Parlour Four

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Steam radio (a term he believed to be decidedly modish) was another matter. There, you offered the world nothing but your voice. Unfortunately he wasn’t altogether sure about his voice – or (to put it crudely) his accent. The microphone, he knew, was an extraordinarily sensitive instrument, and there were certain vocables on which he wasn’t reliable. He could say ‘bun’ and ‘Hun’ to himself half a dozen times, but when it came to ‘one’ he produced the noise you make when you speak of wan and emaciated faces, or something like that. There was nothing – he told himself – merely snobbish about this. It was simply that an orthoepist ought to know how to pronounce common English words.

  So what other spare-time activities were open to professors – to professors of his own sort, without any scientific training to exploit? He knew that his colleague, the Professor of French, was the unobtrusive proprietor of a pie shop, and that the Professor of Egyptology was the mastermind behind his wife’s flourishing travel agency. But he himself was both a vegetarian and unmarried, so there seemed to be no road that way. But other professors wrote. There was distinctly more promise there. In his earlier schooldays, and well before he had developed his philological aptitudes, some master had recorded in a report that he wrote with a natural grace. Why not again start writing with a natural grace? There might be real kudos in it. There might even be money as well.

  But write what? At a first review of this problem it seemed to him that the most appropriate output for a Professor of the Humanities would be of essays and things of that sort. Charles Lamb, Simkiss rather vaguely thought, and Edmund Gosse. Lamb hadn’t, perhaps, done too well out of it, but Gosse had belle-lettered himself into the job of Librarian to the House of Lords: a position as excitingly exalted as it was soothingly secure. But on second thoughts here, Simkiss discovered there was a snag. Essays had distinctly gone out. Nobody wrote them any more, or at least nobody got them published. Of course the idea of reviving a whole literary kind had its intoxicating side. But Simkiss, who was essentially a modest man, decided he wasn’t quite up to that.

  Many professors wrote book-reviews. Some even succeeded in disguising as book-reviews what were in fact essays of that old-fashioned sort. In this trade, moreover – although it was comparatively small, and therefore probably rather hard to break into – there seemed to be considerable scope for various temperaments, and even varying temperaments. The same chap, that was to say, could be pretty well gushing one week and uncommonly acrid the next, even when the transition was effected before literary labours virtually indistinguishable the one from the other. But although this large scope was – such is the frailty of human nature – powerfully attractive, the fact remained that an uncomfortable whiff of Grub Street attached to the whole activity. And its emoluments, probably, weren’t all that.

  Professor Simkiss then thought of novels!

  His Department consisted of himself and an Assistant Lecturer called Hugh Lockton. Lockton was, of course, quite young – yet still not all that younger than himself. He was rather wary of Lockton, who he suspected was one of those given to speaking of him as a harmless little man. They were on familiar terms with each other, nevertheless, and as Lockton’s casual conversation revealed him as a novel-reader in quite a big way, Simkiss thought he might, at least obliquely, sound him out on the matter.

  ‘Hugh,’ he asked, ‘would you say that a good many academics nowadays occasionally turn novelist?’

  ‘Lord, yes! Bevies of them. Campus fiction, mostly. It’s all the poor devils know about. How long have I been in this bloody hole? Just over three years. The world forgetting, by the world forgot: that’s me. And the same with them.’

  ‘I haven’t looked into it myself’ For a moment Simkiss hesitated to continue. He disliked the manner in which the absurd American misuse of the word ‘campus’ had rapidly acclimatised itself in England. He rather disliked ‘this bloody hole’. It was true that their university wasn’t Oxbridge. But it was a fairly old-established ‘civic’ institution, and not one of the mushroom affairs sprouted in the 1960s. However, he resolved to continue. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that what you call “campus” fiction would be best written by people outside the universities. A matter of the spectator seeing most of the game. Think of Trollope, Hugh. As what you might call ecclesiastical fiction his Barsetshire novels have no rival. But he never lived in a cathedral close.’

  ‘My dear Geoffrey, Trollope was the next thing to a great novelist – meaning, you know, a major novelist. We’re talking—are we not?—of failed or discouraged scholars splashing about in the shallows of the thing.’

  Simkiss didn’t like this possibly proleptic vision either. So he said, rather stiffly, that he hadn’t happened to expose himself to much of the splashing. But, supposing he wanted a dip, where should he begin? He could, he supposed, get some of the things from the public library.

  Lockton was silent for a moment. He was all too plainly wondering what this was about. Perhaps he guessed – for when he spoke it was with the ghost of a derisive grin.

  ‘The only decent campus novels are detective stories. And I mean “decent” both ways on.’ Lockton paused again on this cryptic remark. ‘You can see how it is: a lot of fairly cerebral characters more or less in a sealed room. Staircases and quads and all that. I haven’t read many, but I remember rather a good one. Set in Oxford and called An Oxford Tragedy. It’s by a don who was a very considerable swell in quite different fields of endeavour – but with this itch to scribble. Name of Masterman.’

