Eating People is Wrong (14 page)

‘So I ought to avoid the moral satisfaction I get from taking this viewpoint by letting Bates go into a mental hospital? This is what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Viola. ‘All I’m saying is that discussion doesn’t
always
end when your conscience is salved. Life for you is a play with a message.
You should stop worrying about your conscience so much. It doesn’t worry about you, you know.’

‘And where does that get us?’ asked Treece.

‘There are practical problems to face as well, Stuart, and the question is, what should we do if we keep him? Give him a BA honours degree in schizophrenia?’

‘It isn’t
funny
,’ said Treece.

‘No, I know it’s not; but you see what I mean. We aren’t here to provide a haven for the ill-adjusted. He just doesn’t respond to the terms on which we have him here. The
question isn’t whether we should give him a home for a while; it’s whether he’s a suitable student to take an honours course in English.’

‘I disagree then,’ said Treece. ‘I think a university is more than that. You know what the world is like now.’ The world, in Treece’s view, was an ominous
organization; he had been fighting it for years now. The world was a cheap commercial project, run by profiteers, which disseminated bad taste, poor values, shoddy goods, and cowboy films on
television among a society held up to permanent ransom by these active rogues. Against this in his vision he was inclined to set the academic world, which seemed to him, though decreasingly so, the
one stronghold of values, the one centre from which the world was resisted. He was as upset as the most devout of monks when people he knew ‘got mixed up in the world’; that was the end
of
their
capacity for effective living. ‘Great
Scott
!’ he said. ‘We of all people shouldn’t be asking what use a man is to the firm.’

‘That is
not
the point,’ said Viola.

‘Have you talked to this man Bates?’ asked Carfax. ‘Have you taken any personal cognizance of him?’

‘Yes; I have taken personal cognizance of him, on a large number of occasions,’ said Treece. ‘In fact, half my days seem to be spent in taking personal cognizance of Louis
Bates.’

‘Then you must realize that he’s egocentric to the most extravagant degree. He’s irrepressible, he’s a personal problem. He devotes himself ceaselessly to trying to win
attention and sympathy.’

‘I often think’, Treece said rather smugly, ‘that it’s equally true to say that genius is an infinite capacity for faking pains. But we should still foster it, however
much of an embarrassment it may be to us.’

‘All right,’ said Carfax. ‘Louis Bates is a wild, untutored genius. In my humble opinion, he should stay untutored. I don’t want other people’s humanity tied round
my neck. We all have our own troubles, you know – we have our own pains and separations and our own last breaths. We can’t carry everyone else. Our lives are too little.’

‘I think that’s a shameful plea,’ said Treece. ‘I really do. Truly, what do we live for?’ He became excited; vodka splashed in his glass; professors nibbling cheese
straws peered over the tops of them to see what was happening. ‘Caring is our role,’ cried Treece. ‘We’re not secular people. We have no business to accept life as
trivial.’

‘Please, Stuart,’ said Viola, disturbed. ‘Please.’

‘I don’t mean to let him go,’ said Treece, sitting back on his tuffet extravagantly. ‘He needs looking after.’

‘Take it easy, Stuart,’ said Viola. ‘You’re wasting adrenalin.’ It took several minutes more for Carfax and Viola to soothe Treece back to his normal level of
complacency; and still they all stared at each other as if each had been the victim of a great betrayal.

II

There are parties where everyone comes to like all the others present, and parties where hate burgeons and what is left at the end of the evening is a deep estrangement from the
human race. This was the latter kind of party. All about people were reflecting how alone they were and how little their friends mattered to them. Viola’s punch was steaming away like a
geyser on the sideboard. The people who before ten o’clock had been standing were now sitting; those who had been sitting before were now lying. ‘This’, Tanya murmured to Treece,
‘is a party at which everyone almost imperceptibly moves nearer to the floor.’ ‘Where they belong,’ said Treece sadly. Across the room the kittenish wife of a lecturer in
sociology was tearing up into little pieces someone else’s plastic mackintosh. ‘I think it’s obscene,’ she said. ‘Ah, poor child,’ said Tanya. ‘You see at
one glance how
that
mind works.’ A young lecturer in economics, trying to be amusing, knocked off his cigarette ash down the front of Viola’s dress. The record player was now
playing Mozart.

