The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (24 page)

And that, Mulcahy assured himself, was what was on the cards. Domna had made a cardinal error in using an attack on modern literature to strike at him through the students. True, the immediate trend on the campus might seem to justify her conduct. There was a moment in the spring when the whole Jocelyn sideshow seemed to be boarding the gravy train, on to fatter triumphs of platitude and mediocrity. Dr. Hoar won an award in the field of human relations and was presented with a scroll by a United Nations luminary at a little ceremony in the chapel. Warren Austin, through an emissary, consented to speak at Commencement, and the creator of Li’l Abner was to be made a Doctor of Letters. Aristide (the Just) Poncy copped a Fulbright to lecture on Amiel in Lebanon and promptly rented his house to a grateful Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, whose contract, as if by jinn-magic, found itself renewed. Considine Van Tour, at the age of forty, announced his engagement to a widow with a fortune of twenty thousand a year, whom he had met at a writer’s conference in Iowa during the previous summer. Grünthal, of Psychology, got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a study of the learning process, and his students were posted in every class, like Pinkerton men in a museum, observing and making assayments of the retention of auditory material. One of Furness’ long-tressed Ritas was promised a movie-test, and her father was reciprocating Furness’ introduction to an agent by a gift of a thousand dollars to finance a poetry conference, to be held in the chapel in April, with a panel of ten poets; already, of course, there was great rivalry over where they were to stay, who was to give the dinner for them, who cocktails, and so on. Yet this very poetry conference, at which Domna was expecting to scintillate, was going to teach her a little lesson in the workings of retribution—as her friend, Bentkoop, might have told her, you cannot serve God and Mammon, and she had had her first inklings of this truth at a recent departmental meeting when the committee for the conference was selected and her name was wonderfully not included.

Mulcahy himself took no credit for this stroke; he owed it to his protégé, young Ellison, an extraordinary poet in his own right, with a firm sense of true values, and no sentimental hesitations in making them operative. The boy’s doll-like exterior, pink cheeks, Episcopal-school manner and pale, hoarse voice were belying; he had a center of iron and absolute professional integrity. Domna, who contemptuously described him as a neo-traditionalist ultra, showed her own incapacity for assessing the true direction of the modern movement as well as a pitiable lack of judgment in selecting one’s adversary. The real enemies of the future of poetry, as Mulcahy could have told her, were the sentimental progressives, like Consy Van Tour, with his flaccid, prosy devotions to K.A.P., Hemingway, Lardner, Saroyan, and the bristling methodistical moralists, like Alma Fortune, who, following Leavis and the Cambridge school, pretended to see in a man’s style glaring revelations of his personal faults and evasions, the public health inspectors placarding
Finnegans Wake
and the late James as diseased—these were the trough-wallowers and the trimmers, whom Domna chose to rally with in today’s crisis in contemporary art. The rediscovery of George Eliot, indeed! As he laughingly remarked to Ellison, who’s traditionalist now?

It was Ellison, all honor to him, who had foreseen from the start the importance of keeping her off the committee and the ease with which this could be maneuvered, merely by conciliating Furness, who held the purse-strings and cared for nothing but that he should be allowed to put up two or three of the more
réclamés
poets and give the official party for the conference in his handsome, dark-beamed, long living room. A few walks with Ellison, in his bohemian sweat-shirt and sneakers, and Furness was reluctantly able to see that to put Domna on the committee would make the wrong impression on the poets, who were surfeited with Radcliffe misses and faded libertarian poses. There was no fear in the boy and no truckling to convention. “Her verse isn’t taken seriously,” Mulcahy heard him explain to Furness, within Domna’s hearing, as if he were calmly citing some incontrovertible natural fact, and when Mulcahy poked him, he let his eyes rest square on her, coolly and neutrally, while continuing his exposition. All this, admittedly, excited Mulcahy very much; he felt something remarkable in this friendship, which reminded him, in some of its reversals, of the friendship of Verlaine and Rimbaud. Though he knew himself to be the boy’s intellectual superior, both in age and attainments, he often felt like his pupil in the ordinary affairs of life. Ellison seemed to have achieved, through youth and singlemindedness, a dizzying simplification; he did not recognize the existence of obstacles felt to be palpable by timid and second-rate people. The fact that he was not liked in the department neither grieved nor interested him; he saw that the voting strength was divided three to two against himself and Mulcahy, with Furness as the pivotal figure, and he treated Furness frankly for what he was—a pivot—making no attempt at friendship and merely assuming, at certain critical junctures, that Furness would want to be told how to vote. And simply by virtue of this assumption, his sway over Furness was near-absolute. He did not forget, either, that Domna had only half a vote, which seemed to him, in fact, her primary characteristic; he did not, like Mulcahy, worry over what she might think or do if she “caught on” to what was being planned against her. “She has only half a vote,” he replied tranquilly, whenever such conjectures were broached.

