Poetic Justice

by Amanda Cross

  “But,” Kate asked Reed that night, “can Hankster’s accusation possibly be true?”

  A truth at which one should arrive,

  Forbids immediate utterance,

  And tongues to speak it must contrive

  To tell two different lies at once.

  Ten

  THE following morning’s mail brought an invitation to a poetry reading from the Graduate Students’ English Society, The GSES, clearly proud of itself, announced its poet with a flourish and a photograph: W. H. Auden. Kate looked with pleasure at the picture of the white, marvelously rumpled face. Of Icelandic descent, Auden possessed, in the words of Christopher Isherwood, “hair like bleached straw and thick, coarse-looking, curiously white flesh, as though every drop of blood had been pumped out of his body.” The lines in Auden’s face, originally formed, Isherwood said, by “the misleading ferocious frown common to people of very short sight,” had, over the years, deepened and softened: the expression, Kate thought, looking at the photograph, was less ferocious than experienced, life-tossed. She looked forward to the poetry reading. I wonder, she thought, if Clemance will be going. It seems, somehow, suitable that he and I and Auden should be in the same room together in these strange days. But of course he knows Auden and will probably want to see him first.

  It would all have to be arranged soon. Auden’s reading was not far off and must have been arranged hurriedly, but the new GSES was doing well. The previous organization of Graduate English students had, in fact, belonged to the students only nominally; the faculty had used it to try out members from other institutions whom it might later choose to woo. Since the revolution, the GSES had been wrested from faculty hands and devoted to readings and discussion which the students thought interesting: everyone considered the arrangement a wonderful improvement as God knows it is, Kate thought, marking the date down on her calendar.

  She was interrupted in this observation by the ringing of the telephone. Clemance, as though in answer to her thought, asked if she were going to the reading and if she would accompany him. Auden, Clemance said, would not be dining at the University but would arrive just for the reading. Somewhat astonished, Kate agreed to meet Clemance outside the auditorium. “I had just opened the invitation myself,” she said, “and was thinking that you must be planning to go.”

  “Oh, yes,” Clemance said. “I have always, of course, admired his poetry, but it is truly eerie how near he is to the bone these days. Do you know the lines:

  What have you done to them?

  Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:

  You will come to believe—how can you help it?—

  That you did, you did do something;

  You will find yourself wishing you could make them

  laugh;

  You will long for their friendship.

  He is so right in those lines,” Clemance went on, “about how one feels, even toward those students who have most cavalierly and with least thought destroyed the confidence and cordiality it took years to establish. And so right, of course, about guilt. We who in the turmoil of today can continue to believe that we did nothing—we are the generation, are we not, who is finished? Will you bring Reed Amhearst?”

  “To the reading? Certainly, if he wants to come; he hears so much Auden these days he’s quoting it himself. But I suspect there will be an awful mob.”

  “I think I can reserve three seats,” Clemance said. “My influence, though waning, extends that far. A quarter of eight then, Friday evening?”

  When he had rung off Kate pondered a bit about the fancy Clemance had taken to Reed, who appeared oddly skittish in the presence of the famous professor. Certainly that remark about the horrors of daughters having babies had been the absolutely most uncharacteristic remark she had ever heard Reed make. Well, it was probably one of the happier effects of the turmoil that people no longer sorted themselves out so neatly. Reed, indeed, had become a more rigorous attender of the University than she. He was there now, hanging from pipes no doubt and contemplating elevators.

  Reed, at that moment, was thinking of elevators, though not hanging from pipes. He was in fact smack in the middle of the campus contemplating Hankster’s suggestion about Cudlipp. A red herring? The determining factor was, of course, when precisely … Reed turned his steps toward the Administration Building.

  “To see President Matthewson now?” The secretary was clearly unhappy, and Reed could well guess why. The Acting President, compensating for the almost total inaccessibility of his predecessor, had made a point of being readily available to all comers. But of course, in his position, this was a difficult principle to implement: one could scarcely allow oneself to be broken in on by every petulant complainer at every hour of the day. So Matthewson’s much-tried secretary had learned to parry requests. “But,” she plaintively said, “he’s in an important conference.”

  “Tell me, Miss Franklin,” Reed said, reading her name from the sign on her desk, “do you remember when you were called by two faculty members who were stuck in an elevator?”

  “I certainly do,” Miss Franklin said with emphasis. “A most disturbing conversation.”

  “Did you subsequently report it to President Matthewson?”

  “I told him about it that very afternoon. He chuckled, in fact. But of course when more and more faculty members started getting stuck in elevators, and senior faculty for the most part.…”

  “His chuckles became noticeably less robust, as I can well imagine. Tell me, Miss Franklin, and please be sure of your answer: Was that occasion when Professors Everglade and Fansler called you from the elevator the first time senior faculty, shall we say as a group, were stuck in an elevator between floors?”

  “Oh, yes, I can be quite certain about that. In fact, President Matthewson mentioned it again to me only the other day.”

  “I see. Miss Franklin, I’m sure you will be immeasurably relieved to know that I no longer have any need to see President Matthewson. His conference may continue undisturbed, at least by me.”