‘When I hear Mozart,’ said Tanya, ‘I could nearly cry. It is my world as it used to be. You do not know what it is when civilization comes to an end. If I could show you the
old Salzburg, the old Budapest. You do not know what it is you are selling for dollars and cents. And I can’t tell you. Think of a world in which Mozart, whom we know has existed, could not.
You see this loss I am speaking of? Of course, you are not a patriot; it does not do nowadays.’

‘I am in some ways,’ said Treece.

‘Yes, in some enlightened way. You are 55 per cent British, and 45 per cent Terylene, eh? I wasn’t a patriot until it had all gone; then I would have sold my soul to buy it
back.’

‘I’m watching you, Stuart,’ said Viola as she passed by.

‘Ah, Stuart is helping me to regain my lost innocence,’ cried Tanya, laughing.

‘He looked as though he was making it even more remote,’ said Viola.

‘No; Stuart is a little boy; if you could take out his soul and look at it, it would be the soul of a boy. To him I am like an old witch in a wood.’ Treece began to look hurt.
‘Ah, look. He is offended; he thinks I am unkind. Ah, Stuart, do what you want; you will never go to hell.’

‘I’m annoyed with Stuart,’ said Viola.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Tanya. ‘You will make him cry. He is not as hard as you.’

Treece said nothing. He was furious. He got up and went over to the bookcase. ‘The tips of your ears have gone red, Stuart,’ said Tanya behind him. He took out a copy of
Essays in
Criticism
and began to read. People grew annoyed with him. He grew annoyed at himself. He grew even more annoyed with Viola, who ought to have known better, and was after all his friend.

Viola meanwhile went into the kitchen, feeling somewhat upset herself; she had been rather naughty. But, after all, the whole Louis business still rankled. Carfax came in to ask if he could be
doing anything, and Viola, giving him a bottle of red wine to open, said that she was far from being appeased, and that she didn’t think she could take another tutorial with Louis, because he
made her self-conscious about her legs. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t mean to stare at your legs, Viola,’ said Carfax, somewhat embarrassed, as he was with all modern women.
‘Perhaps he’s just thinking.’

‘Oh, he’s thinking, all right,’ said Viola with a short nervous laugh. ‘What worries me is, what is he thinking?’

‘Quite,’ said Carfax. ‘But we both know that this isn’t material for complaint.’

‘Well, I think it is, if he’s mad . . .’

‘He’s not mad,’ said Carfax. ‘We pushed too hard.’

‘Well, I just don’t feel safe with him,’ said Viola, ‘and I don’t find his eccentricities in the least lovable. You know my trouble? I’m a normal, healthy
woman; that’s what’s wrong with me.’

‘Viola dear, are you trampling your own grapes?’ cried a member of the Economics Department, entering the kitchen with an empty glass.

‘We’re not having this party in the kitchen,’ said Viola. ‘Now both of you back in there.’

‘You know, you’re absolutely wonderful when you’re angry,’ said the economist, a stout, sleek young man named Marshall who had been for two years at Harvard and now
behaved as though he had actually invented it. ‘Come and talk to me, pet.’ ‘All right,’ said Viola. ‘Why don’t you show me your bedroom?’ said the
economist. ‘Because I’m supposed to be entertaining my guests,’ said Viola. ‘All of them?’ said the economist. ‘Then start with me.’

They went through into the living-room, and Marshall began to throw peanuts at Professor Treece, who was sitting on a tuffet reading through the whole run of
Essays in Criticism
and
probably annotating the margins; he looked as though he was in there sheltering from the rain.

Viola went across to him and said, ‘Put down that silly magazine and talk to me.’ ‘What about?’ asked Treece peering suspiciously with one eye over the top of the review.
‘Anything you like,’ said Viola. ‘Honestly, Stuart, you are awful. This is the last bloody party I invite you to. You just sit there and
read
.’

‘I can’t do anything right for you tonight,’ said Treece.

‘You’re annoyed,’ said Viola.

‘No,’ said Treece. Then he added cleverly, ‘Of course, I wouldn’t tell you if I were.’

‘You’re annoyed with me. Well, I’m sorry, Stuart, whatever it is.’

‘You make me feel as though I’ve punched your mother or something.’

