The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (30 page)

By this time, half the room was listening. The tall young girls put down their trays on the empty benches and came nearer. Several attenuated young poets and the red-faced, white-haired poet who had slapped his knee and was noted for his dynamic Americanism and metrical intransigency now pushed purposefully forward. The old poet had left, accompanied by two of his cohorts, and, with his departure, a desire to make some gesture of solidarity with the proletarian poet had overtaken the poets remaining, who felt a certain human compunction and also curiosity. The proletarian poet, moreover, was unobjectionable to them as a man of action; indeed, they found him picturesque, as did the students crowding around him, with talkative wonder, as though he were an historical remain, a chipped statue in a square. Everybody, it seemed, had expected him to be much younger; and the explanation, which he himself cheerfully volunteered, lay in his rebirth. His poetry, he explained, with citations, was youthful, direct, and sensuous, celebrating free relations with women, red-wine parties, bull sessions, hitchhiking; as a poet, in short, he was the same age as the Jocelyn literary set, while as a man he was forty-five years old. But it was as a man, sad to say, that he interested the students, who in their turn quickly explained to him that their own literary age was about fifty, thanks to the Jocelyn system of individual instruction, which had made them old before their time. Much later that night, in one of the social rooms, a girl Philosophy major showed him that he had paid the price of a robust and time-conscious nature, that is, that he was dated, that he embodied a militant yesterday, which seemed farther from today than the pyramids; and it was precisely this fact that drew the students to him and permitted Dr. Mulcahy to hurry out of the room, unnoticed while the poet continued to talk of frays with the Bridges union, mutiny on a banana boat off New Orleans, the strike at Ohrbach’s, the old John Reed Club. When the poet finally looked for him, he was gone, like a spectral vapor.

In the moonlight, on the chapel steps, the President and Furness turned to face each other. “Who would have guessed it?” exclaimed the President. Furness shook his smooth head. “Not I,” he disclaimed. “I still wouldn’t credit it if I hadn’t seen Hen turn tail and run.” They took a few steps into the reviving mountain air, on the gravel of the circular driveway. “It puts him in a better light, you know,” remarked Furness, finally, in a tone of apologetics. Their feet crunched as they walked. “For
us,
Howard,” distinguished Maynard. “But we must look at the whole picture. How many students, would you say, got in on the beginning of it?
Oh, my God!
” he cried, suddenly, as the whole picture smote him afresh. Furness regarded him with a certain amused tenderness. “Two or three,” he hazarded. “But there’s a fifty-fifty chance, Maynard, that they didn’t take in the meaning of it. The kids here aren’t very political these days; you can’t seem to get that through your noodle.” The President shook his curly head. “There’s no such animal, Howard. If the kids aren’t political, as you call it, it means that they’ve given in to the forces of conformity and reaction.” His handsome face tightened. “If this thing gets out, I’ll have the trustees on my back again.” They rounded the drive again. “Poor devil, poor hunted devil,” he mused, “he
was
perjured, apparently, before the legislature.” He lit his pipe and spoke through clamped teeth, indistinctly; a terrible new thought had occurred to him. “Howard, you don’t think …?” Furness looked at him sharply; his strong, active face was ravaged in the moonlight. “That he’s still in it?” supplied Furness. The President sorrowfully nodded; he looked eagerly into Furness’ face, with a consciousness of his own pathos—was he once, twice, or thrice deceived? Furness shrugged. “I should doubt it,” he replied. “But am I a competent judge?” He grinned. “I would have
sworn,
I would have
sworn,
” he insisted, “before a legislature, that it was all a blague.” They walked for a time in silence. “Who knows most about all this?” said the President, suddenly. “Domna,” replied Furness. “She’s the only one he told directly.” “We’d better get her,” resolved Maynard. “Right away. Tonight.” “What about the poetesses?” objected Furness. “She’s supposed to be driving them home, to my house.” “You do it,” said the President. “Take them to Domna’s. And then come back. I want you to be there.” Furness made a deprecatory gesture. “I was planning to serve a little whiskey,” he said. The President blew up. “For God’s sake, Howard!” he said bluntly. “My whole career is at stake. We’ve got to cover this thing up, as soon as we can find out what to cover. This is no moment for a drinking-party. Is there any way, do you think, that we could call off this damned conference and send them about their business?” Furness laughed. “We could abduct the poet of the masses. That’s what his former comrades would do.” “Stop using that silly name,” exclaimed the President. “What is the fellow’s name, for that matter? I rather liked him,” he added, to soften the effect of his outburst. “Vincent Keogh,” said Furness. “My God,” cried the President. “Another Irishman!” Furness made a final protest. “Maynard,” he warned, “Domna and Mulcahy aren’t on good terms at present.” “What does it matter?” cried Maynard. “The girl’s honest, isn’t she?” Furness raised a nonchalant shoulder. “But north-northwest, like the rest of us. She can tell a hawk from a handsaw.” He waved and hurried off to his car.

