Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  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.”

  Howard nodded, soberly. He had followed Domna’s argument to the end, unlike most of the others, because he knew her to be honest and presumed that therefore, before she finished, a doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole. In general, he agreed with what she had said, though with certain practical reservations. He was quite well aware that he knew nothing empirically about the quality of Hen’s teaching; but neither, he was certain, did the others, and he would have liked to get this admission on the table. “Fitness to teach” was an imponderable which he had no intention of pretending to weigh; administratively, however, Hen was a nuisance, and while he himself would have done nothing to dislodge him, he thought it obtuse to pretend that no reason for dislodging him existed. Domna’s “right to be wrong,” he thought, smiling, he did not contest, especially since the phrasing seemed calculated to disturb the certainties of the others, those of Aristide, in particular, whose face, bent in consultation now with Domna, wore a thoroughly anxious look, as though he had abruptly discovered that he had been exposed to some contagious disease. “You think it possible, then, that we are mistaken in Hen?” he gravely queried, accepting a piece of ginger from Alma and sinking his large, white teeth into it cautiously, as his big pale gray eyes probed Domna’s bright ones.

  “Unlikely,” declared Alma, plumping down the silver dish. “Domna is right, of course, abstractly. Some sort of act of faith is probably involved for all of us here. But it’s not the unreasoning faith of a savage; it’s the accumulation of a lifetime of observation and inference. I can’t say, of course, from my own direct knowledge, that Henry is a good teacher. I go partly by hearsay and mainly by inference. I know, from our talks together, just as you all do, that Henry is a man with a brain, a big brain. The finest brain, if I may say so, on our faculty. I can’t think that our students can find anything but profit in being exposed to that brain, whatever happens to their projects or their ridiculous achievement sheets. I’ve profited myself, I can promise you. The man thinks rings around me.” She blew out a puff of smoke and mechanically all looked upward for the ring to form. The definiteness of her tone produced in every mind a concrete and haunting image. Mulcahy’s brain seemed to materialize before them, under Alma’s pointer, like a slide in a medical lecture, a cranium in profile or cross-section, with the tissue of veins and arteries, the soft gray matter, the cerebrum and cerebellum, all of unusual size and preternatural activity. Aristide’s eyes protruded. “You don’t say?” he exclaimed. “I should not have rated him quite so high. Where would you place him, Alma, on our friend Grünthal’s scale?” Van Tour giggled. “How about the Rorschach?” he whispered to Domna. “I agree with Alma,” she proclaimed, silencing him with a jab of the elbow. “Henry is the only man in the department who has standing outside of Jocelyn. I knew his early articles in the Kenyon when I was still a student. The synthesis he tried to make between Marx and Joyce was an important critical effort of the Thirties. You may pretend, Howard, that Joyce is a dead end,” she went on, excitably
, though this was what she thought herself, “an interesting molehill in which certain pedants have tunneled till they buried themselves alive, that all this is pseudo-modernism, neo-orthodoxy, but what else, please tell me, is there that you find so un-sterile and fructifying? Where has your Proust led us? What you consider modern, your new decadence, is simply the latest billow of the Gothic Revival—Petrus Borel, my God!” Her accent had become more marked, as she felt herself moving along sure ground; like most European women when they argue, she was both angry and zestful. “You may say that these Joyce excavations of Henry’s are like some labor of the Pyramids, a monument of waste in the desert! Yes, in a certain sense, I agree, but it is at any rate a monument, a work requiring patience, study, the knowledge of seven foreign languages—a human sacrifice! What have you or I or any of us here to compare with it? Which of us has learned Italian or studies Hebrew at night with the Bible?”

  Domna stopped, breathless, scornfully conscious that she was probably giving offense to the feelings of the others. Whenever she saw, or thought she saw, excellence, she had a summary impulse to make others bow the knee to it, as she did. Generosity in all things was a point of pride with her, but she had no pity for those too lowly placed to dispense it. Thus, in the little speech she had just made, she had been driven by the demon of arrogance to wound Furness’ vanity and incidentally, for all she knew, the separate vanities of the other three. But for the moment she felt perfectly reckless of such matters and did not care whether the effect of what she had said would be a net reduction of the sympathy that had hitherto been extended to her idol. Indeed, she rather enjoyed the idea that only she was sufficiently spendthrift (that is, sufficiently rich in resources) to pay Mulcahy full homage.