  “I’m exceedingly glad to be of help,” Miss Franklin faintly said. She did not pretend to understand the conversation she had just taken part in, but if a crisis, in these days of continuing crises, had been averted by the exchange of inconclusive remarks, she was not about to complain.

  Feeling considerably more buoyant than he had in days, Reed set off for the bar and grill where he had lunched with Peabody. The man, Reed thought, who speaks in two languages, one in a university and one in a bar and grill. He called Kate my bird, said she was sexy about the Victorian novel, told me nothing, made me pay for the lunch, and yet left me with the feeling that I had profited by the whole occasion. Which I had.

  Sure enough, Mr. Peabody was in his accustomed booth, drinking beer and holding forth.

  “May I ask you a question privately?” Reed asked. Peabody stepped aside with Reed.

  “I sometimes take the Fifth, but probably not with you,” he said.

  “Do you remember,” Reed asked, “the day you and three of your fellow University College students, who are, I understand, a sort of traveling P.R. arrangement for your Alma Mater, first called on Professor Fansler?”

  “Sure I remember; I told you about it. Get to the nub, man.”

  “Miss Fansler was stuck in the elevator that day, and kept you waiting.”

  “Not really. You seem to keep mentioning elevators. Have you noticed it? Look into it, man, that sort of thing can become serious.”

  Reed decided to ignore this disingenuous remark. “How many people knew you were going to talk to Professor Fansler, to ask for the first time to be officially admitted to a Graduate English class?”

  “Everyone, man. We were like publicizing it. We’d had it with that boys’ group always having us on the defensive—we told the world we were going to move, we announced our schedule of offensives. Your bird was the first.”

  “Professor Fansler,” Reed said, frowning slightly, “was carefully picked for this of
fensive.”

  “Natch. We had to decide—old Vivian even consulted with some of us students before deciding which faculty member would be the best to begin on.”

  “Vivian?” Reed faintly said.

  “Frogmore. We all came up with the name of your Professor Fansler, and we told the world. A compliment, really; don’t get uptight about it.”

  “On the contrary,” Reed said. “May I contribute,” he asked, reaching into his pocket, “to the beer or cigarette supply?” In his day, Reed thought, such a request would have been considered insulting and patronizing; he would have been lucky to get away unassaulted. Because money was scarcer then? Or more sacred? Peabody’s response was simple.

  “That would be much appreciated,” he said, “in these penniless parts.” Reed handed over the money, and thought to himself as he walked back to the campus that money became desanctified only to those who had neither earned it nor done without it. The question was, was that a good or a bad thing?

  So it was Cudlipp who had started the elevator business; madly to disrupt the University as the hated University College moved toward power? Only one more errand, Reed thought.

  And he set his wandering feet on the path to the Dean’s Office, now occupied, in the legal sense, by Robert O’Toole.

  O’Toole was moving in and out of the Dean’s Office like a reverse spectre—someone, that is, who haunts the place he is soon to inhabit. The Acting Dean was only too happy to vacate; indeed, his eagerness to depart the office bordered on the indecent. Kate was right: administrators were not going to be easily come by in the days that lay ahead.

  Half expecting a snub, Reed was pleasantly surprised to find himself being ushered into O’Toole’s office, offered a seat with a certain flourish, and encouraged to settle in for a cozy chat. Life was certainly very odd. But, as Kate had observed to Reed, the need to talk had markedly overcome many since the passage from the old life—and, to be sure, an unwillingness to chatter had never marked the academic profession.

  “You have pleasant surroundings for your new and onerous tasks,” Reed observed. The room was a lovely one, paneled, high-ceilinged, with the graciousness no new building, however elegant, could achieve.

  “My main reaction to it,” O’Toole said, “is a desire to run and not to stop till I hit some pleasant spot in the middle or far west.”

  “Surely there are no hiding places,” Reed said.

  “Obviously not. Have you noticed the Times is devoting a special section, complete with index, to the turmoil in the colleges? Perhaps we, like plague victims who have recovered, will be safest of all.”

  “I have often wondered if the carrying on with one’s daily life is not the most difficult part: no excitement and glory, just plain hard work.”

  O’Toole nodded. “You want, I assume, to talk about Cudlipp’s death.”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind, but I can’t help. The whole thing seemed so shocking, even in a place by now inured to shocks.”

  “You mean there is no inherent logic in the situation?”

  “Yes,” O’Toole said. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

  Reed paused. “You are widely known as—I believe the word ‘disciple’ has actually been used—of Clemance. Is he as great a teacher as they say?”

  “Absolutely great; almost sui generis, if you know what I mean, as though one had to judge him by special standards.” O’Toole leaned back in his chair. “He taught us to think, those of us who came with the necessary equipment for thinking, which is rarer than you might suppose. We did not always draw the same conclusions he did, but he was a good enough teacher, even, to be pleased with that. And then, so much of what he has himself produced is first-rate; some of it errs, but none of it is cheap. He has even written plays, which means he understands something of literary creation, but, most important, I am inclined to think, he is never esoteric, scholarly, or turgid. What he has to say is available to any cultured, intelligent man who will read with care. But I sound as though I were writing his obituary, which God forbid. When your teacher becomes your colleague, there is a tendency to think of him as two people: from then, and now.”

