The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (13 page)

He suddenly gave vent to a wholly unpremeditated and rather concessive laugh. A truant sympathy for Hen made his argument sway and topple, just as he reached to crown it—his public positions were always unsteady, being built up, block by wooden block, like a child’s tower, out of what he held to be correct and fitting; a mere stir in the ambience or an inner restlessness could unbalance him. In this case, it was the presence of Aristide, perturbedly nodding and deploring, and the recollection of Elmendorf Senior, a beetling kulak of the region, that brought a glint of malice to his eye. The subversive he acknowledged in himself was all at once irresistibly appealed to by Hen’s consistent vagaries of character. One side of Howard, his best, the side that drew his students, was an airy sybarite in the moral sphere and behaved as a sort of prodigious host, officiating, somewhat in the background, over the great banquet of life and letters, calling in the dancing-girls and the poets, drunken Alcibiades and simple Agathon, applauding each turn without invidious distinction; in this mood, he wore a garland perpetually round his neck; his collar was loosened, his blue stare moist with afflatus; he cried, Encore, encore; and his methodology was simply reductive: he considered Socrates to be a man and mortal. The indignation he had felt, just now, with Mulcahy, tacked as it neared the ethical and sought another route for its expression. He took a more pacific tone and, thrusting his rather undershot jaw out, said, “God knows, Alma, I don’t enjoy playing the Christer. Minding Hen’s p’s and q’s is not
my
idea of a picnic. But let’s face up to the facts here. If you’ve got to champion Hen out of personal loyalty, that’s your affair; each to his own taste. Take it up with Maynard;
I
won’t stop you. But for God’s sake, if you must go into it, do it
with your eyes open.
”

There was a second knock on the door. Aristide leaned forward. “Excuse me, Alma,” he interjected, “Ellison asked me to tell you that he was sick in bed.” Alma gave a snort; Herbert Ellison, the young poet of the department, who taught verse-writing and modern poetry, was never on hand when needed; she suspected him of moral cowardice or of an intellectual superiority to the mundane, which amounted to the same thing. Domna Rejnev and Van Tour came into the room together and without a word took seats, side by side, as if pledged to a common intransigence. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Furness exclaimed, paying no attention to them and continuing, deliberately, from where he had left off, “Hen’s appointment is not being terminated for political misbehavior. If Hen was ever a Party member, this is the first Maynard or anybody else ever knew of it.” He paused to let this sink in, together with its implications, and his eye inadvertently met Domna’s; she was staring at him with an expression of such cold ferocity that he shivered and lost track of what he had meant to say. He had been steeling himself for the last half-hour against just this look of hers, which he had precisely anticipated, but which nevertheless made him quail. His soul, however, stiffened obstinately; he was half in love with Domna, or so he kept telling himself, and this drove him, tactically, to resist her. “I don’t delude myself,” he cried, with a certain resolved desperation that brought all eyes but Domna’s curiously to rest on him, as if for once he spoke directly from the heart, “I know what you’re thinking!” Domna turned him her profile in a gesture of contempt. “That I’m behind this dismissal, that I’m jealous of Hen, that I’m a trimmer”—he made a slight ironic bow to Alma, who was fond of using this word. “Believe me,” he glanced at Domna, who kept her head averted, “Maynard didn’t consult me. If he had consulted me …” He shrugged. “What would you have had me say? What would you have said in my place if you had been nearly two years acting as a buffer, between Hen and the bursar and the registrar, between Hen and his tutees, between Hen and the
Jocund,
between Hen and the student council? If other departments had complained to you about Hen’s raids on their students?”