This foresight and lucidity made a great impression on Mulcahy, who watched with respect while the department voted, unanimously, on Ellison’s suggestion, for a committee of two. Ellison was then elected, without a single dissent, and immediately nominated Mulcahy to serve with him. This was the ticklish moment; Van Tour, with an aggrieved expression, nominated Domna; Furness, looking uneasy, proposed a secret ballot. When the votes were counted, Mulcahy had won easily—there were only two counters against him, Van Tour’s and Alma’s, as he ascertained from the wastebasket; it had been an unnecessary precaution to vote for himself. Irrationally—for it had all gone according to schedule—he felt a little ashamed and supinely gave in to Furness, who also appeared to have qualms and truculently insisted that Domna should be invited to chair the important afternoon session—a quite unnecessary concession, as Ellison remarked later to Cathy, who was in full agreement.

What fascinated Mulcahy about Ellison’s attitude toward Domna was the fact that it was completely literary and devoid of personal ill-feeling. He simply paid her no heed in extra-poetic connections, as if she were a superfluous quantity. So he treated all people who bored him and most general ideas. To people and ideas his adaptation was functional, as to food, drink, and clothing. He used only what was necessary to his immediate purpose, and his life, in Mulcahy’s eyes, in comparison to his own, had a wonderful spare, stripped beauty, like that of a Mondrian painting. When he came to the house in the evening, he brought his own bottle with him, which he placed on the floor beside him; he accepted a glass from Cathy and refilled it till the bottle was gone. He was fond of charades and singing. He made Cathy take up her music again, so that she could sing to him in the evenings. He liked to have Henry read Joyce to him, for the rhythms and vocabulary, he explained, though Joyce did not interest him as an author: his work was too naturalistic. He ate very little and often drank himself stiff—the legend put about by the students, that he wore nothing under his outer clothing, was correct, Mulcahy found, when he put him to bed on the sofa.

For his friends, he was full of energy and a multiplicity of plans. He discouraged Cathy from cutting her hair, in imitation of Domna, but counseled instead a permanent and large, regular old-fashioned waves, like those shown in the old Nestlé advertisements or in Morris Hirschfield’s women. One evening, he brought a shawl with him, which he said he had stolen off a piano; she put it on and danced while he blew on a mouth-organ which he produced from his dungarees’ pocket. It was he who got her to write poetry again and advised her not to show it to Henry, lest she be thought to be influenced by him. He promised to send it to
Furioso,
which had published some of his own verse, as soon as she accumulated enough and urged her meanwhile to write constantly, at every hour of the day, to develop that first verbal facility; he had her read Pope and Dante and listen to Caruso’s records. Encouraged, Cathy wrote steadily, on the backs of the children’s drawings, of laundry lists and achievement sheets; it was her fancy to stylize herself as a naïve or housewife poet, in the style of Grandma Moses—a shrewd idea, commended Ellison, and suggested she try
Partisan Review,
with an eye to being picked up by
Life.

Mulcahy was not offended by these managerial gestures toward his wife. He recognized in them the creative impulse, the longing of every poet-Pygmalion to make his own Galatea; in Cathy’s milk-white skin he too could feel a temptation that was not of Eros but of Apollo. It pleased him, moreover, that his wife had decided to challenge Domna on her own ground. He himself, thus far at any rate, had been unable to muster Ellison’s objectivity; he was hurt by Domna’s covert attacks and mistrustful of the spread of her influence. Hearing of parties she had given, which he ought to have been asked to for form’s sake, he was heartened by Cathy’s successes with a growing circle of admirers. Thanks to Ellison, the news of Cathy’s poetry was spreading, and many people who had never been privileged to hear a line of it described it to each other in detail; the little house on the hill was rapidly becoming a center of literary and artistic pronouncements, for Cathy had the Irishwoman’s gift for pithy and prophetic utterance; her decrees began to be quoted, like the manifestoes in the latest little magazines in the library. Her admirers included Furness, who made a point of dropping in, offhandedly, to settle his little score with Domna, and to whom Cathy, in her whimsical femininity, had suddenly taken a fancy. The turn of fate which had brought him into the Mulcahys’ orbit while Domna plummeted into ignominy appealed, obviously, to his Proustian sense of pattern; Furness adored, as he frankly confessed, reversals and sudden shifts of fashion—the life of a small college charmed him as a microcosm of high society.