  ‘I must get hold of it,’ Simkiss said dishonestly. He had no intention of writing whodunits. ‘But there must be a good many serious novels in a university setting. Indeed, I remember one of them. It was called The Masters. It struck me as rather good.’

  ‘Did it?’

  Hugh Lockton, who was getting even more bored by his chief than usual, contrived to utter these two monosyllables to so rude an effect that Professor Simkiss closed the conversation, and went away to do some thinking.

  He saw almost at once that – particularly at the outset of a writing career – one has to draw on one’s own experience if anything in the least convincing and verisimilar is to emerge. It wasn’t, of course, a hard-and-fast rule. Bits and pieces could always be done on the strength of second-hand experience. For example, he had an elder brother, who had also been a very clever boy at school, and who was now a civil servant moderately high up in Meat, Poultry and Eggs. Although he didn’t see this brother very often, he was fairly sure that he could get him pretty faithfully into a book. But Meat, Poultry and Eggs don’t take one very far if one’s aim as a novelist is, say, the achieving of a comprehensive picture of Man in Society such as Tolstoy and similar masters of the novelist’s craft provide.

  So Simkiss realised that he must do some serious thinking about what might be called his world. What was its circumference? In what particular areas was he aware of it in depth? Where on his map were there to be located the regions of his particularly vivid awareness of things? He asked himself quite a number of questions of this sort – scurrying on to the next because there always seemed to be a bit of a hold-up in coping with the last. He asked himself, for instance, about women, since women figured quite prominently in a great many novels. He couldn’t tax himself with being utterly incurious about women. He did wonder about them from time to time. His dreams, and one or two other things, told him he wasn’t what his students nowadays called a poof. But when he thought about women a large blankness took possession of his mind. Soberly, he acknowledged that here lay a considerable disability. He could, of course, go to work on women here and now. He could get them up – much as he could get up a new language. But, as with languages, women would take time. Much reading would have to be done. He might even have to go to parties.

  Checking an impulse to move on to something else, he continued to worry at the woman business. His mother had died when he was quite young. He hadn’t any sisters. His grammar school had been a boys-only a
ffair – and he had entered its junior department at seven and left from the sixth form at eighteen. Oxford in his time had equally been a boys-only experience, with girls-only colleges as the sole receptacles for females that the place provided. Now, of course, he had students of both sexes (or ‘genders’, as they were beginning to say), but he didn’t see much of any of them except in lecture-rooms. All in all, he hadn’t had a chance. Pass on to something else.

  Passing on, and circling round and round, Professor Simkiss was almost driven to the conclusion that his entire life so far had been devoid of any pronounced experiences whatever. It had always been his belief that he was the possessor of a capacious memory. But, now scrutinised, the capaciousness seemed to be rather exclusively a matter of abundant information on issues of a learned and indeed recondite sort. He could recall the occasion of many of these acquisitions with surprising clarity. He could see in detail, for instance, the notched and inky school desk at which, with commendable speed, he had mastered the Greek alphabet. But what of boyhood – its sorrows and its joys, its companionships, games, hobbies, and so forth? From all those long years he couldn’t securely recall a single damned thing entitled to be called an event. It was all most discouraging. A novelist? He seemed to hear the mocking voice of young Hugh Lockton saying, don’t make me laugh.

  But Geoffrey Simkiss possessed pertinacity. Without it, how could he have coped with the birth of lexicography, or the decay and death of Old High German? He sat down and wrote a novel.

  In this first novel he was thoroughly drastic with himself. There were no female characters. The action never strayed beyond the curtilage (scilicet campus) of a redbrick university. There was a fairly complicated plot, turning on a dispute between colleagues about who had first discovered the importance of a manuscript found lurking in the library. This didn’t, of course, lead to anything of the ‘whodunit’ sort. Nobody was found knifed in the refectory. On the other hand, there was no shirking of unsavoury matters when they turned up. One of the professors was found to be secretly using a photocopying machine in contravention, if not of the law, yet plainly of the ethics of copyright. The Vice-Chancellor was sometimes more than a little tipsy after attending official dinners of the University Council. So there was no nervous avoidance of the seamy side of things.

  The novel was reviewed in several papers, and all these reviews had at least something agreeable to say about it. Not knowing that there is a convention about treating first novels in this way, Professor Simkiss was a good deal encouraged. And then he was actually interviewed! The interview, it was true, was conducted by a woman on behalf of a local weekly paper, so it wasn’t exactly the kind of affair that later gets collected into a book. The young woman struck Simkiss as vaguely familiar, so it was possible that a few years earlier she had sometimes appeared in his lecture room. He found this conjecture slightly disconcerting – as he also found the fact that she had brought along a tape-recorder and planted it in front of him. She appeared, moreover, not to be a very experienced interviewer, and she had also brought along a set of prepared questions on a scratch pad.

  ‘Professor Simkiss,’ she asked, ‘by whom do you regard yourself as having been most influenced?’

  Simkiss felt rather blank before this, and his impulse was to say ‘Nobody at all’, since that, although odd, seemed to him to be true. But he reflected that a claim to absolute originality might be regarded by the tape-recorder as on the arrogant side. ‘Dostoyevsky’, he said – and was promptly appalled. The absurd name had simply bobbed up in his head, and out he had come with it. Dimly, he knew that the tape-recorder had got him on the run. But he fought back. ‘Dostoyevsky, decidedly,’ he said with weight.