  A constrained silence followed her outburst. “Grant Hen everything you say,” remarked Furness at length, “none of all that really touches on the question of whether he’s the right man for Jocelyn or for this particular department. God knows,” he interjected, laughing, “I don’t want to put myself in the position of robbing the poor-box or taking the widow’s mite. Let’s pretend that poor old Hen was a big figure in his time; let’s allow him his few words of Hebrew and his quotation from Leopardi. What you’re invoking, nevertheless, Domna, is a medieval standard of scholarship as an end in itself. Here at Jocelyn, I’ve been given to believe, we’re after something different: an active, two-way relation between the student and the faculty-member. Great learning can be an impediment to this; it opens up too great a hiatus, as in Hen’s case, between the student and the instructor. Hence we don’t insist on the Ph.D. or even the Master’s; in fact, we regard advanced degrees as a liability, if anything. None of us, except you, excuse me, Aristide, would be here if the college didn’t have this policy. Quite apart from other factors, Hen’s appointment, from the beginning, was a regression from Jocelyn principles. Hen, to speak frankly, has never subscribed to our methods, and I think a great deal of the trouble we’ve had with him can be laid to an unconscious resistance on his part to the experimental ideology. This refusal to fill out the achievement sheets and the field-period reports isn’t the result of mere inefficiency—it’s an act of obstructionism, or sabotage of the experimental machinery, unconscious, as I say, and very likely irrational; I think it very probable that Hen literally cannot fill out our achievement sheet. More power to him, in a way; one can’t help but respect an integrity that buckles at putting a check beside ‘prejudiced but genial’ or ‘truly liberal.’ ” The mocking smile played over his lips, but at bottom he was powerfully in earnest. For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words, modern, secular, experimental, were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation.

  “Hence, Alma,” he declared, “I can’t join you in thinking that all Hen’s sins of omission can be relegated to the realm of mere technicalities. They’re the expression of a certain reactionary Schweikism which we’ve seen also in faculty meetings.” “Most interesting, Howard,” exclaimed Aristide. “I’ve observed the same thing myself. Hen and I have had a number of discussions on the question of relative grading, and he assures me that he doesn’t believe in it. He believes in absolute grading. I had not myself drawn the inference that he subscribes to a belief in the Absolute.” “I too believe in absolute grading,” insisted Domna. Furness laughed. “My eye,” he said. “How many Excellents did you give last term? You’re a real fraud, Domna, when it comes to the achievement sheet. You grade them on their beauty or on a look in their eye. Your marks, take it from me, my dear, are an exercise in sheer coquetry.” He laid a drawling stress on the last words; Domna colored. “As far as that goes,” he continued, “our friend Hen is rather liberal with the Excellents when it serves his purpose. But seriously, the point is, Hen doesn’t belong here, doesn’t share our objectives. He came here—let’s be frank—for asylum; we gave it to him. He ought, long since, discovering his hostility to us, to have looked for another connection. Instead, he’s remained here on sufferance and treated his post as a sort of embassy, with extra-territorial rights, from which to attack our institutions. Why should Maynard stand for it? He’s stood for it this long, I can assure you, out of simple kindheartedness and decency, in the hope that Hen would have the grace to move on, once he had re-established himself, to the kind of academic work he prefers. If Hen had made the slightest effort to find a post he liked better, during the two years he’s been here, I should have more sympathy now for him and for Cathy. . . . After all, Alma,” he argued, turning his persuasion on her, “Cathy is responsible, equally with Hen, not only for his hanging on here, but also for the attacks he’s made on Maynard and the faculty as a whole. Having been married, you know very well that the woman can always control these choices. I’ve tried, more than once, to get her to see that Hen was doing himself harm with these continual rows over trivialities, and she’s graciously informed me that Hen owes it to himself as a pedagogue to correct misdoing wherever he sees it. That Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy approach bores me, I must say. She encourages Hen in these power-fantasies to keep her hold on him as the one true and excellent wife; why, the woman’s a regular Maintenon. As it happens”—his eyes narrowed—“the last time I went there, to offer a little unwanted advice, my car wouldn’t start when I left and I was treated, through the picture-window, to an imitation of myself. Cathy, wearing Hen’s hat and muffler, was prancing up and down the room—”

  “Stop it,” cried Alma, sharply. She and Domna exchanged a horrified look. These imitations of Cathy’s were well known to them; indeed they had laughed at them heartily, but seen from Furness’ side of the window, they assumed another perspective. In this light, Mulcahy’s position at Jocelyn did in fact appear unjustified. Moreover, the two women could not help but feel to some extent implicated in that rather dubious position; they also had encouraged Hen to tilt against the local pieties and abetted him in his sarcasms; for the first time, strangely enough, it came home to them that Maynard Hoar did have a sort of case against their friend, but at the same moment they discovered that it would be wiser not to see this just now—any justice to Maynard would have to be done hereafter. Yet a sense of complicity held them silent in each other’s presence; each read the other’s thoughts and did not wish to be the first to disavow them. But Van Tour rushed in, colors flying, and saved them from a moral predicament. “ ‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’ ” he hotly quoted, turning to Furness. “Isn’t that what you’re really saying, Howard? It’s the old move-on-buddy line that we used to hear in the Hoover days when anybody got independent. ‘Why don’t you go back to Russia if you like it so well there?’ I must say,” he added, chastely, “I never thought I’d be listening to that old bull slung at Jocelyn.” For a moment, every face wore a look of gratitude to the speaker for reviving the old militant simplicities, like a martial tune from long ago, but then a sigh went up; the inalienab
le right to “bore from within” was something they no longer believed in, though they felt a sort of pain where the belief had been, as a veteran does in an amputated limb. “It’s no good, Consy,” said Furness, regretfully. “Change that phonograph record. Maynard doesn’t owe Hen a living just because Hen disagrees with him. How about it, Domna?” he pressed her. “Even you wouldn’t allege that.”