Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Yet now, in the presence of the department, Mulcahy experienced misgivings. Would the department swallow these poets, whom, to tell the truth, he himself had boggled at somewhat until Ellison had reassured him? He cast a curious look at Domna and at Furness, who appeared to be struggling with what he could not help but recognize as a desire to laugh. “Herbert,” said Furness, in a muffled voice, “the purpose of this conference is not to emulate Columbus. We need a few of the old landmarks—you know, Stevens, Dr. Williams, Miss Moore—to give the students their bearings.” Domna gave a delighted laugh. It was plain to Mulcahy that he and Ellison had erred, since she did not seem at all offended but truly and spontaneously amused. “The list,” she cried, “is perfect to be buried in a time-capsule. In twenty years, we will dig it up and find whether the promise has been fulfilled.” Ellison regarded her calmly. “You find bliss in your ignorance,” he stated, like one making a scientific discovery. Domna opened her mouth sharply to answer, but on a sudden placatory impulse Mulcahy intervened. “Who would you like to ask, Domna?” he queried, with an anxious, appealing smile. “Have we overlooked somebody whom you think important?” Furness’ smooth jaw dropped; he stared; everybody’s gaze followed his to Domna, who looked nonplussed and yet touched.

  “My private opinion,” she said finally, “has no special right to be considered. There is always injustice when a conference claims to be representative—any tendency that exists, if only in one person, can demand a right to be heard. My real criticism of this list—please excuse me—is that it seems to be based on an expectation of cruelty in its confrontations. You have listed several pale, respectable old men, with a long history of publication, one man in middle life whose poetic reputation is in eclipse, and four or five fledglings who have published very little and are noted principally for a critical intransigency. What do you expect to happen? Those young men will tear their elders to pieces, to the joy of the student-body, and the older men will not retaliate because they are disarmed by their success and will not stoop to in-fighting with puny adversaries, who have no body of work to put at stake. You’re planning a Roman holiday, for what motives I can’t imagine, unless you expect publicity. And how is it you ask no women? Do you think that a sentiment of chivalry might be a deterrent to blood-thirst?”

  “But it’s those pale respectable old men who have everything their own way in poetry,” protested Mulcahy, aggrieved. “Nonsense,” said Domna. “Every one of those old men lives in terror of some youthful thug who plays bodyguard to him and dictates whom and what he shall endorse. What you’re doing is asking them to come here without their customary protection—the poor things, it’s pathetic—to face a gang of hoodlums. You must show a certain piety by inviting the usual flappers and buffers: the poets of the middle ground.”

  “What an appraisal of the poetic situation,” murmured Ellison. Domna flared up. “The trouble with the poetic situation,” she said, “is that it has become organized, like the Skull and Bones society, on the lines of mutual assistance, not to let the fellow-member down. With the advent of the new criticism to America, we’ve learned to become ‘readers’ of poetry and lost our critical standards. During the past fifteen years, criticism within the fold has been reduced to a minimum. On the other hand, no poet of any real merit has been excluded from the fold, so that complaints appear unjustified. You and your friends”—she turned to Ellison—“are too impatient. You want to make a putsch for the sake of tighter control, more daring methods of promotion, but violence is unnecessary. Time will bring you power.”

  “Is she accusing me of being a fascist?” said Ellison, speaking to the room at large. There was no answer. Furness coughed. “Why don’t you make a practical suggestion, Domna?” But Domna suddenly turned obstinate. “The omissions are obvious,” she declared. “You have a wide choice—Tate, Ransom, Miss Moore, Empson, Jarrell, Shapiro, Auden, Winters, Roethke, Lowell, Miss Bishop. Who am I to say?” At the mention of these names, Ellison shuddered and directed his gaze out the window. With the defection of the two poets, Furness stepped into the breach and made two or three recommendations. The meeting adjourned.

  Henry caught up with Domna as she was passing through the swinging doors into the other part of the building. He touched her on the sleeve. “Domna,” he said, “I don’t want you to misunderstand Herbert. He meant nothing personal, I promise you. You and he are not really far apart; the very things you said this afternoon I’ve had him tell me a dozen times. It’s the old business of the ins and the outs. He’s a natural out like you and me and deeply fears any compromise. This makes him standoffish and touchy, just like you.” Domna shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “Not like me. I’m not a natural out.” He swung into step beside her as she started across the campus. “Domna,” he said, suddenly, “who was behind that meeting?” Domna’s face froze; the faint, musing smile died on her lips. He felt her stiffen as he took her arm. “Was it Furness?” he asked. Domna shook her head. “Or Alma?” he prompted, more softly. “No,” she cried. “It was all of us, the whole department.”

