Poetic Justice Read online

  “But if I know you, you’re keeping up all the same.”

  “Of course I am. I’m taking a doctorate. In fact, I’ve almost got it. Now what do you think of that? I’m writing a dissertation for the Linguistics Department on the history of Verner’s Law. Please look impressed. The Linguistics Department is overjoyed, because the darlings didn’t know there was anything new to say about Verner’s Law until I told them, and they’ve been taking it like perfect angels.”

  Kate smiled. “I always suspected an extraordinary brain operating behind all your committee-woman talents, but whatever made you decide to get a Ph.D.?”

  “Grandchildren,” Polly said. “Three chuckling little boys, one gurgling little girl, all under three. It was either hours and hours of baby-sitting, to say nothing of having the little darlings cavalierly dumped upon us at the slightest excuse, or I had to get a job that would be absolutely respected. Winthrop has encouraged me. ‘Polly,’ he said, ‘if we are not to find ourselves changing diapers every blessed weekend, you had better find something demanding to say you’re doing.’ The children, of course, are furious, but I am now a teaching assistant, very, very busy, thank you, and only condescending to rally round at Christmas and Easter. Summers I dash off to do research and Winthrop joins me when he can. But you look tired, and here I am chatting away. Let’s have lunch one day at the Cosmopolitan Club.”

  “I’m not a member.”

  “Of course not, dear, though I never understood why. Why are you looking so tired?”

  “Meetings. Meetings and meetings. We are all trying, as you must have heard, to restructure the University, another way of saying that we, like the chap in the animated cartoons, have looked down to discover we are not standing on anything. Then, of course, we fall.”

  “But everybody’s resigned. The President. The Vice-President. We’ve got an Acting President, we’re getting a Faculty Senate, surely everything’s looking up.”

  “Perhaps. But the English Department has discovered there is no real reason for most of the things they have been happily doing for years. And the teaching assistants—where, by the way, are you being a teaching assistant? Don’t tell me the College has reformed itself sufficiently to be hiring female, no-longer-young ladies, however talented …”

  “Not them; not bloody likely. I’m at the University College. Very exciting. Really, Kate, you have no idea.”

  Kate, looking blank, realized she hadn’t.

  “Really,” Polly Spence said, “the snobbery of you people in the graduate school! We’re doing splendid work over there …”

  “Didn’t the University College used to be the extension school? Odd courses for people at loose ends like members of labor unions who only work twenty hours a week and housewives whose children are …?”

  “That was a hundred years ago. There are no more courses in basket-weaving. We give a degree, we have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and our students are very intelligent people who simply don’t want to play football or have a posture picture taken.”

  “Forgive me, Polly. As one always does when one speaks from ignorance and prejudice, I’m sounding a lousy snob.”

  “Well, you’ll be hearing more from us, just you wait and see. Meanwhile, you must come and have dinner. When I tell Winthrop I’ve met you, he’ll insist. He always finds you so entertaining, like Restoration comedy.”

  “And about as up-to-date. I’m faltering, Polly. If you want to know the truth, I’m thinking of taking up bridge, if not palmistry, astrology, and the finer points of ESP. One of my students has offered to introduce me to a medium with electronic thought waves.”

  “There is no question about it,” Polly said. “We must have lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club. It reassures one.”

  Kate, walking up the stairs of Baldwin, waved a dismissive hand.

  “Kafka,” Mark Everglade said, meeting her in the hall outside her office, “where is thy sting?”

  “I take it,” Kate said, “that is a perpetually appropriate remark these days.”

  “Perpetually. Would you mind teaching a text course next year in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton?”

  “You have to be joking. And what, while I’m doubled over with hilarity, is a text course?”

  “One that uses books, of course. I know we’re all tired on the first day of the semester, Kate, but surely you could have seen that. You remember books? They’re what we used to read before we began discussing what we ought to read. The students have spent the entire summer reforming our course offerings, and it’s now to be text courses.”

