Poetic Justice

by Amanda Cross

  “Bounce it?”

  “Demolish it, phase it out, declare it null and void, give it the ax.”

  “But Cudlipp is only Chairman of the College English Department,” Kate said.

  “There is no ‘only’ about it, I’m afraid,” Castleman said. “For reasons we do not wholly understand, he is determined that the University College must go. It gives a bachelor’s degree that Cudlipp claims dilutes the prestige of the degree given by The College, as they so maddeningly call it. He has lots of other arguments. The point is, since he is in the English Department, we felt we needed someone in addition to Professor Cartier to help us in what is, I’m afraid, a fight for survival.”

  “The College feels,” Luther Hankster whispered, “like someone with valuable suburban property whose neighbor threatens to sell to a black.”

  “Does Bob O’Toole go along with this? I have always thought of him as a follower of Clemance.”

  “So he is,” Castleman said. “But, as perhaps you have noticed, he possesses arrogance and ambition in about equally large proportions, which puts him squarely on Cudlipp’s side.”

  “Where does Clemance stand?”

  “Oh,” McQuire said, “he’s with the College; always has been. He suggests, in his marvelously reasonable way, that we are simply not ‘excellent’ enough. Which is nonsense; we are the most excellent college for adults in the country.”

  “Have you had much to do with the College, Professor Fansler?” Herbert Klein asked.

  “Enough to know they are in danger of giving arrogance a bad name,” Kate lightly said.

  “Exactly,” Frogmore exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Well put, Kate.”

  “O.K.,” Kate said. “You want someone from the English Department—which you gather, correctly, is fed up with Cudlipp’s throwing all that weight around.” She hoped Frogmore would consider that well put too.

  “And,” Castleman said, “we need general sort of help so that when the Administrative Council next meets they will confirm the future of the University College in no uncertain terms. Needless to say, Cudlipp will do all he can to prevent that.”

  “Right,” Kate said. “I see, or think I do. But why me? I don’t even like teaching undergraduates.”

  “You are more decorative than our other colleagues,” Cartier said.

  “We did a lot of research, Kate,” Frogmore said, “and we ran into very little flak when it came to you.” (My God, Kate thought, he is smart; smart enough to know the we-chose-you-for-your-womanly-charms bit wouldn’t work; good for him.) “From all sides we heard of your sympathy with students—your willingness, long before the roof fell in, to give them time. We also heard that you are opposed to the publish-or-perish racket, and to professors who have no time for anything but their own professional careers.”

  “All exaggerated, I assure you. I have no recent experience in undergraduate teaching and, to be brutally frank, not much desire for it. I like graduate students because they’re self-selected.” She winked at Bill McQuire.

  “Why do you dislike teaching undergraduates?” Hankster asked. “Or did you just say that to startle us?”

  “I said it because it’s true—and tact isn’t my most notable characteristic. Why is it true? Because of the age of undergraduates—delightful, no doubt, but not for me. As far as I’m concerned, youth is a condition which will pass, and which I prefer to have pass outside of my immediate field of vision. Of course, I have nothing against young people—apart from the fact that they are arrogant, spoiled, discourteous, incapable of compromise, and unaware of the price of everything they want to destroy. It’s not that I disagree with their beliefs, or mind if I do disagree. I just prefer those whom life has had time to season.

  “What a long speech. I am certain I ought not to be so emphatic; for one thing, it’s unladylike and mysteriously unbecoming not to cherish the company of the young of one’s own species. Someone must have asked me a question, and now I’ve come all over nasty about children, and quite forgotten what it was.”

  “We are answering the question of why you were chosen to join us,” Klein said. “We felt we could interest you in a college whose students are no longer in the throes of role-playing: older, experienced in the ways of the world, mellower on the whole, and totally motivated—self-selected was, I believe, your own phrase.”

  “I see,” Kate said. “And am I to be persuaded to some special action, or only encouraged to cheer in a general sort of way?”