H
ENCE IT HAPPENED THAT
the President, Furness, Domna Rejnev, and the two lady poets were among the few people connected with the poetry conference not to have a hangover on Saturday morning. Furness’ house, according to the brigade of students who came to clean it up, must have been the scene of revels; he himself, coming downstairs in the morning, renamed it the Mermaid Tavern. The informal ten o’clock session, held in Barnes Social around a table, was sluggish; the psychology student with the tape-recorder, who was stationed under the table with the poets’ permission, was able to pick up several new hangover recipes and to witness exchanges of No-Doz and benzedrine. By a forced agreement with the Psychology department, this recording was later destroyed, at the price of Dr. Grünthal’s resignation and the loss of the Rockefeller grant.

Young Mrs. Giolini, a pretty heiress with a black spit-curl, thought to be very stupid, read a paper on the mock-epic, which, according to the tape-recording, everybody believed she had had help with. She was in the habit of subsidizing upstart magazines of verse with typographical eccentricities, and already among the older poets the word was passing that she ought not to have been invited. One choleric little poet in middle life, with sideburns and short jutting whiskers, considered that they had each, every man-jack of them, been personally insulted by being asked to sit down at the round table with her; at the same time, he held that the college had showed a shocking discourtesy in leaving the two women to pass the previous night un-companioned. This ill-feeling grew during the morning, as the inevitable publishers’ representatives began to arrive, in very hairy tweeds, and to drop onto the floor, cross-legged; they too, in most cases, had hangovers and had driven all the way over from Bucks County on the remote chance that another
John Brown’s Body
or a novel might be picked up at this conference. It was felt by the older poets, most of whom held academic jobs, that this conference, like every other one, was going to be shot through with commercialism; the younger poets were less incorruptible, and Herbert Ellison’s two friends immediately struck up an alliance, considered very questionable by the majority, with the youngest of the New York publishers, whom they pronounced “very intelligent.” And the worst fears of the majority were realized almost at once. Consy Van Tour, who was chairing the session, had the idiocy to call on the publishers to say a few words on the subject of modern poetry as it looked to
them.
They did not need to be asked twice. They all, it turned out, had strong identical opinions on the subject of modern verse, which they did not read much, they conceded (Translator’s note—“Not at all”), but which nevertheless they felt qualified to judge by virtue of their position: “This is the way it looks to the man behind the desk.” And to the man behind the desk,
it did not communicate.
The poets around the table indicated by their tight lips and wearied eyebrows that communication with these persons and their salesmen was the last thing they desired; but they did not have the rudeness to say so. And their restraint had the result of making the publishers more confident. Emboldened by an intuition of their own solid mediocrity, they became convinced that each of them, individually, was the audience that every author aimed and yearned to reach, and that if he did not reach them, well, manifestly, he failed. Having pronounced this sentence, they would calmly get up, stretch, stroll over to the window, like expert consultants whose part is done when the fault is pointed out, the execution being left to others.