  “I have never read Bulwer-Lytton. I have never even discussed reading Bulwer-Lytton, except with some strange student who used to turn up every seven years with another thousand pages on the development of the historical novel. Ah, I see, The Last Days of Pompeii is now considered relevant. Perhaps it is, at that.”

  “If only,” Mark Everglade said, “a volcano would come and cover us all with dust. We have done away, as you would have known if you had ever listened at all those meetings this last summer, with lectures and seminars. We now have text courses, preferably in texts nobody ever heard of before, like Bulwer-Lytton and the literature of the emerging African nations. While I think of it, we are in the market for someone who reads Swahili, if you should ever hear of such a person.”

  “So mysterious,” Kate said. “No doubt there are scads of fascinating literary works in Swahili. But I spoke just the other night to someone returned from Africa. He said that in Ethiopia, for example, there are seventy-five different dialects, and that the tribes can only converse with each other in English. In Nigeria, I understand, there are two hundred and twenty-five languages, with English again the common tongue for conversation. Why don’t we train people to teach English in Swahili, instead of training people to teach Swahili in English, or is that a particularly reactionary observation?”

  “Not only reactionary,” Mark said, “but probably in itself grounds for occupying this whole building. Now as to the catalogue …”

  “Why are we discussing next year’s catalogue on this year’s first day of classes?”

  “As you will see when you meet with the student-faculty committee for finalizing the revisions of the catalogue, everyone keeps changing his mind, so that we’ve got to get the damn catalogue for next year into print so that no one can change it and we can argue about the year after.”

  “I am not on the student-faculty committee to finalize anything, and I will not serve on any committee with so barbaric a word as ‘finalize’ in its title, and that’s final,” Kate said.

  “The title is open to discussion,” Mark said, “but I’m afraid you’ve absolutely got to be on the committee because you’ve been on it all summer and are the only one who knows what’s going on.”

  “ ‘We have no means of learning what is really going on,’ Auden says.”

  “I had no idea Auden was so relevant; the ultimate compliment.”

  “Well, he may be,” Kate said, “but I’m not. Do you think that could be my whole problem?”

  “It’s the problem all right. We are not only magnificently irrelevant, but are prevented, mysteriously, from enjoying the fruits of irrelevance, which are frivolity and leisure.”

  “I wish I were an African nation,” Kate said. “It must be so comforting to think of oneself as emerging.”

  Kate had time only to dive into her office, add the mail she had collected from her box downstairs to that already on her desk unopened, grab the dissertation on Auden, tell three students who appeared from nowhere that she was not having office hours or consultations of any sort, and listen, with perfect impassivity, to the ringing of her telephone. Kate did not claim to have learned much during the previous spring’s disruption or the summer’s hard committee work, but she had learned one thing: it is not necessary to answer one’s telephone, One can always suppose that one is not there. This vaguely existential decision meant, therefore, that Kate avoided for another two and one half hour
s what her governess used to call a rendezvous with destiny. A nice phrase. But Kate had early on discovered (though considerably after the reign of the governess) that one cannot “avoid” a destined rendezvous. Rendezvous are either inevitable or impossible.

  It was by no means usual for the dissertation examination, the final examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, to be held on the first day of classes. In fact, like so much else now going on, it was hitherto unheard of. But the spring revolutions had meant the inevitable postponement of many doctoral dissertation examinations, partly because the Committee of Seven appointed by the Dean of the Graduate Faculties could rarely be collected (most of them were either wrestling with plainclothesmen at the time, examining identification at the University gates, or begging the mayor to intervene in the University’s problems). And even had it been possible to get all seven in one place, it was not possible to find the place. The head of the Graduate English Department, a man for whom, Kate had decided over the summer, the term “long-suffering” was meiosis, had held several examinations in his living room (to the evident distress of his children, who had planned to watch television at the same time), but after a while all such efforts were given up. When it reached the point where one examination committee (which fortunately included no lady members) met in the men’s room of the Faculty Club, and two of those who had been asked at the last minute to serve had never, it soon became evident, heard of the subject under discussion, the office of the Dean of Graduate Faculties declared itself officially closed. For one thing, with all the student raids on the administration buildings, the secretarial staff became so unnerved at the necessity of shoving all records and dissertations into the safe at the threat of occupation that they flatly refused even to come to the office until things had “quieted down.”