  Henry smiled. “Dear Domna, I was not born yesterday. There is always an initiator. Who spoke first? I think I have a right to know.” “We all did,” she reiterated. Henry laughed aloud. “I can find out very easily, you know, but let’s try guessing and you will tell me if I hit it right the first time.” He held up his bare hand and began to count on the plump, shortish fingers, as though playing with a child. Domna continued to shake her head, but he could see that she was curious to know whether he guessed right. “We’ll eliminate poor old Consy,” he said. “He bears no grudges and knows nothing about poetry. If it had been a short story conference, we might have expected him to fight. You?” He scrutinized her carefully, down to her narrow fine-leather shoes. “No. I think not. If it had been you, you would have said so, out of sheer incontinence. It is Furness, then, or Alma. Which one? On the whole, I think Alma. A little bird has been telling me that Alma is angry with me. Somebody has put it into her head that I am ‘angling’ for her job and trying to push her into leaving Jocelyn.” Domna flushed, uncontrollably. “Just ask her,” he went on, “whether she remembers the morning when I pleaded with her not to go through with her resignation. Now, naturally, it’s too late and she has only herself to blame if she can’t find another position. I’ve done all I could, God knows, written stacks of letters for her, but nobody seems to want her. Let’s say, then, I guess Alma. Do you deny it?” “No,” said Domna, stopping in her tracks and whirling on him. “I don’t deny it or assert it. You have no right to ask such things.” She hesitated. “But if you’re going to suspect Alma, I’ll tell you. You’re wrong. It was me.” Henry gave a pitying laugh. “Dear Domna, don’t you think I know that you and I have no students in common? If a student betrayed my confidence to a teacher, it could not have been to you. You gave yourselves away when you told me you had student sources. The others were too canny to do that. It was you who made the slip.”

  Domna drew a long breath. “As it happens,” she announced, “you’re wrong. We do have a student in common, but it was not that student who told me. I beg you, leave this thing alone. Nobody meant you any harm; we were merely thinking of the college and of the unfortunate effect on the students of a débâcle at the poetry conference. If Ellison was planning some outrage, we owe you a debt of gratitude for telling your students about it. There was no intent to injure you, only a public solicitude which was possibly exaggerated. You must not harbor vindictive feelings against anyone, including your students, who acted also for what they thought was the best.”

  Henry squeezed her arm. “I don’t harbor them against you, Domna,” he said cheerily. “I congratulate you for a valiant attempt to shield your friend, Alma.” He doffed his old gray hat to her and turned quickly back on his steps. In the Administration Building, in the registrar’s office, he found the class-file he was looking for. “Miss Rejnev, Oral French, Sheila McKay (transfer),” he noted and hurriedly slipped the card
back.

  CHAPTER XI

  What Would Tolstoy Say?

  DOMNA, WHEN Henry had left her, turned on a guilty impulse sharply to her right and made for Linden Hall, where Alma had her apartment. She was going to confess to Alma the thing she had just done and purge her soul of the falsity in which Mulcahy had left her. It seemed to her that she had committed a very unfriendly act: the embarrassing truth was that it had been she, just as she had said, who had first alarmed the department with the prattle of Mulcahy’s student, the pale, anxious, little McKay girl, who had recently attached herself to her, hanging about after French class, waiting to walk with her to the post-office and confiding to her all the worries and scruples of an over-conscientious nature.

  The burden of this conventional child’s avowal was that she was afraid of Dr. Mulcahy, who was making her read Ulysses, which shocked her, pumping her about her other teachers, filling her up with all sorts of menacing theories about the artist as arch-conspirator, demanding that she and her friends baby-sit free of charge and do all sorts of menial work for Mrs. Mulcahy, who spent a great deal of time at the hairdresser’s or in her bedroom, lying down, writing poetry. According to this wide-eyed Sheila, some of the boys in her circle were “slaves” to Dr. Mulcahy: he was coaching them to play a disruptive part at the poetry conference and running them ragged in his household so that they had no time to study and were finding themselves conditioned in all their courses but his. This gush of confidence imparted twice a week had in it something of awe and pristine wonder that had tempted Miss Rejnev to listen to it, at first, from a sense of intellectual duty—to Sheila, Dr. Mulcahy was a phenomenon, like thunder, for which she sought an adult explanation that would restore tranquillity to her cosmos. And the child herself, in her timid way—as Domna, torn between amusement and solicitude, related to Alma and Considine—had been groping toward understanding while holding tight to the rail of analogy: the boys revolving around Mulcahy in charmed servitude, she breathlessly discovered, reminded her of the followers of Ulysses turned into swine by Circe’s spell. Hence, in a certain fashion, it was conceded, the experience of Mulcahy had been valuable to her, as the beginning of her mental life.