  “Let some of our students into your courses,” Frogmore said. “Get to know them. Find out a bit about what we’re doing, and give us a chance to impress you. Carry our banner in the Graduate English Department any way you see fit, but fight our cause there.”

  “I’ve certainly no objection to a few of your students in my courses, if I can interview them first. As to the fight in the Graduate English Department—you know, I don’t as a rule drink at lunch, but right at the moment I feel the need of what Auden calls an ‘analeptic swig.’ ”

  “You’ve got to admit, Reed, it’s not madly me. I mean, can you imagine one getting involved in a university power-struggle? ”

  “Then don’t,” Reed said. “What I can’t imagine is why you don’t just say no, but then I, like all outsiders, am having a certain amount of trouble understanding what in the world is going on in that university of yours. Surely you can send this Frogmore chap a firm but gracious note telling him you don’t want anything to do with his silly college.”

  “But am I certain I don’t want anything to do with it? It is, after all, awfully soul-satisfying of them to want me.”

  “And a very clever bunch they are, I must say. Though it is certainly by no means clear to me why the proposition of any old college gets the most careful consideration, while my …”

  “I have yet to refuse one of your propositions, Reed, admit it.”

  “Kate, whenever you start talking like a bad imitation of Nancy Mitford I know that you are not only plastered but worried.”

  “Sweet, perceptive you. Though I must say, I really can’t believe that Auden drank a whole bottle of Cherry Heering.” They were in Kate’s living room late that night and Kate, as she carefully explained, while she had long since admitted she couldn’t write poetry like Auden’s, wanted to discover if she had at least his capacity for alcohol. “You see,” she had told Reed, “Auden went to spend the evening with the Stravinskys and Robert Craft, and he managed to drink a pitcher of martinis before dinner, a bottle of champagne during, and a bottle of Cherry Heering after. Craft thinks he thought the Cherry Heering was Chianti—I rather wish it were, actually. All that affected his labials only slightly and his wit not at all. It had no effect either, apparently, on his stomach, his liver, or his plumbing—not one visit to the loo. Well, I have failed the test—that is, my stomach is all right; I have, thank God, no way of knowing how my liver is; I’m far too comfortable to go to the loo; but I am not going to make it through this bottle of Cherry Heering. To join the fight or not to join the fight, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to defeat Jeremiah Cudlipp, which would be so pleasant in the gut, to say nothing of the good one could do, or …”

  “Kate,” Reed said, “what has happened to you this fall? Last spring, at least before all those students decided to occupy all those buildings, you seemed to …”

  “Sara Teasdale.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  In the spring I asked the daisies

  If his words were true,

  And the clever little daisies

  Always knew.

  Now the fields are brown and barren,

  Bitter autumn blows,

  And of all the stupid asters

  Not one knows.

  “I am certain,” Reed said, “that Auden does not quote Sara Teasdale even after three bottles of Cherry Heering. What are you worried about, this University College?”

  “There is my motto.”

  “Oh, my God,
which motto is that? If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly?”

  “Not that one. The British Navy one: never ask for a job, never refuse one.”

  “I wonder if I, too, am not an honorary member of the British Navy: I’m thinking of leaving the D.A.’s Office.”

  “Reed Amhearst! Why? Surely you haven’t tired of fighting crime?”

  “I’ve been offered a job—actually a partnership—in a Wall Street law firm. Great rise in salary, among other things. A man might even consider supporting a wife and a small canary.”

  “Do you mean you would help people merge companies and diddle with their stocks and bonds?”

  “No. That’s what everyone else in the firm does. I would be expected to rally round when their clients take time off and start diddling with things other than stocks and bonds. I am distressed, Kate, that the more certain I become of what I want, the more uncertain you become. I do realize that the University has got to go through a time of reorganization and re-examination, but—well, you seem positively driven …”

  “To get plastered.”