  “What of Cudlipp, whose obituary you could be writing?”

  “Cudlipp was a more ordinary academic; an interesting scholar and a good teacher to those who could stand his rasping ways. Absolutely devoted to the College. I admire loyalty and devotion.”

  “What I’ve seen of your work seems very good to me,” Reed said. “In the Clemance line: socially relevant discussions of literature with intimations of morality. Will you have time for work when you are dean?”

  “I hope to have, but no doubt every new dean beguiles himself in that way. The secret, I suspect, is to be able to sleep only four hours a night.”

  “Let me ask you a pointed, not to say barbed, question, Mr. O’Toole. Do you intend to continue fighting, as Cudlipp did, the continued functioning of University College? I know you’ve told the Board of Governors and the administration that, as a new dean, you don’t feel the Administrative Council should be allowed to so much as vote on expressing confidence in the University College until the mysteries surrounding Cudlipp’s death are cleared up. But, should that …”

  “As a matter of fact,” O’Toole said, “I’ve changed my mind. To be frank, the pressure from the alumni of the College is enormous, but I’m inclined to think that we ought to let the vote go through; certainly we ought not to hold it up because of Cudlipp’s death. There is really no question, is there? Cudlipp’s death was an accident. It isn’t as though he had been shot or anything. I admit that immediately after his death I was moved to follow a policy which he would have approved as a delaying tactic but—we are the living. The University must adopt the attitude that Cudlipp’s death is a closed book; we must proceed to rebuild the University. I’m about to get in touch with Castleman and Klein and the Acting President and tell them.”

  Reed regarded O’Toole for a while. Kate’s adjective for him had been arrogant, and Reed had learned to trust Kate’s adjectives. But the man in front of him was not arrogant. “I think your change of mind is understandable,” Reed said, “and almost certainly best for the University. Except, of course, that you have, by your previous attitude, stirred up a certain amount of investigation, and it is easier to begin these operations than to stop them.”

  “But surely there isn’t anything to discover, is there?”

  “There is the problem of the elevators.”

  “You mean, to the extent that the elevator stoppage was responsible for Cudlipp’s death?”

  “That stoppage, and others. Mr. O’Toole, I believe I know who was behind the interference with the elevators, but I would like confirmation; hunches have little legal standing. I’m looking for some College students, one, two, perhaps three. I wondered if you could help me to find them.”

  “I’m not even officially Dean yet.”

  “I know, and I apologize for importuning you so early, not to say prematurely, in your administrative career. I believe there are one or two young men who may, as a prank of course, perhaps rather radical youngsters …”

  “Why do you think they’re radical? Because only radicals do mischief?”

  “No. Because they are students Hankster was particularly interested in. I may have drawn an incorrect conclusion. That, however, is not the point. All I want is a statement from those students of what they were doing, and assurances that it will stop. The whole matter need not go outside University disciplinary procedures, nor even that far if you do not choose.”

  “What makes you think I know who they are?”

  “Perhaps, as the new dean, you can guess. Will you look into it and let me know? Is that a bargain?”

  “You might call me in a day or two and see what I’ve decided,” O’Toole said.

  “All right, I will. Thank you for your help.” Reed was amused and a little relieved to see the old arrogance returning. “I’ll teleph
one tomorrow,” he said. “And I do want to wish you all good fortune in your years as dean. You may be inaugurating an important new policy, where faculty members give a few years to administrative work out of devotion.”

  O’Toole stood up and, with great formality, bowed Reed from the room.

  That fellow was back,

  More bloody-minded than they remembered,

  More godlike than they thought.

  Eleven

  KATE and Reed met Clemance outside the auditorium. Clemance had succeeded in reserving three seats, and they were ushered, past glaring students, to their places in the third row.

  “I’ve had a word with Auden,” Clemance said. “I suspect there’s a good deal of kindness in his presence here; he knows a few of the students. He’s going to read his poems and answer a few questions and then he’s got to be off. So there’s no chance of a party or anything for him afterward.”

  Here Auden was led onto the stage by the student head of the GSES. Kate could not think back to a day when so prominent a poet would not be introduced by someone at the University at least half as prominent in his own right. But achievement, these days, gave place to youth.

  “We are honored and grateful,” the student said, “to have Wystan Hugh Auden with us tonight to read his poems. He has said that after the reading he will answer a few questions if they are relevant.” Auden’s slight look of surprise at this suggested to Kate that this was a free translation of anything Auden might have said. But it received a grateful laugh soon followed, as the student sat down and Auden rose, by thunderous applause. “I mount the rostrum unafraid,” he had written in a marvelously funny poem, “On the Circuit,” which Kate found herself recalling with delight.

  Auden read some recent poems, and some older poems, and a fairly recent poem to Miss Marianne Moore on her eightieth birthday: “It’s much too muffled to say,” he concluded, “how well and with what unfreckled integrity It has all been done.”