He laid his cards lightly on the table, with a disarming emptying of the sleeve; Mulcahy, nevertheless, could not be persuaded quite to trust him, and Cathy’s cry, “But of course one can’t trust him, that’s the whole beauty of him,” was too Jamesian an accolade for his taste. It struck on his ears rather falsely, with a timbre of luxury and idleness, suggestive of a leisure-class life which could afford to collect people as objects—a far cry from the realities of Jocelyn. “He doesn’t matter,” said Ellison, expressing a truer view. To Ellison, it was of no importance that Furness still seemed to have a soft spot for Domna, despite everything Cathy had told him of how the girl used to malign him behind his back. Beyond a certain point, Furness did not care to hear her decried, and it amused him even to try to play the peacemaker between her and the Mulcahys. “We must all make friends before the poetry conference,” he announced sentimentally, throwing his arms around the Mulcahys, and he was threatening to give a pre-conference party at which everybody should pair off with his worst enemy. “That would be rather difficult,” observed Cathy, “since Domna has so many. For once, she would get her wish and have all the men to herself.” Furness laughed pacifically. “I will cede my place to Henry,” he said. What was behind this, Mulcahy suspected, aside from general perversity, was Howard’s indefatigable curiosity. He could not find out the reason for the coolness between the Mulcahys and Domna and naturally itched to know, since it would surely be discreditable to somebody. Mulcahy himself had stood firm; he did not propose to tell a story that would damn Domna forever with people of feeling—after all, she had once been his friend and he did not wish to provoke her into denials that would only make her uglier. That she had doubted him, unwarrantedly and without a second’s hesitation, was shameful, apparently, in retrospect, even to herself, for she had not said boo to anybody, so far as he knew, about that revealing evening and chose, rather, to hide her guilt in sallies against the modern movement and its “unholy alliance” with tradition, which meant, of course, in plain English the friendship between Ellison and himself. Everything he heard of her from the students inclined him to think that she had gone a little mad, as people will, on occasion, when they find that they have been seen in their true colors—one curious sign of this was the fact that she still refused to have anything to do with Furness, as though in her own occluded mind she inflexibly declined to admit a changed situation. She was adhering, that is, to the past, to a time prior to that fatal dinner, and this in its turn cast an interesting sidelight on her violent thrusts against the modern: what she hated about the modern was her own refusal to face the present.

All this, of course, gave grounds for pity, and he would have pitied her wholly, if she had not been dangerous. It was unfortunate that he himself, in an unpardonable fit of rashness, had given her weapons with which she could do harm. He had not yet heard of any direct charges linking himself with the Communist party, but he lived in quiet expectation of the inevitable anonymous letter posted to the local authorities. It was distasteful to him to have to ascribe such potentialities to her, even in self-protection, but history, alas, had shown to what lengths an hysterical anti-Communism, combining with a personal grudge, could carry an unbalanced woman who had a score to settle with herself. She had no corroborative evidence, naturally, which our legal system still weakly asked to see, and her own unsupported statement that he had “confessed” membership to her would not carry much weight with impartial minds, but who in these days was impartial or even wished to be? Luckily, whatever currency the tale had gained on the campus could be shown to be traceable to Domna, and to her alone—it had been his good angel, he now saw, that had guided his reluctant hand when he had agreed to let her assume full charge of his destiny. He could not be made responsible for her fabrications on his behalf, however well meant they were—so any sane person would admit—and the fact that she had no backing from him, in this matter of the “confession,” ought to have warned sensible people against giving her too much credence. He was too honest, of course, to deny to himself that the inspiration for the story had come from him, but who would have thought that the crazy girl would make so much of so little? She had apparently had a real wish to believe him a Communist, to take him
au pied de la lettre
when he had spoken metaphorically—a foreshadowing, had he but guessed it, of her later attitude toward him, which was one of cold-hearted crimination.