Eating People is Wrong (3 page)

Bates’s manner of speaking was quiet and firm and therefore somewhat impressive; Treece was affected. ‘I happen to be a very good worker,’ Bates went on, with what Treece could
only define as a coy smile, speaking quietly in order to efface any suggestion of bravura. ‘And there won’t be any distractions. I’m not bothered with the social side, you see,
and it’s that, I think, that dissipates most people’s time and effort. Much leisure is required to consolidate friendships, so I shall regard them as an indulgence to be infrequently
sated. Actually, as it happens, you know, I don’t exactly fit in here; I’m a lot older than the other students, and I come from a different social class, perhaps.’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’ said Treece.

‘Well,’ said Louis brusquely, indicating that he intended to come from a different social class from the others whether Treece liked it or not. ‘My father was a railwayman, and
that was in the days when the railways were a form of puritanism. Hard work, honesty, thrift, clean living, self-restraint. Indulgence I’m suspicious of. I believe in application and
self-training. I’m self-made. Now you have me in a nutshell.’

Treece had to grant it to Bates – self-made was exactly what he looked; he might have been the finished product of a physical do-it-yourself kit. ‘Most of us are self-made,’
said Treece, wondering as he said it whether this was precisely true. One of the depressing things about Bates, Treece was discovering, was a kind of hideous juxtaposition of taste and vulgarity, a
native product for the self-made man. This is the way the world must end, Treece was beginning, these days, to think, in taste fragmenting and hanging on only in certain departments of the human
soul. Fragmentary was clearly the right word for Bates; his spirit hung in tatters in the room before Treece, part good, part bad, and splendidly irreconcilable.

‘And’, Louis went on, ‘I’m a poor man; I’ve no money to spend on amusements; it all goes on books, what there is of it. Don’t misunderstand me and think
I’m complaining; I’m not,’ he cried, casting an intense, soulful look in Treece’s direction, ‘I’m merely explaining the conditions that I live under. I mean,
these are my terms, and they’re what I think will make me do well here. That’s my aim and intention, of course; or, to put it better, that would represent a proper statement or
fulfilment of myself as I judge myself to be, if you see what I mean. What I say is that there won’t be anything – friendships or entertainments or affairs, you know, or anything like
that – to stop me working.’ He said all this very quickly, as though to gloss over its essentially confessional content and give it the aspect of objectivity. His tone was a mixture of
dejection and . . . could it be pride?

Treece found himself growing nervous of an excess of self-exposure; some ingrained social
mœurs
was beginning to be offended. ‘Well, it’s as well to be aware of what one
is about from the start,’ he said dismissingly.

Bates seized on the comment as on a favour. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is, isn’t it?’ His assurance was far from shattered, however, and the unspoken contention that, in
view of his hardy apprenticeship in a girls’ school, they were equals of each other, returned into view. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘and I hope you can fit in on this, I
don’t think I’ll be attending any lectures here, if you don’t mind. I gather that that’s an undergraduate privilege, and my reasons are very sound; my memory works visually
rather than audially – you’ll be familiar with the phenomenon. So of course lectures, however good they may be, don’t register with me at all.’

‘But it’s a question of keeping up . . .’ said Treece.

‘Oh,’ said Bates, ‘I thought we’d settled that with our little treaty of cooperation.’ He rose to go. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I’ve a few essays
here that I’ve been doing which might clarify to you, if you’ve an odd moment, the actual nature of my powers . . .’ and he added, with a smile deprecating, modest, yet with a
hint of a snigger, as if he knew he was clever to put it in just this way ‘. . . and my deficiencies.’