  Today four members of the examining committee had shown up, which was a quorum, and an enormous relief to Kate and the candidate, who had flown in from his teaching post in California especially for the examination. All is, thank God, minimally official, Kate thought, taking her place as chairman at the head of the table. To Kate’s right sat the other member of her department, Peter Packer Pollinger, the official sponsor of the dissertation. To her left sat the two necessary representatives of other departments, Professor Kruger from the German Department, and, next to him, Professor Chang from the Department of Asian Civilization. Professor Chang was present as the result of total desperation, but someone else outside the English Department was required, and, after all, Auden, together with Christopher Isherwood, had gone to China in 1938 and written a book about it. The Department of Asian Civilization had told Kate that Professor Chang had never been to China, but one couldn’t ask for everything in outside examiners.

  All began properly enough. Kate asked Mr. Cornford to leave the room and told the committee what facts about Mr. Cornford, provided in a special folder by the office of the Dean of Graduate Faculties, seemed relevant: his education, present position, date and subject of his master’s essay. “Perhaps, then, we can ask the candidate in for the examination,” Kate hopefully said.

  “Clarification, please,” said Professor Chang.

  “I beg your pardon,” Kate said. “I didn’t mean to seem to be rushing. Is there a question about Mr. Cornford? About Auden?”

  “Please. I have read dissertation with great interest and attention. But I would like to point out I am not from Department of Asian Civilization. I am from School of Engineering.”

  “Engineering?” Kate said faintly. “I’m afraid there must be some confusion.”

  “Mr. Auden is most interesting writer,” Professor Chang said, “but are there many limestone landscapes in China?”

  “Limestone landscapes!” Professor Kruger said. “It is more a question of the Weimar Republic. Auden does not realize that the love of death and the rejection of authority …”

  At this point Professor Peter Packer Pollinger began blowing through his mustache, always a sign, as Kate well knew, that he was about to burst into speech. Professor Pollinger had only three kinds of speeches. The first was about punctuation, particularly about the necessity of keeping all punctuation marks inside quotation marks. He had been known to go on about the unbelievable dangers involved in placing punctuation marks outside quotation marks for close on to two hours. His second speech had to do with Fiona Macleod, the alter ego and pseudonym of a turn-of-the-century Irish author named William Sharp. He had managed (William Sharp, not Professor Pollinger, although the confusion did appear to be in some mysterious way appropriate) to get himself so perfectly, so schizophrenically divided between himself and his pseudonymous alter ego (who was, of course, a lady) that he had been known to fall down in a fit if William Sharp and his wife were invited to a dinner party and Fiona Macleod overlooked. Professor Pollinger had for the last ten years devoted himself (he was now sixty-seven) to the collection of every possible datum about William Sharp, and he was delighted, not to say compelled, to transmit whatever he had most recently learned to anyone he encountered. Thus despite a good deal of dodging behind doorways, everyone in the English Department, but particularly the secretaries, who, being rooted behind their desks, were less able to disappear, became authorities on the life and times of William Sharp/Fiona Macleod.

  Professor Pollinger also had a third speech, which was unassigned: variable, as the mathematicians say. This speech might happen to do with any experience Professor Pollinger had recently undergone which had sufficiently caught his attention to be memorable: how a snow drift into which he had absentmindedly walked had overwhelmed him; the way he had heard the sound of the Irish Sea quite clearly in his ears for a solid hour before his wife returned to discover that the tub in the adjoining bathroom had overflowed, leaving Professor Pollinger ankle-deep in water; or, very occasionally, when truly impelled by circumstances, Professor Pollinger would deliver himself of a pertinent fact, which was always, as it was now, alarmingly germane to the discussion.

