The History Man (23 page)

Howard hears the telephone click at the other end; he puts down the receiver. He gets out his diary, and makes a note in it; Miss Callendar, Thursday, dinner. As soon as he has finished doing this, the telephone rings again. ‘It's Minnehaha Ho,' says the voice, ‘Professor Marvin for you, Howard.' The equipment clicks; there are mumblings; another voice says ‘Howard?' ‘Hello, Professor Marvin,' says Howard. ‘Ah,' says Marvin, ‘are you, er, alone?' ‘I am,' says Howard. ‘Good,' says Marvin, ‘I've got here a matter of exceptional delicacy.' ‘Oh, yes?' says Howard. ‘A student of yours has just been to see me,' says Marvin, ‘I've just had a very tearful session with him.' ‘I take it the tears were his?' asks Howard. ‘Oh, yes,' says Marvin. ‘His name is Carmody.' ‘Ah,' says Howard, ‘I was just going to ring you about him. To lodge a formal complaint.' ‘Oh, dear, dear,' says Marvin. ‘He was complaining about you, you see. He thinks you've marked him rather harshly.' ‘Did he tell you he'd attempted to blackmail me?' asks Howard. ‘No,' says Marvin, ‘he didn't say that. He did say that you and he didn't get on, and that he'd like to be taught by someone else.' ‘He doesn't seem to have told you very much at all,' says Howard. ‘He's failing, of course, and he wanted his marks raised. His way of trying to obtain this was not by doing passing work, the way of most of our students. No, he was going to expose the political bias of my teaching, unless I cooperated. He visited you because I didn't.' ‘Oh,' says Marvin. ‘Um, um.' ‘I hope you kicked him out,' says Howard. ‘No, I didn't kick him out,' says Marvin, ‘I gave him a glass of sherry.' ‘I see,' says Howard. ‘He told you he wasn't satisfied with my marking, so you sat him down and gave him sherry.' ‘Yes,' says Marvin. ‘As head of department, I think I have a duty to do him the fairness of listening.' ‘To unfair nonsense,' says Howard. ‘He came with a sense of injustice,' says Marvin, ‘I felt it my duty to explain to him how we work here. The concept of academic disinterestedness.' ‘I hope that impressed him,' says Howard. ‘If so, it would be the first concept he'd ever grasped.'

‘Can you kindly tell me how this situation has got this far?' asks Marvin, ‘He tells me you refuse to teach him.' ‘I do,' says Howard, ‘I don't teach blackmailers.' ‘Oh, look, Howard,' says Marvin, ‘can't we resolve this as between gentlemen?' ‘How do you think we should do that?' asks Howard. ‘He accepts his grades,' says Marvin, ‘you take him back, and do all you can to bring his work up to passing level.' ‘You may be a gentleman,' says Howard, ‘but he isn't, and in another sense nor am I. I come with a sense of injustice too. He made a corrupt accusation, and I won't teach him.' ‘Then I'll have to move him to someone else,' says Marvin. ‘Oh, no,' says Howard, ‘I can't accept that either.' ‘I don't understand,' says Marvin, ‘someone has to teach him.' ‘No,' says Howard, ‘I want him banned from the department. I want him disciplined.' ‘Howard,' says Marvin, ‘I hoped we could cope with this informally. You're forcing an issue.' ‘Yes,' says Howard, ‘it is an issue.' ‘There are two sides to every case,' says Marvin, ‘I shall have to listen to his.' ‘But there aren't two sides to every case,' says Howard, ‘you'll just sink into your liberal mess, if you accept that.' ‘I have to accept it,' says Marvin, ‘I shall need both your complaints in writing, please. And then I shall have to read those disputed essays.' ‘That won't help,' says Howard. ‘I think it might,' says Marvin. ‘No,' says Howard, ‘why should your judgment be better than mine? In any case, the marks aren't just for what he's written. We try to take everything into account here, don't we? Isn't it our ideal to judge the man in as many ways as possible?' ‘I agree we try in marking to take some account of seminar performance,' says Marvin, ‘I shall take that into consideration. But I have to read those essays. Unless, of course, you think there's still an informal solution?' ‘Oh, no,' says Howard, ‘by all means, let's have an issue.' ‘That doesn't delight me,' says Marvin, ‘it can only open many doors better kept shut.' ‘I'd like them open,' says Howard. ‘I've never understood your taste for confrontation,' says Marvin. ‘As Blake says,' says Howard, ‘“Opposition is true friendship”.' ‘I haven't noticed the note of friendship,' says Marvin, ‘but so be it.' The telephone goes down at the other end. Howard replaces his receiver; then he walks to the window, and looks out, with pleased regard, on the wet campus.