When Louis Bates had gone, bowing his great head under the doorway, offering a last glimpse of trousers frayed at the bottom and of worn heels, Professor Treece felt as if he had, up to now,
been living in a dream which had now exploded. He recognized Louis Bates as essentially a burden, a personal problem with whom he had to come to grips. What he saw –
had
to see –
in Bates was man as essentially the buffoon, the creature who couldn’t be taken seriously. He mirrored in himself all that was absurd; he postured, he strutted, he affected. Yet at the same
time good sense and taste had to be granted to him. The whole problem was presented for Treece in the sheaf of essays which Treece now found himself reading. Instead of the usual freshman work,
which called Pope, with error and not alas with subtlety, a Romantic, said his poetry was ‘charming’, and, if the author of the piece had found him, borrowed heavily from Dr Samuel
Johnson on the evident supposition that Treece had not yet tapped this mine of critical opinion, Bates on Pope was not lacking in assurance. The essay was almost good enough for
Partisan
Review
; if any other student had written it, Treece would have concluded that this was where he had got it from. But the Batesian mood was so firmly there that Treece had no doubts. He went on
to another essay, which held that the main theme in English literature was ‘the escape from reality into morality’; this, said the essay, was the reason for the contemporary decline in
the novel, for the novelist of today lacked (he excepted E. M. Forster, ‘our old figurehead’, as he called him) the training in moral stature. Let us look to the Americans, moral
pragmatists all, cried the last line of this manifesto. A third essay pleaded for a reconsideration of Shaw, because, in his work, morality ceases to be morality and beomes art. Treece, who was
always hideously afraid that he was overlooking and mishandling some sort of genius, perhaps a sort that hadn’t been discovered yet (genius and stupidity have so much in common that the
problem bobbed up constantly), read on and grew increasingly nervous.

II

‘Towns’, Professor de Thule, head of the history department, used often to say (it was practically his one intellectual proposition), ‘are the dynamic image of
ourselves as social entities’; to this Professor Treece used often wearily to reply, ‘Obviously.’ But what could one say of the provincial city in which the University stood? It
was just bric-à-brac. Chaste up to the late eighteenth century, it had given itself to all comers during the industrial revolution. There were, indeed, parts of the town in which one felt a
real sense of place; but most of the time one felt a sense of
anywhere
. Treece had amused himself over the few years he had lived there by trying, a little at a time, to unravel the little
threads of puritanism, for to his London mind, provincialism and puritanism were the same thing. It was sheer Tawney; religion, and the rise of capitalism. Gradually the place for him began to
emerge as an entity; he found he could say, in certain moods, in the new intellectual tradition, Why, I like it here. Though the eighteenth century was his period, and he found it attuned happily
to his disposition, he found himself getting more and more a Betjemanesque
frisson
from Victoriana. As business and nonconformity boomed, the former market town had erected Victorian Gothic
churches, a Victorian Gothic town hall, an Albert Hall for quiet concerts and methodist services, a temperance union hall, a mechanics institute, a prison, and a well-appointed lunatic asylum.
‘Why doesn’t Betjeman come and live
here
?’ people asked when they saw the place. As for the University, which had still been a university college even when Treece was
appointed to his chair, it was frequently mistaken for the railway station and was in fact closely modelled on St Pancras. The pile had, in fact, a curious history. When, in a riot of Victorian
self-help, the town had finally decided that it wanted a university, it had provided it with all that vision, that capacity for making do, that
practicality
which had been the basis of the
town’s business success. Its founders had obtained its cloistered halls for next to nothing. The town lunatic asylum was proving too small to accommodate those unable to stand up to the
rigours of the new world, and a larger building was planned. It was not big enough for an asylum, then; but it was big enough for a university college. So, as Treece frankly admitted, it became an
asylum of another kind; great wits are thus to madness near allied. There were still bars over the windows; there was nowhere you could hang yourself. The place sat, with its red-brick spires and
towers, with its Gothic slit windows and its battlements (‘At least it’s easily defended, if it should ever come to
that
,’ said Professor de Thule practically) on
Institution Road, between the reception centre and the geriatric hospital. If I retain an image of these Groves of Macadam when I am gone, thought Treece, it will be of old men in worn suits
picking up cigarette ends in the forecourt. ‘It’s lucky we’re all sophisticated,’ Treece always told his visitors, ‘or we shouldn’t like it a bit.’

