The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (23 page)

“But that is true,” protested Domna, dropping to her knees on the hassock. John shook his head in reprimand. “True, but also not true. And not relevant to the student’s purpose. Content
can
be paraphrased. What we’re doing here at Jocelyn is a sinister thing for our students; we’re turning out classes of sophisticated literary hollow men, without general ideas, without the philosophy or theology that’s formed in adolescence, without the habit or the discipline of systematic thought. Our students have literally no idea what they think or believe except in questions of taste, and they’ve been taught to fear formulation as a lapse in literary manners. Hen is the one force here that runs counter to this tendency. His Jesuit training formed him in an older mold and his Joyce studies confirmed him in the habit of universalization.
Finnegans Wake
: one book which shall be all books, the Book of Life.”

Domna interrupted. “John,” she said tensely, “I have to tell you something.” Her pale, severe face was sharp with trepidation, as if she feared being overheard; they moved a little closer. “This is
my
confession. I think Henry is mad. He comes to see me at night and talks, talks, talks. He has a delusional system centering on Joyce. He speaks of Joyce’s life as a Ministry. He speaks of the Book, the Revelation, the Passion.” John raised his eyebrows. “Most of the Joyce brotherhood are a little batty,” he cautioned. Domna shook her head firmly. “This is different; it’s not an ordinary obsession. He believes that he’s been subject to persecution for propagating the Word. This, he insists, is at the bottom of his troubles; all the rest is pseudepigraphal—that was his own word. He is hated, he says, by Joyce’s enemies, who comprise the whole academic world, with the exception of rival Joyce experts who hate him also, since they are really Joyce’s enemies in disguise.” Virginia laughed delightedly. “How wonderful!” she cried in sincere enjoyment and admiration. Domna laughed also, but more grudgingly. “Yes, it’s funny,” she admitted, “but terrifying, too. You know that stick he carries; he’s put it aside, he says, for the duration of this emergency in token of symbolic burial. His Communist period, he says, was a ritual conversion symbolizing Joyce’s baptism in the religion of naturalism—the precursor. And the Communists hate him because he transcended naturalism, just as they hate Joyce. Behind Joyce, you see, is the identification with Christ. Bloom was Christ; Earwicker was Christ—Henry Mulcahy is Christ in the disguise of Bloom and Earwicker, the family men, the fathers eternal consubstantial with the Son.” The laughter died out of her voice. “I’ve tried to assure myself,” she declared, “that all this is merely an allegory, the pastime of an ingenious mind, that he uses to give form to his experience, to console himself in a rather bitter way by the sense of repetition, but, John, I’m afraid he believes it literally, just as you believe in the Incarnation.”

John’s dark eyebrows knitted; like an upright young judge he seemed to search his experience for precedents and normative explanations. At the same time, with his short black hair standing up, there was something alert and lively about him, like a hare after its quarry: understanding. “Christ’s experience,” he announced finally, with an odd eager smile, “is the great paradigm for the persecution psychosis. It displays the whole classical syndrome: belief in divine origin, special calling, chosenness, the cult of exclusive disciples, betrayal, justification—one might even add, following Freud’s analysis of paranoia, homosexuality, for it’s noteworthy that He not only eschewed women, but that His betrayer was a man. The betrayer for the paranoid is always of his own sex, the loved and feared sex. One could say,” he continued breathlessly, with a sort of awkward ardency, “that by becoming man precisely God underwent what could be described as madness: the experience of unrecognition fusing with the knowledge of godhead, the sense of the Message, the Word, the Seed falling on barren ground, the sense of betrayal and promised resurrection. And like the mad, who use symbolic language, He spoke in parables.” Domna huskily laughed.
“Jésus-Christ, c’était un fou qui se croyait Jésus-Christ.”
John nodded. “Yes; in so far as He was human, this was his predicament. But is it any wonder that man who seeks in his highest moments to identify himself with God, should do so also in his time of tribulation, in the dark night of the soul. And if Hen is mad, Domna, to choose to imitate Christ, in the pattern of his sufferings, where are all the Thomas à Kempises?”