Aristide cleared his throat; Domna’s pink lips parted and swiftly closed again; she took out a pencil and began to draw, indifferently, in her notebook; Alma coughed, a quick, shrill, peppery cough that at once earned her the right to answer. “No need to quarrel,” she said tersely, and the room came to order. Her voice was like a pointer, moving sharply on a map or blackboard, which gave her an air of authoritative impersonality, though as a matter of fact she was congenitally nervous and suffered from intermittent eczema, asthma, shingles, and all the usual disorders of the repressed female brain-worker. Her neck, as she spoke, reddened and she coughed, from time to time, awkwardly. “We have a simple difference of opinion. We differ, apparently, as to Henry’s professional qualifications. We indorse him; you do not. That’s the nub of the matter. The political question is secondary. Nobody has the right to teach merely because he is or was a Communist—on that we can all surely agree?” All heads promptly nodded but Domna’s. “You disagree?” swiftly asked Alma. “‘Nobody has the right to be a policeman,’” quoted Domna, rather slowly. “I am not sure. In principle … yes … no. I am not sure.” A heavy frown appeared on her forehead; everyone turned to look at her in perplexity. Domna’s thought-processes, as they all knew, were rather lengthy and tortuous; Van Tour heaved a sigh. “Let’s say you temporarily abstain,” put in Alma, kindly. “The point need not come up unless Howie persuades us that Henry is unfit to teach on academic grounds. I think we would all say, however, that membership in the Communist Party, past or present, does not in itself establish unfitness to teach.” Aristide revolved this statement. “Well now, Alma,” he allowed, “I am not sure you have the correct formulation. Intellectual freedom—that is the usual point, isn’t it? Can a Communist under discipline have intellectual freedom? We hear that they cannot, that they are under strict orders to promote their infamous doctrine; their minds are not free as ours are.” Van Tour interrupted, excitedly. “Catholics are not free either,” he protested with heat. Like many teachers of English, he was not able to think very clearly and responded, like a conditioned watch-dog, to certain sets of words which he found vaguely inimical; in an argument he was seldom able to discriminate between a friend and a foe, the main contention and a side-issue. With a person of his temperament, a statement of preliminary axioms, such as Alma had been attempting, was fatal. He was now under the impression that Aristide was slurring Mulcahy; a mid-western distrust of foreign languages, moreover, led him to associate Aristide, who was a Protestant, with the ukases of the Vatican. “Catholics believe in a single truth, too,” he cried, warming. “They only tolerate opposition in countries where they haven’t taken over the government. Look at Spain! Why should we let
them
teach when we won’t allow it to Communists?” “Hear, hear!” remarked Howard, amused. “No one has intellectual freedom,” asserted Domna suddenly, in a vicious, smoldering tone.

Alma coughed and resumed control of the discussion. “Let me re-frame the point.
Past
membership in the Communist Party does not in itself establish unfitness to teach.” “Aye, aye,” cried Van Tour. Aristide nodded. “Hence,” pursued Alma, “if we can agree that Henry possesses the necessary academic qualifications, we will be in a position to argue that his dismissal be reconsidered, (a) in view of the present discriminatory practices in the colleges, which will make him, if fired, virtually unemployable, (b) in view of his own admission of former membership in the Communist Party, which, in the absence of direct evidence of his incompetence,
suggests
at any rate that political discrimination may have been exercised here against him.” Howard withdrew his tongue from his cheek and whistled. “Very discreet, Alma,” he commended. “You make no concrete charges, bring forward no evidence, and merely counsel Maynard to avoid the
appearance
of evil. I take my hat off. May you mediate for me when my hour comes.” He blew her a congratulatory kiss. “Agreed,” retorted Alma, absently. “Alma,” put in Aristide, “a single correction, if I may. Strictly speaking, Henry is not being fired. His contract is not being renewed, a rather different thing where future employment is concerned. I presume that you are using the expression loosely, as a sort of shorthand, and, so long as we all understand that, it may be convenient to do so.”

Alma nodded. “Now, whatever we think ourselves, Maynard will undoubtedly tell us that Henry is not being fired, as you say, Aristide, but being let out for routine administrative reasons. What’s more, he will mean it, I assure you. If Maynard has fired Henry for political activities, he has no conscious idea he has done so. Therefore, it devolves on us to give him our opinion that Henry is professionally competent and deprive him of the psychological basis for treating the problem as a purely routine incident. And, as Howie points out, it is possible that Maynard has been acting in good faith and knows nothing of the Party membership. In which case, the vigorous protest of Henry’s department ought to open his eyes to what appears to be a flagrant injustice. Now, Howard,” she said pleasantly, with an air of “drawing him out,” “you are in disagreement with the rest of us. You do not think Henry competent for a number of reasons which you have cited and which, so far as they go, we are prepared to accept, I think, without further question. The head of the department, we will all agree, is in a position to have a certain kind of knowledge of a teacher’s routine work and routine failures which the rest of us, happily, are spared. We will all admit, I think, that Henry has been lax, but which of us here, I wonder, is in a position to cast the first stone?” Her shot-like eyes peppered them; she folded her muscular hands in her lap. “Not I,” said Van Tour eagerly. “I’m
always
late with my achievement sheets. My students are
forever
after me to return their little term papers.” He flapped a white hand in the air. “And the complaints I’ve had from the registrar’s office!” He heaved his shoulders in their suede jacket and sent his eyes to heaven. “Nor I,” exclaimed Domna. “You know yourself, Howard,” she chided him, “that I forget to record class absences. And my library history is shocking. I never remember,” she earnestly told them, “to put the books on reserve.” “We all have our peccadilloes,” warmly declared Aristide, “I remember one of my students—do you recall the case, Alma?—Hyslop, I believe the name was, who was doing a paper for me on Victor Hugo or was it Dumas
fils
?” His large flat lips stretched and tightened around the proper names, like a rubber band contracting; he had never anglicized a French word in all his professional history, with the single considered exception of
Paris.