  “Yes, but I was going to say—to examine every alternative as though you had somehow forfeited the right to say a simple ‘no’ to anything.”

  “But I have, you know. In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt. The generation gap appeared somewhere between me and my brothers. They deny that they are guilty of anything but an excess of generosity, and I deny that I am innocent in anything except bumbling good intentions. Excuse me a minute, I think I’m going to throw up.”

  Reed, watching her more or less dignified exit, decided this was hyperbole. She returned, indeed, in a cheerful mood.

  “I have thought it all out,” Kate said. “Ready? The University College is a damn good idea, and there is nothing against it except the insufferable snobbery of the College. The fact is, now that I come to think of it, I know plenty of people of my generation of all sexes to whom an adult college of excellence would be the chance for a new life or a second life, which is becoming more and more necessary in the United States but which present institutions make impossible. Hooray, I’m going to make a speech. Ladies and gentlemen …”

  “Right,” Reed said. “Then drop Frogmore a short, gracious note saying let’s fight together shoulder to shoulder for good old University College, sincerely yours, Kate Fansler.”

  “Just Kate. He never uses last names.”

  “Good. Then you join the fight for University, and I’ll join my law firm. Why not?”

  “Frederick Clemance.”

  “Our hero.”

  “You need not be vulgar. When you speak with admiration of all those musty forensic types, I do not sneer.”

  “I’m not sneering, simply surprised to have his name introduced into the discussion. What’s he got to do with University College?”

  “He’s against it. Lock, stock, and barrel—or do I mean hook, line, and sinker? Anyway, he hates it, he wants to crush it underfoot, he has joined with Jeremiah Cudlipp to defeat it, and do I want to go into battle with those two?”

  “Why not? Growing up consists in fighting our former heroes.”

  “Maybe. I’m not that grown up. I don’t want to get close enough to Clemance to discover he’s not as great as I prefer to suppose he is.”

  “I don’t know about the labials but the sibilants are doing fine. If I remember correctly Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats, which isn’t all that difficult since you cannot have read it to me fewer than eighteen times, Auden found no difficulty in recognizing that Yeats was magnificent and silly at the same time. Something about time forgiving those who wrote well. Clemance, if I am to believe you, wrote well. Let time forgive him, and get on with your college.”

  “But Clemance isn’t silly; he’s always been large of soul when all about him were nit-picking. Anyway, I’ve been hero-worshipping him since before I got into his special seminar as a student, and that, God help me, was nearly twenty years ago.”

  “If Clemance is as large-souled as all that, why does he associate himself with Jeremiah Cudlipp?”

  “I don’t know. Love for the College, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  Kate got to her feet and wandered over to the book-case. Clemance’s books were there, ranged together, biographies, essays, plays, poems—all together, a rare tribute in itself, since Kate divided her library ruthlessly into categories: poetry, fiction, drama, biography, criticism, cultural history, and books-not-worth-keeping-with-which-I-cannot-bear-to-part. “And if this were a movie,” Reed said, “we would flash back to eager young Kate, eyes shining, hair streaming down her back, listening to Clemance in the glory of his prime, explaining us to ourselves.”

  “My hair never streamed down my back, surely it’s the prime of his glory, and I wish they still made movies like that.”

  “He must be almost as old as Auden.”

  “We’re all almost as old as Auden, ‘in middle-age hoping to twig from/What we are not what we might be next.’ ”

  “I’ll tell you what you and Clemance are going to be next.”

  “What?”

  “On opposite sides. Do you think I could be present at the opening fusillades of what promises to be a most interesting skirmish?”

  “You can if you want to join us tomorrow. Frederick Clemance, though you may not believe it, has invited me to lunch. Why should you want to support a small canary?”

  “Why should I want to support a wife? The only woman I think of marrying has long supported herself, with the aid of a meager salary and a large private income, and is presently concerned with founding a new college.”