“You’re playing on words,” she protested. “Though to me, John, to speak frankly, all religious people seem a little mad.” “That’s because you don’t believe in godhead,” he retorted. “You don’t believe in the black reality of the night of separation our friend Hen is undergoing.” The three moved closer to the fire. Domna met John’s eyes. “No,” she said, squarely, “I don’t. Except as a metaphor. But I am willing to pity him if you want.” John firmly shook his head. “You don’t pity him, Domna; you’re ashamed for him; you’ve just told us so yourself.” Domna considered. “I think I feel pity mixed with horror. I should like to avert my eyes. This is not the proper Aristotelian compound, as Henry himself would be the first to say. What is requisite for the tragic spectacle is pity and terror compounded—pity for the tragic victim, terror for oneself, in so far as the victim
is
oneself, universalized, by extension. But I cannot feel that Henry is myself and I can only feel horror of him.
Noli me tangere.
” She shuddered. “I had the misfortune to be born into the upper classes and I cannot respond to suffering when the sufferer is base. And it seems to me now—forgive me for saying it—that this arrogant Henry has the soul of a slave. No doubt this cringing soul reflects social conditions; one has only to look at Henry to imagine the matrix that formed him—a poor heredity, hagiolatrous parents, a nasty and narrow environment, sweets, eyestrain, dental caries. I detest the social order which sprouts these mildewed souls—all that should be changed, for everybody; nobody should be permitted to grow up in such a bodily tenement. But there is also in each individual the faculty of transcendence; there is in each of us a limited freedom. I myself have been poor and I am not sentimental about poverty—poor people must be judged, like the rest of us. Poverty has certain favorable aspects: the poor are free of money-guilt and the sophisms and insincerities that go with it. Poverty and bad heredity are not a blanket pardon; need palliates Henry’s behavior but it is not a justification.” “Very true,” agreed John. “But who is to do the judging, Domna? You? I?” She hesitated and then grew reckless. “Yes, I. Why not? I, you, everybody. Everybody who will judge himself has the right to judge others and to be judged also. This abrogation of judgment you practice is an insult to man’s dignity. Everybody has the right to be judged and to judge in his turn. This ‘understanding’ you accord Henry is dangerous, both to him and to you. God is our judge, you will tell me. But there is no God. God is man.” The blasphemous words rang out; the windows rattled; but John seemed unaffected. “God is man, Domna, if you wish,” he said gravely. “But He is not men.”

Domna suddenly looked tired. “No,” she admitted. “I suppose in a certain way I am on
your
side. If I presume to judge Henry, I don’t presume to punish him. That is not my affair.” She sighed. “And yet I can’t help but feel that I’m implicated in a frightful swindle. When I think of how soundly I rated Dr. Hoar this morning!” She gave an unwilling laugh. “After all, you were in good faith,” said Virginia. “I wonder,” replied Domna. “I think really, in my heart, I knew all along too. I think I hid from myself what I did not want to see. I didn’t dare ask myself what Cathy must be thinking; to ask would have implied an answer I didn’t wish to get. My pride, I imagine, undid me; I could not stand to be wrong.”

John gave the fire a final poke; the last red ember dissolved in a shower of sparks. “Let me console you,” he said abruptly, as though he had been withholding this last piece of information till Domna had spent herself. “I don’t think Cathy’s health had much to do with Maynard’s decision—assuming he made it this morning. What impressed him most was the faculty support for Hen: he hadn’t quite expected it and was relieved, in a way, to find it was there. I think between ourselves, as Maynard would say, that Maynard had a good many qualms about letting Hen go. Quite aside from Cathy, Maynard has a pretty fair idea of the employment picture and he knows as well as the rest of us that Hen’s prospects aren’t too bright. Nobody likes to have the feeling that he may be sending a man with five dependents out onto the relief rolls, and whatever Hen may say of him, Maynard, in his way, is a very decent fellow. The letter he sent Hen may have been something in the nature of a trial balloon, to test faculty reaction. He wasn’t anxious to let Hen go, but on the other hand, he couldn’t keep him in the face of the bursar and the trustees, without some faculty backing. Now he can go to the money-bags and announce that a valued group in the faculty considers that Hen’s departure would be an intellectual loss to the college. That was what he wanted to hear; so long as he had the impression that Hen was an intellectual liability, he couldn’t in fairness to the students argue for retaining him as a teacher. Maynard himself is quite at sea in these cultural matters; he honestly wants to be told who is who and what is what. He meant it when he told us he was grateful to us for our visit—we forced him to take a line he’d been half wanting to take. In a word, we accepted responsibility.”