‘I’m sorry, Stuart. I really am,’ said Viola. ‘I’m very fond of you. You mustn’t confuse me with Tanya. She doesn’t like you because she thinks I do.
Now, come along, get off that tuffet and talk, join in the chit-chat.’ ‘I was just wondering: did I switch off the petrol on my bike?’ ‘I never heard anyone in the world
fuss so much as you,’ said Viola, dragging him into the middle of the room. ‘Now, say something.’

‘Has everyone’, asked Treece, timidly, of the gathering, ‘sent off his Christmas cards?’ ‘Good,’ whispered Viola. ‘I’ve already sent off about two
hundred because Adrian won’t do a thing about them,’ said Mrs Carfax. ‘He claims to be a writer; I say he should write all the letters and cards. After all, I
am
practically illiterate. He only married me because I was that, and he wanted someone to get away to from his students.’

‘No one knows why I married you, least of all me,’ said Carfax heartily, ‘and I don’t claim to be a writer. I claim to be a scholar. Who’d dare claim to be a writer
in an English provincial university, except Kingsley Amis?’

‘Why on earth not?’ demanded Treece.

‘Because there’s no room for dilettantism of that sort. A provincial university is just a modern version of the work-house. We’re trainers of the aspiring
bourgeoisie.’

‘But why are we teaching in a university in the first place? Goodness knows it’s not for the money. It isn’t because we want to teach, or because, simply, we love scholarship.
Isn’t it because we want to live in a world of circulating ideas and critical valuations? Isn’t it because we love independence and freedom of thought? Or am I being
naïve?’

‘In a way, Stuart, I really think you are,’ said Viola.

‘Well, I don’t,’ said Treece. ‘If our function isn’t to talk about what is good when the rest of the world is talking about what is profitable, what
can
we
do?’

Lionel Marshall interposed, ‘You seem to think that the function of the university is to give a training in taste and improve the standards by which people live. But to what effect? How
would this serve them, as far as their social function is concerned?’

‘They would act as a group of protestants when people tried to lower standards and mortgage the values of our civilization; you must admit there is always that risk.’

‘Yes, there is, but what is going to happen to this group of malcontents?’

‘They would form a pressure group on behalf of the survival of serious values.’

‘Yes,’ said Marshall; ‘but you simply develop a group of disordered citizens with no social role in the society they live in.’

‘But they do have a social role; every society needs its intelligentsia.’

‘No; I disagree,’ said Marshall; ‘especially when by that you mean an intelligentsia that is preserving the values of aristocratic as against popular taste. I think the
function of the intelligentsia is changing.’

‘What you mean then is that it’s ceasing to be an intelligentsia,’ said Treece.

‘No,’ said Marshall. ‘Simply that it’s ceasing to be a liberal one; intelligentsias are by no means always liberal in outlook.’

‘Oh, not all this again,’ said Viola, laughing. ‘But you have to admit it, Stuart. We are parasites on the big world; we can’t exist without its approval; we happen to be
luxuries they can afford, and if things get hard they’ll push us overboard.’

‘In any case,’ said Marshall, ‘it’s necessary to accept the fact that university graduates must go into business and industry. Some can stay outside, a lucky few like
ourselves; and we can
afford
to know better than everyone else. We don’t have to face the moral problems of living with it.’

‘But even those who can’t be independent can at least perceive what is wrong, if they are shown.’

‘Well, aren’t you just saying it’s better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted, and content? Is it really better?’

‘It’s my belief that it is better. That’s why I’m what I am,’ said Treece. ‘What concerns me is that the quality of life and the standards that people live by
seem to me to be getting worse, and we’re not doing anything about it.’

‘You’re still saying that the function of a university is to make people discontented, which is an anarchistic position to take up.’

‘In any case, Stuart,’ said Viola, ‘I truly distrust these abstracts; I don’t want to talk about
culture or civilization
. I’d rather have some working man
reading
Reveille
and sopping his pint than any of these middle-class, cultivated people, who take their library list down every Monday morning and do eurythmics and support
causes.’

‘Well, that’s where we differ,’ said Treece. ‘It seems to me that the radical middle classes in England are the salt of the earth. Practically everything that we value
seems to me to have been won by their efforts.’

‘Viola seems very temperamental tonight,’ said Miss Enid. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean all those things.’