IX

‘It's a very serious issue,' says Roger Fundy, excavating into a jacketed baked potato filled with false cream, ‘it's the ultimate test of whether sociology is a relevant subject.' ‘Ah, what's that?' asks Dr Zachery, the micro-sociologist, a small man who works on small problems, approaching the table in his wool hat, carrying his tray, ‘I've been looking for such a test for a very long time.' ‘You're a reactionary, you wouldn't know an issue if you saw one,' says Fundy, ‘I'm talking about the visit of Mangel.' ‘The visit of Mangel?' says Zachery, sitting down and taking off his hat. ‘There's no visit of Mangel.' ‘A departmental memo just came round to say that Mangel's coming here to speak,' says Moira Millikin, at the further end of the table, peering down into her baby's carrycot, which lies in the aisle where the students pass back and forth. ‘You know, I already had four food contacts today already,' says Melissa Todoroff, a strong-minded American lady who is at Watermouth on a year's leave from Hunter College, here to study English women, ‘can anyone do me a quick calory count on this hunk of steak-and-kidney pie?' ‘Mangel the geneticist?' asks Howard Kirk, sitting in the precise middle of the table, and looking about with innocent curiosity. ‘Mangel the racist,' says Fundy. ‘He studies the genetics of race,' says Flora Beniform, at the end of the table, ‘I don't think that makes him a racist.' ‘I thought we'd driven biological explanation right out of sociology,' says Moira Millikin, ‘I thought we were through with all that shit.' ‘Hey, any of you kids into
I Ching
yet?' asks Melissa Todoroff. ‘You've also driven sin and evil right out of sociology,' says Flora Beniform, ‘which doesn't prove there's no sin.' ‘I'm all for making the subject as economical as possible,' says Dr Macintosh, ‘it does mean less work.' ‘A serious and well-known scholar,' says Zachery, ‘very distinguished work.' ‘It's obscene,' says Moira Millikin. ‘Jesus Christ was a Capricorn,' says Melissa Todoroff, ‘what's your sign, honey?' ‘I'm a little bewildered, I think,' says Zachery, ‘we believe in differentiation by class, and promote those for the tension they create. Yet not the racial ones. Now, how is that?' ‘Class is cultural, race is genetic,' says Moira Millikin. ‘I don't believe in astral influence,' says Dr Macintosh, ‘in any case it gives an advantage to people whose mothers have good memories.' ‘Of course, Flora,' says Howard, ‘you know Mangel. You worked with him at the Tavvy at one time, didn't you?' ‘Yes, I did, Howard,' says Flora, ‘I worked in social anthropology with him. He's a fat, ugly man, he smells of borscht, he's serious and liberal, he believes we have a biology, which most of us here actually do, like it or not, and he's certainly not a racist.' ‘It's all been exposed by the radical press,' says Moira Millikin, ‘all that tradition. Jensen, Eysenck, Mangel. It's all been shown to be racist.' ‘Don't you believe in
anything
, honey?' asks Melissa Todoroff. ‘We can't have him, we've got to stop him,' says Roger Fundy.

The sociologists are sitting at a large plastic table, taking lunch, under the domed plexiglass and flexiglass of Kaakinen's university cafeteria. Students talk, girls yelp, babies squall. The great fancy room towers above them, a thing here of stark places, there of wild Scandinavian frenzies. Such is the detail of design that the very food they eat seems converted into artefact: Jackson Pollock hash, Mondrian fried eggs, Graham Sutherland chicken leg are followed by David Hockney ice cream and Norman Rockwell apple pie. The sociologists eat off their trays; as they eat, they examine, with formal solemnity, the agendas for their coming meeting, turning over the stencilled pages, lifting a bean or a sausage, passing from main agenda to supplementary agenda to document A and document L and document Y, moving from egg to yoghurt. At the time when he conceived the refectory facilities at Watermouth, Kaakinen was taken by a great, democratic dream; deeply mindful of the social symbolism of eating, he was determined at a stroke to remove those distinctions between senior and junior common room which privatize the essential communion of food, and so have the formal effect of separating, in some root way, the student from his teacher. Instead, therefore, Kaakinen invented prandial community; he made rooms, and corners of rooms, where, under one roof, in democratic babble, every sort of social mixture might occur. Thus, as the fancy takes you, you might sit over there, among rubber plants, with a view through thick leaves straight out over the artificial lake, and eat in some grandeur, at some expense; or you might sit over here, in a place of purity and simple functionalism, where, with specially designed plastic forks that look like spoons, and knives that look like forks, you may, having waited in the cafeteria line, practise contemporary eating of contemporary, plastic-wrapped food at a most modest cost. This of course, has the informal effect of separating the student from his teacher; it is the faculty who sit among the rubber plants, eating
oeufs en plat
and
pommes frites à la chef;
the students sit at the plastic tables, with their plastic implements, eating their egg and chips.