He got to his feet rather stiffly and solemnly. The fire had died out; it was nearly dawn; a few roosters were crowing; a high-pitched dog barked. “Milking-time,” he said, going to the window. “Time to go to bed.” Virginia lit a candle and let the wax drip into a saucer to fix it; she handed it to Domna, who reluctantly pulled herself up. The word, responsibility, seemed to lie on her shoulders like a burden. John’s practical and reassuring exordium, it appeared, had sunk her into new perplexities. With Virginia in the lead, carrying the oil lamp, they went single file up the stairs, on tiptoe, so as not to wake the baby, whose six o’clock feeding was less than an hour off. In the upstairs hall Domna suddenly detained John. “Responsibility,” she whispered, “what does it mean, we accept responsibility for Henry? Does it mean we underwrite him for one year, or are we stuck for life?” Her candle trembled as she laughed, rather nervously. “For one year, I should think,” said John. “And Communism,” she murmured, “do you still think that had nothing to do with it?” In the darkness, he looked at her rather oddly, with a wry twist of the long jaw, but she could not see this; the flame of her candle lit up only her own face. “No,” he said, stolidly, in his ordinary speaking voice. He gripped her arm and drew her toward him till he could kiss her, dryly, on the forehead. “Sleep well,” he adjured, with a curious creak in his voice. “The sleep of the just.”

H
ENRY MULCAHY’S CONTRACT WAS
renewed late in February. He at once let it be known that he signed under pressure; the new contract contained no provision for the rise in salary to which length of service now entitled him. But faculty opinion, as he probed it, was neutral for once on a salary question. Nobody denied the facts, but nobody seemed anxious to act on them. There seemed to be a movement to flee from the subject, as from an embarrassing connection, even while it was being admitted that, yes, there was a certain “hardship,” as if the admission wholly relieved the speaker of the need of doing anything about it. Of all those who assured him, with an air of expert knowledge, that he had better settle down and forget it, nobody volunteered to tell him how he was going to support six people on thirty-two hundred a year. The common prescription was that he should try “creative” writing—with four children in the house!—even his wife, Cathy, subscribed to this vulgar success-dream and kept urging him to enter a contest sponsored by an influential quarterly for the best long short story by a person in academic life. To be told to write for money was the final insult to his talent and to a lifetime of sacrifice to an anti-commercial ideal. The very suggestion informed him that there was a new and subtle influence at work against him on the campus. He knew where it came from—Miss Domna Rejnev, who went about murmurously confessing that she had just sold some of her wretched mannerist verse to that same influential quarterly and advising everybody else to seek publication, like a woman in an advertisement who has found satisfaction in the use of Pond’s cold cream.

And it was
this
modest young lady who was daring to gibe at him to her classes under the pretense of deploring what she called the “scholasticism” of contemporary criticism, the egoism of the modern artist-figure; he recognized her characteristic touch in the phrase that he began to hear parroted by the students: “the theophany of modern literature,” ecod! She flushed whenever she saw him, and with good reason, for she could not face the plain fact that he and Cathy had dropped her; to hide this from her following, she always pretended to be concerned and friendly, asking about the children and threatening to “look in” on Cathy, “when she had a moment to spare.” She held her head very high these days, as though her pretty ears were burning; she ought to have known that to break with him and join the herd of success-mongers and philistines was going to be a risky play.

He watched her strolling about the campus with Bentkoop and Milton Kantorowitz, the painter, holding an arm of each and looking up earnestly into their faces, the square Dutch head and narrow, long-nosed Jewish one making, as the students said, an interesting pictorial composition, and he smiled to think that Domna regarded the two melancholy men as bucklers of invincibility, a very foolish illusion, since Bentkoop, according to his wife, was thinking of leaving Jocelyn to study for holy orders, and Kantorowitz was a learned simpleton like all painters and had no understanding whatever of the verbal disciplines and their problems and was more likely to embarrass Domna than to help her in a literary crisis.