The poets then took the joint hazard of asserting that their verse, all modern verse, was intelligible to any person who would take the trouble to read it—a perilous contention which was easily put to rout by the devilish kind of senior male student who had spent four years in college drilling holes in his teachers’ logic. Such a tall, large-eared Mephistopheles suavely rose from his place and read aloud a passage by one of the poets present and asked for a show of hands of those who understood it. A few hands hesitantly went up all around the room, but to everybody’s surprise but the poets’, who had been through this all before, there were several hands at the table itself that simply refused to go up. And one handsome young poet rose and gravely tried to explain that understanding of a given poem and respect for it were not necessarily identical, that he himself was not certain of the meaning of all the details in the disputed passage, but, even while the Literature faculty nodded in approval, he was interrupted by a fresh member of the Art department, who popped up like a jack-in-the-box to demand, “Why don’t you ask the author?”

At this instant, Consy Van Tour received a sharp poke in the ribs and a whole collection of scribbled notes, ordering him to call for the next question, but the students now were echoing the popinjay art teacher’s question, though more in a tone of entreaty. “That question is inevitably broached by an audience if the chairman doesn’t know his business,” observed the choleric poet to his neighbor, taking care that Consy heard him.
“No,”
they all semaphored sternly, as the wilting, plump Consy hesitated. “To ask a poet for an explanation of his poem is a violation of professional ethics, like asking a doctor to prescribe for you when you meet him at a friend’s house at dinner,” said the whiskered little poet, a formalist and neo-traditionalist, to Consy, when the meeting had been adjourned—he was a specialist in poetic etiquette, or rather in the correct forms to be observed with poets. He had already checked off several violations in the manners prevailing at Jocelyn, and his eye now followed with acerbity the student crawling out from under the table. “Where is Mr. Furness?” he sharply inquired, cocking an eyebrow at Consy. Consy did not know; he only knew, he protested, that Furness had telephoned him very early to ask him to take over this morning’s session. In reply, the poet took out his pocket-watch.

Hovering on the edges of this group, Alma Fortune was nearly beside herself. She was furious with Howard for not being here and with Domna as well, who had promised to take a carful of poets for a drive before luncheon. All around her, she saw poets covertly unfolding train-schedules and glancing at their watches; she heard muttered talk of their decamping after the afternoon session, before the buffet supper that was being prepared for them at Furness’ house by the best cook in the region. She was not familiar enough with the poetic temperament to know that this migratory urge was merely a passing one—after cocktails, most of the poets would be amenable to staying on, and some might not leave for several days, if they found a congenial bivouac. Ignorant of these contrarieties, she hurried about the room with a nervous smile, pointing out that the train being spoken of was slow, crowded, inconvenient, and invariably late into Harrisburg. She stopped to glare at a publisher who was offering rides in his Buick back to Bucks County, and then, on second thought, invited him to stay for supper. She spoke to her tenants, the red-faced poet and his wife, and all the while her eye was on the door, willing Furness to enter. Even Mulcahy, who ought to have been here, had rushed out toward the end of the session, without any explanation, on a note’s being passed to him by a student. There was nobody but herself and Consy—she discounted Ellison as useless—to round up the poets and see that they had their lunch properly and got to the chapel on time for the afternoon session. One of them, the poet of the masses, had already failed to appear for the session that had just ended, and now, as she was trying to make plans, three more slipped out the side door. “‘And now for God’s sake, hock and soda-water,’” laughed the very handsome curly-haired youth who had spoken at this morning’s session. Alma knew her Byron and knew what this meant; it was the
locus classicus,
she said to herself bitterly, of the hair-of-the-dog in literature. At this moment, when despair seized her, Furness debonairly entered.

What Alma did not suspect was that early that morning, before the session had started, the poet of the masses had been shaken awake by Furness and asked if he would mind driving in to see the President in his office. Dazed, breakfastless, and bleeding from a quick shave, he had tiptoed down the stairs behind Furness and out into the lucent morning, while the other poets still slept. This embassy was the fruit of the previous night’s interview, which had lasted until three in the morning, with Domna, himself, the President, and finally Bentkoop, who had been summoned out of bed, arguing what ought to be done. The result was that Furness had overslept and had nothing to eat either. And as he drove along in his Pontiac, alongside the poet, who had a terrible breath on, Furness wondered whether the counsels of night had been ill advised. He seriously doubted whether the poet would tell the President anything.