But in these matters the sociologists, in so many things the exception, are the exception. The sociology students eat in the expensive section, in order to express indignation; the sociology faculty eat in the cheap one, in order to maintain the egalitarian spirit, and save a penny or two at the same time. And today, because it is the day of the departmental meeting, there are many of them, along the long table which is somehow, historically,
their
table; they consume, simultaneously, the food and the agenda; they examine both with critical expressions. For, over time, the food has grown less, in quantity and quality, as economic rot sets in; meanwhile the agenda has grown longer, as bureaucratic growth occurs. They eat with dislike; they read with rue. There are two kinds of rue. There are some of them who inspect the documents as a diary of necessary or even unnecessary boredom, a poor way to spend an afternoon, a routine plod through matters of budgets and parties, SSRC research grants and examinations; there are some with higher criticism to offer, who read the agenda with an energetic scepticism, as one would read a contract from a hire-purchase company, looking in the fine print for errors, enormities, evasions, the entire sphere of the unsaid.

‘I think some of us are missing the entire point,' says Roger Fundy to the table. ‘The point is that genetics isn't an innocuous science. It's a highly charged area, with deep social implications, and you have to protect your conclusions from having racialist overtones.' ‘Oh, yes?' asks Dr Zachery. ‘Even if that means falsifying the results?' ‘If necessary, yes,' says Moira Millikin. ‘Extraordinary,' says Dr Zachery. ‘I think this is meant for me,' says Flora. ‘Look, Roger, have you ever known me think that anything was innocuous? It's against my nature. But I know Mangel. He knows the dangers as well as you do. He happens to be a serious scientist. He's never over-stated his conclusions, and I don't agree that any results should ever be falsified. He'd like them to come out your way as much as I would, but when they come out they come out.' ‘Why do you think all the radical press is attacking him? They know what they're doing,' says Moira Millikin. ‘I'm sure of that,' says Dr Zachery, ‘but they're not doing what we should be doing, protecting disinterested research.' ‘There was a pregnant woman on the bus today,' says Dr Macintosh, ‘funny how once your wife's pregnant you see them everywhere.' ‘We're all responsible for our conclusions,' says Roger Fundy, ‘because all mental organizations are ideological in significance. Which means that it is we who organize the results, not science.' ‘I got up to offer her my seat,' says Dr Macintosh, ‘and then I suddenly realized that in this radical climate there's no way to address her. Finally I said: “Excuse me, person, would you like to sit down?”.' ‘But even that's patronage,' says Melissa Todoroff, ‘why shouldn't she stand up like anyone else?' ‘Which item on the agenda does Mangel come under?' asks Flora Beniform. ‘I'd burn mine,' says Melissa Todoroff, ‘you could say I have, symbolically. But I jiggle and hurt whenever I run upstairs.' ‘Item 17,' says Moira Millikin, ‘visiting speakers. That's when the fun should start.'

A very loud crash comes from the direction of the self-service line. The sociologists' heads all turn; in the line, someone, a bandaged person, has dropped an entire tray and its contents. ‘Oh, God,' says Flora, ‘it's Henry.' Henry Beamish stands transfixed in the line, with yoghurt all over his trousers; a skilful student blocks with his feet a rolling roll. ‘My God,' says Howard, ‘he's come.' Flora rises wearily from her chair: ‘I'll go and collect him some more food,' she says. ‘Of course Henry would elect to carry a tray when he had only one available hand.' ‘What's happened to Henry?' asks Moira Millikin. ‘Didn't you know?' asks Dr Macintosh, ‘he gashed his arm on a window last night. At Howard's.' ‘Oh, did he?' says Moira Millikin. ‘Jesus, it's terrible,' says Melissa Todoroff, ‘I lost my IUD someplace, and ten whole weeks of term still to go.' ‘God, I can't bear to look,' says Moira Millikin, for Henry, apparently acting under Flora's orders, has made his way to the end of the self-service line, where there is a turnstile, to keep count of consumers, and he is now attempting to push through it, moving steadfastly in the wrong direction. ‘He shouldn't be here,' says Macintosh, ‘what's he coming in for a meeting like this for?' ‘No doubt he's sensed that great issues are at stake,' says Dr Zachery drily. ‘Isn't that nice of Flora?' says Henry, coming up to the end of the table, where he stands, his arm in a white sling, beaming at his colleagues, with his usual pointless congeniality and air of detachment. ‘Everyone's so kind.' ‘Ah, Henry,' says Howard, rising, so that his chair catches Henry's foot. ‘I could have managed, of course,' says Henry, ‘I was balancing well, but someone turned and caught my tray with a flutecase.' ‘How are you?' asks Howard. ‘I'm pretty well, Howard,' says Henry, ‘it was just a cut, you know. I'm terribly sorry about that window. And the fuss, too. I hope you got my message?' ‘You look very pale,' says Howard, ‘you shouldn't have come in.' ‘Oh, I couldn't miss a departmental meeting,' says Henry, ‘not a departmental meeting. There are some things on this agenda which are of serious concern to me.'