  “Auden was interested in engineering,” Professor Pollinger now announced, blowing through his mustache. “Wanted to be one. When the Oriental languages fellow dropped out, I suggested an engineer.” Professor Pollinger puffed for a moment or two. “Glad to discover they had a Chinese engineer,” he said. “That made it all right, I thought. Couldn’t find you,” he added, looking sulkily at Kate.

  Kate coughed. “Then,” she said, turning to the gentleman from Engineering, “your name isn’t Professor Chang?”

  “Is,” that gentleman insisted. “Contradiction, please. Is.”

  “I see,” said Kate, who didn’t. “Well, then, perhaps we can begin. Will you, Professor Pollinger, ask the usual first question?”

  “Certainly,” said Professor Pollinger, puffing through his mustache. “What made you choose this topic, Mr. Whateveryournameis?”

  “Please, Professor Pollinger,” Kate said, “if you don’t mind, don’t ask the question until we get the candidate into the room.”

  “Very well,” Professor Pollinger said crossly. “Very well.” Kate, going to the door to summon Mr. Cornford, gave Professor Pollinger a baleful look. She seriously suspected him of putting them all on. Due to retire at the end of this year, he found it suited his peculiar sense of humor to appear gaga, but Kate suspected that a delight in confusion allied with a general resentment of the modern world was chiefly responsible for his eccentric ways. He had, of course, not really directed this or any other dissertation, although he did read right through all of them searching for punctuation outside quotation marks.

  “Please be seated, Mr. Cornford,” Kate said. The committee, as was customary, arose at the entrance of the candidate. “We will now begin. Professor Pollinger, will you please ask the first question?”

  “Mr., er, Whateveryournameis,” puff-puff through the mustache, “do you happen to know if Auden ever read the poetic dramas of Fiona Macleod?”

  “Perhaps,” Kate interjected, “Mr. Cornford could begin by telling us why he chose …�
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  “Tell me please,” Professor Chang said, turning courteously in his chair, “in China your Mr. Auden found limestone landscapes? And what, please, is dildo?”

  How they got through the subsequent two hours—for Professor Kruger was very interested in Auden’s experiences in Germany, and Professor Chang in everything—Kate never properly knew. But such a good time was had by all that they quite happily voted Mr. Cornford a distinction (which he thoroughly deserved) and Kate was still congratulating him when the other three had bowed themselves from the room.

  “My God,” Mr. Cornford said. “No one will ever believe it. Can it possibly be official? I shall go to my death, which I hope is far distant, telling the story of this examination, and no one, no one on God’s green earth will ever, ever believe it. And this is the world of scholarship I want to enter.”

  Kate laughed. “Well, according to T. S. Eliot, Auden is no scholar, you know.”

  “Eliot liked his poetry.”

  “Of course he did. But he insisted Auden was no scholar all the same. Somebody asked why, and Eliot said: ‘I was reading an introduction by him to a selection of Tennyson’s poems, in which he said that Tennyson is the stupidest poet in the language. Now if Auden had been a scholar he would have been able to think of some stupider poets.’ And if you, Mr. Cornford, had been around this university as long as I, you would know that it is better that a farcical examination produce a first-rate piece of work like yours than that a brilliantly run examination produce, as I have often seen it do, a farce.”

  “So Auden was right,” Mr. Cornford said. “ ‘Against odds, methods of dry farming may produce grain.’ But, oh my Lord. ‘Your Mr. Auden, he found limestone landscapes in China?’ ” he mimicked.

  Kate parted from Mr. Cornford at the door of the building; he was due to make a midnight plane. This, she thought, has been a day. But it has had its moments, she thought, chuckling to herself over Professor Chang, bless his heart.