When Treece arrived at the University the next morning, the first person he saw in the main hall of the building was Louis Bates. The hall, which smelled noxiously of floor polish, was filled
with ‘freshers’, trying to find out how to register. This was true, Treece observed, in both senses of the word: how the problem hovered in the air, do we establish terribly, terribly
interesting university personalities for ourselves? ‘
Essen sie
?’ someone asked near him, very affectedly. Most of the students were fat little girls, fresh from school and
pubic-looking. Bates stood in a corner, looking like a renounced undertaker, talking to an evangelist from the Christian Union. ‘I just want a straight answer, yes or no,’ he was
saying, ‘is this a bounded, or boundless, universe?’

Treece went up to the Senior Common Room and bought himself a cup of coffee. He sat down in a chair and began to read
Encounter
, which as usual was full of articles about Japan. ‘Do
you know you can get twenty-five non-proprietary aspirins for fourpence at Boots’?’ cried Dr Viola Masefield, who lectured in the department in Elizabethan drama, coming to the door.
She delved in her shoulder bag, which was as big as a newsboy’s satchel, for the little tickets that one bought coffee with. ‘Isn’t it a ramp?’ Treece admired Viola’s
indignations. She was always full of protest about
ramps
, and overcharging, and overcrowding in houses, and lack of toilet facilities at the bus station: her principles were always directed
against tangible objects, whereas Treece’s, these days, could fix on nothing save unresolvable complexities. Viola had taken her degree at Leicester and then had come here; she didn’t
know anybody, and to her London was a big place where it was easy to get lost once you got away from the British Museum. Viola’s reactions to problems and to people were violent and
immediate, as Treece was well aware; people who met her for the first time sometimes used the word ‘sophisticated’ to describe her, because her manner was bright and when she smoked it
was through a long jade holder, but those who knew her better were aware that this was the last word for Viola, for even simple female cunning of the type that’s given to every sheltered
country girl was missing in Viola’s case; this itself was her charm. Treece therefore thought he should give a warning to Viola about Louis Bates, who was in one of her tutorial groups.
‘Viola,’ he said, ‘can I have a word . . .?’ ‘Just a minute,’ said Viola, ‘I want to wee-wee’; and she was off, swinging her dirndl skirt like
something that had just come off-stage from a performance of
The Bartered Bride
.

‘I hope it goes well for her,’ murmured the man in the armchair next to Treece’s, looking up from the
Women’s Sunday Mirror
. He was a sociologist whom Treece
remembered as a post-graduate student; then he had been a slim, dark-haired, very English young man who played football for a university team and wanted an MG sports car. Now all that had changed;
he wore green, German double-breasted raincoats (all his clothes were double-breasted; indeed, said Viola Masefield once, I think
he
must be double-breasted), carried large briefcases made
of wide-grained red leather, and cultivated a Central European accent; most of the best sociologists were, as he said, from
Mittel-Europa
.

‘I’m catching up on the ephemera,’ said the sociologist, whose name was Jenkins (he hated it, because it didn’t end in ‘heim’), noticing that Treece was
looking curiously at his reading matter.

‘You’re lucky,’ said Treece. ‘It must be nice to be a sociologist and be able to read
anything
.’

‘It’s terrible,’ said Jenkins with feeling. ‘There are times when I begin to think that vot we need is a benevolent fascism. I have a television set,’ he went on,
leaning forward confidingly. ‘I think I am perhaps the only man in this University with a television set, and I sit there all night and watch it. You know, this is the great culture-leveller;
all over England people watch this stuff and go away and take the same image of the world, and themselves, and standards of value along with them. Oh, and it’s terrible. All those people . .
. I hope they
know
what it is they’re doing. I wish I didn’t have to watch it. I wish I could get away.’

‘How was America?’ said Treece. Jenkins had just returned from a year at the University of Chicago, or Colorado, or California (faculties of sociology in America drift about like
flocks of birds; you wake up one morning and find the ones you are interested in have risen from their perches and have settled again,
en masse
, at the other side of the continent), where he
had been, financed by a Rockefeller Scholarship, in order to find something out about a new discipline called Group Dynamics.

‘I suppose you’re glad to be back,’ said Treece.