  One scene, however, described by Sheila, had made Domna and her colleagues very uncomfortable: an account of how Mulcahy, coming home one afternoon, had endeavored to make a boy confess to breaking a serving-dish which in fact he had not broken, sending him out of the room to “think it over,” and agreeing grandly to accept his apology when the boy remained uncommunicative. Such a scene, nevertheless, they all acknowledged, belonged, all too horribly, to the purlieus of private life; it was not the department’s business to regulate Mulcahy’s personal relations with his students nor to pry into the details of his hold on them. “They love him, Miss Rejnev,” Sheila explained simply, when asked why they stood for such treatment. “He flatters them, you mean,” sharply corrected Mrs. Fortune, who had been detailed to be present at this interview. And yet the two teachers, once the frightened girl was gone, had exchanged looks of bafflement—they believed in love and its inviolable sanctities. It was the same with Consy Van Tour’s excited report that he had seen Mulcahy borrow money from a student to pay for a huge bag of groceries in the village store, so heavy, affirmed Consy, that the student staggered as he carried it out to the car. This was not the department’s affair either—there was no college rule forbidding loans from students to faculty—and, for all anyone knew, this might have been an isolated instance. Such insights into Mulcahy’s personal life fell under the heading of gossip, and not only Domna, but her two friends and Aristide, to whom these stories were confided (eliciting an “Inouï!” and a bulging of the big, flat eyes), felt somewhat guilty for dwelling on them. Yet it seemed as if everything conspired, in this particular period, to bring to their attention damaging facts about Mulcahy, which rained on them like reproaches; and this concurred, very awkwardly, with a sudden coolness and haughtiness shown by Mulcahy to all of them, a coolness to which Domna held the clue, which she felt that, in all honor, she ought not to divulge. And the fact that she had not, despite greater and greater provocations—including a most damnable attempt to woo her favorite girl-student away from her—said a word to anybody but the Bentkoops of her unpleasant little discovery gave her, she was persuaded, a certain leeway in listening, not only to Sheila’s tales, but to the tales brought to her ears by every little bird on the campus.

  It would seem, she inwardly protested, that she had been singled out by fatality to learn the worst about Mulcahy, as though in punishment for her credulity. Hardly a day passed, she swore, but that some student tapped on her door, to complain that Dr. Mulcahy was not in his office for his tutorial and did she know where he was, or, if it were not a student, it was the librarian, asking if she would speak to Hen about sending in his reserve list on time. There was, as she knew, a natural explanation for these recurrences: it was supposed by the ignorant that she and Mulcahy were still friendly, and those who needed to complain of him had found, by experience, that it was pleasanter to do so through an intermediary. Hence, it had fallen to her lot to be, where Mulcahy was concerned, the bearer of bad tidings, which soured their relations still further. She had no doubt that he presumed that she was spying on him—a warrantable conclusion from the evidence. Therefore, as March had worn on, with its flurry of spring colds, leading to unavoidable absences, latenesses and so on, she had delegated the task of mediation to Alma, who at once fell under Henry’s displeasure, and at length to Aristide, who sped back and forth on his errands of conciliation, with the invisibility and discretion of Hermes, winging between mortals and Olympus. All these reprimands and reminders ought, of course, to have fallen to Furness to deliver, but a conspiracy of delicacy spared him, so that he alone of the original group was unaware of the real state of affairs and even supposed, as the three guiltily recognized from remarks of his casually thrown out, that Hen had finally buckled down to the job.

  And Domna and her two colleagues were unable to determine, reluctantly listening to Furness, what color their own affrighted imagination was lending to the picture of Hen’s delinquency. Was he worse, as it certainly seemed to them, or were they merely conscious, awkwardly, of certain features of his behavior which they had firmly overlooked in the past? And if he was better, if he was now “behaving himself,” as Furness lightly noted, then what must he have been in the past, when they had all so staunchly underwritten him? The very thought made their reason quake. And the fact that he had drawn away from them, that he sometimes indeed seemed positively unfriendly, as Consy declared, aghast, gave their investigations a certain posthumous character, as though, like Proust’s Marcel, they were tracking down infidelities of a lover dead and beyond the grasp of their reproaches.

  The stories they had inevitably begun to hear of the goings-on in the little house on the hill, of Cathy’s extravagances, of the close friendship with Ellison, made them, in fact, wonder whether this was the same Henry. “It doesn’t sound like the Henry I knew,” Alma kept repeating, as though her own Henry had strayed from her, like a household cat. And the two women, in particular, sometimes fell victims to the temptation of tracing the faults they now saw in Henry directly to Ellison’s influence and of dating Henry’s deterioration from the day he threw off their soft yoke. Hence, it was only natural that they should fasten on Sheila’s report of the deep-laid plans for the poetry conference as a pretext for bringing Henry to book, censuring the insufferable Ellison, and restoring order to the department under their benevolent tyranny; and they found no difficulty in enlisting the indignation of the gentle, public-spirited Consy, whose Writers’ Workshop students had told him enough already, he asserted, to freeze his balls blue.

  From this moment, they all three ceased to feel guilty and became animated by a spirit of public interest. Up to then, though greatly disturbed by the stories brought to them by Domna from Sheila, which were corroborated by their own canvassing among Mulcahy’s students, they ha
d felt that reluctance to intervene that characterized them as true liberals. They were conscious of owing a duty to the students to protect them from the eccentricities of a teacher whom they themselves had sponsored, but they could not be sure how far this duty extended and where it conflicted with their duty to Mulcahy as a fellow-being with certain gifts and certain handicaps, for which due allowance must be made. There was also, they could not help but feel, a duty to themselves, a duty not to spy, not to be underhanded, not to encourage informers or welcome irresponsible gossip, but this duty, likewise, was in conflict with both the other two, for how were they to determine the limits of their responsibilities if they did not inform themselves precisely as to what was going on?