  “I’m not founding a college, I’m allocating resources—that is, if you’re describing me. Are you thinking of marrying me for my money?”

  “Odd you should mention that,” Reed said. “It’s the only reason for marrying you I hadn’t thought of. Now, when it comes to the reasons for not marrying you, there isn’t an argument I’ve missed. But I’m like the Jew in Boccaccio who was converted to Catholicism on the sensible grounds that if the Church has succeeded despite all the corruption he found in Rome, it must have God behind it.”

  “The world is full of beautiful young women aching for a handsome man like you, all graying sideburns and youthful demeanor. I am aging, cantankerous, given to illogical skirmishes and the drinking of too much wine. There must be at least fifty young women waiting for you, Reed.”

  Reed walked then, in his turn, to the bookcase (poetry), extracted a volume and read from it: “ ‘One deed ascribed to Hercules was “making love” with fifty virgins in the course of a single night: one might on that account say that Hercules was beloved of Aphrodite, but one would not call him a lover.’ Nor is that all,” Reed said, turning the pages. “We have all agreed we live in uncertain times. Indeed, says Auden:

  How much half-witted horseplay and sheer bloody misrule

  It took to bring you two together both on schedule?

  If equal affection cannot be,

  Let the more loving one be me.

  Three

  SATURDAY morning, and Central Park free for human beings to move at the speeds they might have attained at the turn of the century: horses, bicycles, and the almost forgotten pleasures of walking. Kate and Reed, whenever they considered the incredible series of disasters to which living in New York City regularly exposed one—strikes, garbage uncollected, snow unremoved, no transportation, no heat, no safety in the streets—or whenever they heard others complain of city living, would always think: they have taken the automobiles out of Central Park on weekends. It was the one urban blessing the decade had conferred.

  “To return,” Reed said, “to the conversation of last night, why has misrule and horseplay brought you to such a state of discombobulation? Or, since it has, may I offer my help in recombobulation? Does the University matter that much?”

  “On Thursday, when the semest
er began,” Kate said, “I asked myself that question—not, perhaps, whether it matters, which it so clearly does, but why?” Kate stopped to pat a puppy who came loping up anticipating admiration. “I can remember many stages of the revolution or insurrection or whatever it might be called. The exhilaration of the week when the buildings were occupied, the sense of absolute aliveness which, despite all the problems, one did so ringingly feel. I remember being shoved against a building by a plainclothesman with a club and thinking, this is it. I remember hearing the endlessly repeated obscenities from the students who stood about on the ledges and roofs of the buildings like acroteria, and wondering if indeed, as one of the characters in one of Forster’s novels notes, they were out of fashion. I remember watching the flowers and grass being trampled, distinctly noticing as the last tulip was crushed. I remember, on the first day when they occupied the President’s Office, walking by the administration building and thinking: so that’s where the President’s Office is, and never wondering, then, why in all the years I had been associated with the University I had never learned where the President’s Office was, nor cared to learn. Later on, of course, we heard that the guards had entered the office, not to try to bounce the students but to rescue a Van Gogh which hung there, and I did muse then to think that I had never known the University possessed one of the world’s great paintings.

  “But none of that was the worst, you know; it only seemed the worst to those on the outside, who were appalled at the actions of the students, or appalled at the actions of the police—when what I became so suddenly struck with was the fact that there had never really been a university. That a bunch of half-baked, foul-mouthed Maoist students could bring a great university to a standstill, could be followed in their illegal acts by nearly a thousand moderate, thoughtful students, but above all could reveal that the University had never really been administered at all. We had a president whom no one ever saw, whose understanding of the true condition of the University could not have been more inaccurate if his job had been running a yacht club in East Hampton; we had a Board of Governors who had never, literally never, spoken to a student nor visited the University except for the monthly meetings, when their chauffeurs drove them to the campus; we had a faculty so busy with its own affairs that it had not troubled to observe that there was no university, only separate egos, departments, schools, programs all staking claims.