Howard broke in with a jerky laugh. “
Et tu,
Aristide?” he reproached him. “I should never have thought it.” The malicious smile returned to his face. “Shall we all confess and take our hair down? I could unfold a tale or two myself.” Every face, he noted, showed alarm—what tales, he asked himself, were they thinking of? Alma, he knew, privately censured him for “too close a relation with the students.” It was believed, also, that he had written certain well-to-do students’ term papers. Moreover, he kept a trot in his office, of the plots of the world’s famous novels, which he had once pressed on Domna in an emergency. For a moment, scanning their faces, he felt a lurching desire to rock the boat of their conventions by some untoward and scandalous revelation; he steadied himself with a jolt. “We’ve all of us let our work pile up on us from time to time,” he announced in a rather cavalier and yet sententious tone. “But in Hen’s case, there’s a point where quantity became quality. The quality of his work has been affected.”

“How do you know?” cried Van Tour. “You don’t know the quality of a man’s work from the memos you get from the registrar!” He spoke quickly and belligerently, from what everyone recognized to be a job-insecurity of his own. He was a well-intentioned, fat, youngish man with a sentimental devotion to literature and a belief in its “improving” qualities, but chronically vague and disoriented; like many sentimental people, he really felt things more deeply than those who characterized him as sentimental; he was truly moved by a beautiful passage and truly warmed to indignation by injustice to man or animal, yet there was always something in his feeling that seemed wide of the mark or of too literal or personal an application—in this case, his defense of Mulcahy had, in the embarrassed ears of his colleagues, an overtone of personal defensiveness; he was unable to distinguish between Mulcahy and himself, and he plopped into Mulcahy’s ambience like a whitefish into a sea-full of sharks. “How do you know,” he demanded, “the quality of a man’s relation with his students from these two-by-four official complaints? A teacher’s relation with his students is something very private and sacred; yes, sacred!” he cried. “I’m not afraid of using the word. I’ve heard Domna’s students beef about those reserve books, but that doesn’t mean they don’t adore Domna.” Domna, somewhat offended by this direct and unexpected criticism, even though she had just confessed herself guilty, moved uneasily on her straight chair. “And the same goes for Hen,” Van Tour added, settling back in his seat with an air of virtue and finality.

“But in that case, Consy”—Mr. Van Tour’s name was Considine—“how are we to assess anyone?” inquired Furness, soothing; folly in another made him considerate, like a nurse. “We can’t quiz each and every student on his instructor without setting up a spy-system; teaching would become intolerable.” He gave a slight shake of his straight shoulders. “And we can’t let the students have a veto-power over the faculty; that would be frightful. Teaching, like all the arts, can’t be democratic or subject to referendum; it must be run from within, by an autonomous guild, according to guild standards.” “Exactly, Howard!” exclaimed Mrs. Fortune. “You’ve put your finger on the point. Now what are these standards to be? Are they to be administrative or internal, like the standards of a poem? Within certain limits, isn’t it possible for each teacher to make his own, as a poem makes its own laws? Isn’t that what we have here at Jocelyn that all of us treasure, whatever we may say about it? A certain autarchy, a rule of equals, without mutual interference?” Her small, dark-complected face had flushed; she leaned forward, hands folded between her knees, her skirt stretched tight, exposing round garters. Domna’s forehead puckered. “But a poem,” she objected, “justifies itself in the long run by referring back to life….” “Tolstoyan!” retorted Alma playfully, “be silent.” Seizing the pacific opportunity, Howard winked at Domna. “Somebody—I believe Orwell—” he lightly divagated, “says that you can’t
prove
that a poem is good. A piece of news we must keep from the students at all costs or we should
all
be out of a job.” “You can’t prove that a poem is good, but you can
know
it,” said Domna, suddenly, with conviction. “There’s an act of faith involved, in each step of the esthetic initiation, a kind of new and quite arbitrary decision made when we choose to replace Turgenev with Tolstoy, or Lydgate with Chaucer. We make these choices in accordance with our own life-purposes; knowledge is not fortuitous but the fruit of a conscious decision, a turning toward, as Eliot says. In general, we submit ourselves to the judgment of the poets in these matters; we allow our poets to tell us that Donne is superior to Milton, and here perhaps we are wrong, but we cannot
know
that we are wrong until we also become poets. Tolstoy was wrong, in my belief, about Shakespeare, but his wrongness has a certain authority; we pause to listen to him because he was a poet. In the same way, it is only we teachers who have earned the right to be listened to on the question of another teacher’s competence, who have earned,” she finished, somewhat defiantly, “the right, if you want, to be wrong.”