated, Mr. Cornford,” Kate said. The committee, as was customary, arose at the entrance of the candidate. “We will now begin. Professor Pollinger, will you please ask the first question?”

“Mr., er, Whateveryournameis,” puff-puff through the mustache, “do you happen to know if Auden ever read the poetic dramas of Fiona Macleod?”

“Perhaps,” Kate interjected, “Mr. Cornford could begin by telling us why he chose …”

“Tell me please,” Professor Chang said, turning courteously in his chair, “in China your Mr. Auden found limestone landscapes? And what, please, is dildo?”

How they got through the subsequent two hours—for Professor Kruger was very interested in Auden’s experiences in Germany, and Professor Chang in everything—Kate never properly knew. But such a good time was had by all that they quite happily voted Mr. Cornford a distinction (which he thoroughly deserved) and Kate
was still congratulating him when the other three had bowed themselves from the room.

“My God,” Mr. Cornford said. “No one will ever believe it. Can it possibly be official? I shall go to my death, which I hope is far distant, telling the story of this examination, and no one, no one on God’s green earth will ever, ever believe it. And this is the world of scholarship I want to enter.”

Kate laughed. “Well, according to T. S. Eliot, Auden is no scholar, you know.”

“Eliot liked his poetry.”

“Of course he did. But he insisted Auden was no scholar all the same. Somebody asked why, and Eliot said: ‘I was reading an introduction by him to a selection of Tennyson’s poems, in which he said that Tennyson is the stupidest poet in the language. Now if Auden had been a scholar he would have been able to think of some stupider poets.’ And if you, Mr. Cornford, had been around this university as long as I, you would know that it is better that a farcical examination produce a first-rate piece of work like yours than that a brilliantly run examination produce, as I have often seen it do, a farce.”

“So Auden was right,” Mr. Cornford said. “ ‘Against odds, methods of dry farming may produce grain.’ But, oh my Lord. ‘Your Mr. Auden, he found limestone landscapes in China?’ ” he mimicked.

Kate parted from Mr. Cornford at the door of the building; he was due to make a midnight plane. This, she thought, has been a day. But it has had its moments, she thought, chuckling to herself over Professor Chang, bless his heart.

“Going my way, lady?” a voice said. “Or, more exactly, may I be allowed to go yours?” With something of a flourish, a man who had clearly been waiting for her removed his beret and bowed. “Bill McQuire is the name,” he said. “Remember me? Department of Economics. Statistics is my specialty. I advised you once that some figures you wanted to juggle could not reveal anything meaningful, being self-selected.”

“I’m going to get a taxi,” Kate said. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“I wanted to talk with you,” McQuire said, “on a quite impersonal matter. May I buy you a drink?”

“Can it be as important as all that? I’ve had a day.”

“Very important. Dean Frogmore has been trying to reach you all day, but your telephone never answers. I’ve been delegated to drop round and catch you after your examination. Successful candidate, I hope?”

“Beyond my wildest expectations,” Kate answered. “What’s this all about?”

“I realize,” McQuire said, “that I am perhaps not the ideal man to approach you. But when Frogmore asked, I had to say I was acquainted with you. Do you know of Boulding?”

“He isn’t by any chance a character in a novel by Bulwer-Lytton or a citizen of an Emerging African Nation?”

“He’s an economist, and he announced one of the great laws of modern times: if it exists, it must be possible. That’s what I want to see you about: something which exists, but which everyone is saying is impossible.”

“I have always thought,” Kate said, “that you scientists and social scientists ought to emblazon on your
walls a quotation from J. B. S. Haldane: ‘How do you know that the planet Mars isn’t carried around by an angel?’ Will it express my utter confidence in your knightly qualities if I ask you up for a drink?”

“It will,” Bill McQuire said, hailing a taxi. “Same place?”

“Same place,” Kate said. “And who in hell is Dean Frogmore?”

Kate had consulted Bill McQuire some five years earlier, when the Admissions Office of the Graduate Faculties had co-opted her onto a committee to study the old patterns of admission and to evolve new ones. For the first time in her life Kate found herself confronted with statistics, with no knowledge what to do with them but a distinct sense that either the statistics before her or the conclusions to be drawn from them were faulty. Someone had suggested that she consult a statistician, and had suggested Bill McQuire. Professor McQuire had himself soon provided a new statistic in Kate’s life. He was the only man she had ever gone to bed with on the basis of a ten-hour acquaintance, liked moderately well, and never, to all intents and purposes, seen again.

They had, of course, met from time to time on University occasions, in the Faculty Club, once on a dissertation committee when a student of Kate’s had written on some abstruse topic concerning economics and literature. They greeted each other on these occasions not only with the pleasant formality their surroundings required, but with the pleasant indifference they both genuinely felt.

Now, when they had reached home, Kate left McQuire in the living room to fix himself a drink. It was, Kate thought, a room Auden would have approved of:

McQuire seemed to agree, for he was happily stretched out in her Knoll chair when she returned. “It is extraordinarily ungallant of me to say so,” he laughed, “but when I opened your liquor cabinet I had a most magnificent case of
déjà vu.
I remembered looking into it, years ago, whenever it was, and thinking: My God, Jack Daniel’s, and that’s exactly what I did tonight. What can I get you?”

Kate asked for Scotch. She watched him as he fixed the drink. How old was he now, somewhere between forty-five and fifty? His curly hair was thinner, and gray; at least he doesn’t dye it, Kate thought, and was surprised to have thought it. Bill had always worn his curly hair longer than the prevailing style—he was a distinctly Byronic type—and now that fashions had overtaken him he looked oddly more out of style than he had previously done. His face was lined, with that special crinkled quality of the skin which marks those who have drunk heavily and long. Turning to her with
the drink, he found himself held by her stare. “Portrait of an aging stag,” he said. “Dissipated but kindly. If you want to know the whole hideous truth, I like them younger and younger all the time, so that I am in danger of becoming a dirty old man. Humbert Humbert, I do pity thee. Well, no,” he added, seeing Kate’s eyes widen. “Eighteen is still my under limit. Cheers.”

“I am trying to decide,” Kate said, “why it is that you are quite incapable of shocking me, even though I think your life reprehensible and I find promiscuity shocking, particularly in married men.”

“I’m sure you do. In fact, I have often noticed that those most shocked by marital infidelity are usually themselves unmarried. Cecelia, as it happens, has settled quite nicely into life, though she is pleased to see that neither of our sons at all resembles a rampant stag—that is, me.
You’ve
worn well, Kate. I like you and the way you look, and you’re very decent to put up with me this afternoon.”

“I haven’t worn all that well. Supposedly I shall always be tall and lean with a French twist and a face that shows all the worries in the world. Do you know what I like about you, Bill? It’s only just occurred to me, so let me say it and then we can get down to whatever you and Dean Toadwell have on your minds.”

“His name is Frogmore. What do you like? My eternal evanescence?”

“The fact that however much you stalk your prey, you do not class women with motor cars if they are attractive and with eye-flies if they are not.”