  ‘And Dickens?’

  ‘Dickens?’ It didn’t seem to Simkiss that the young woman had any business to chuck novelists at his head in this random way. ‘Why Dickens?’

  ‘I think Dostoyevsky is known to have been influenced by Dickens.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ Simkiss had never, indeed, come across this fact, if fact it was, but he spoke with the authority of a man who is conscious of having ground to recover. ‘We, too, have our pedigrees, you know. Chains of command! We trace each other everywhere in the snow.’ Simkiss fell silent on these disjointed utterances – shocked, this time, by a sense of making gibberish out of other men’s aphorisms, and tumbling the result into the woman’s horrid little machine. In the ensuing silence the machine could be heard softly turning the tape on its pivots, hungry for more. And the nightmarish occasion did continue for some time – remorselessly recorded, Simkiss felt, for all eternity. It was only when the machine clicked to a stop that the young woman packed up her scratch pad and called it a day.

  ‘Our photographer,’ she said, ‘will come this afternoon. He would like you to wear your mortar-board and gown.’

  ‘I will do nothing of the kind, madam.’ For the first time, Professor Simkiss allowed himself to become quite cross. He had made a fool of himself, he felt, and might just as appropriately appear with a bauble and bells. ‘And I’m not sure that I want to be photographed. But I suppose I must put up with it.’

  ‘It’s not like the dentist,’ the young woman said cheerfully, and dropped the tape-recorder into a shopping-bag. Then she switched abruptly from professional to human curiosity. ‘I say!’ she said. ‘Whatever put it into your head to write a novel?’

  Simkiss knew what the reply to this ought to be. It was something like, ‘I had an overpowering sense of possessing a unique vision of life which I must communicate to others’. But he was by nature an honest man, and honesty triumphed. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

  The young woman received this without surprise, and at the door she asked a final question.

  ‘And are you going to write another one?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Professor Simkiss said. ‘And I’m going to start at once.’

  In addition to being an honest man, Geoffrey Simkiss was (as has been mentioned) a pertinacious man as well.

  His second novel turned out to be very like his first. At its centre was a contentious issue of a familiar academic sort. Which of two deserving scholars, each long-established within the university in which the story was set, should be promoted to a vacant Chair? The committee charged with sending a nomination to Council took its duty very seriously; it met, adjourned, met again on a weekly basis throughout an entire university term. There was much temperate debate, and many cogent arguments in favour of one candidate or the other were deployed, weighed, answered. Amid the domestic sanctities of the senior professors, too, discussion between intimate colleagues often went on far into the night. Simkiss reported it all.

  Where the second novel didn’t follow the first was into that territory which the tyro Simkiss had vaguely thought of as affording a slightly risky light relief. Nobody now ran a profitable little side-line in cut-price photocopied cram-books. The Vice-Chancellor was strictly sober. Simkiss had been puzzled and rather hurt that – with the exception of Hugh Lockton – none of his colleagues had ever referred to the first novel, although many of them must at least have known of its existence. This, Simkiss had concluded, might well be because they disapproved of its admitting, even in a passing fashion, what could be regarded as a louche element. So Novel Number Two was very pure indeed.

  But still nobody uttered a word about it! This was the more vexatious in that Simkiss would have been particularly grateful for a little private commendation, since public commendation was in singularly short supply. About the same number of reviews appeared as before, and it was more often than not the same reviewers who provided them. But what had been ‘brilliant’ in the first book turned out to be ‘conscientious’ when found in the second; and ‘conscientious’ itself appeared in the appraisals a good deal less frequently than ‘pedestrian’. Simkiss, who knew that the two books were at least much of a muchness, was puzzled and disheartened by this. Then he noticed that a substantial proportion of the reviewers were female. So th
at was it! Varium et mutahile semper femina. Or (Simkiss reflected) as Richard Stanyhurst had translated it:

  a windfane changabil huf puffe

  Always is a woomman.

  Lockton had provided him at the outset with a short reading-list in campus fiction, beginning – perhaps a shade whimsically – with Tom Brown at Oxford and Zuleika Dobson. But Simkiss had refrained from reading either these early masterpieces or later works by near contemporaries of his own. He judged – reasonably enough – that this abstention distinguished him as a writer of independent mind. When he had fully established himself, he felt, it would be quite amusing to discover how he stood in relation to these fellow-labourers in the academic vineyard. So disregarding, indeed, was he even of reviews and advertisements of such things, so innocent of quite celebrated names, that he almost set out on a small examining job at another provincial university in ignorance of what he was to find there. Fortunately, he was obliged to mention his expedition to Lockton.

  ‘Hugh,’ he had said, ‘you’ll have to hold the fort next Thursday and Friday. I have to cope with a thesis at Nesfield, and I’d better spend the night in the place.’ Nesfield, although also a university city, was a manufacturing town in a state of pervasive decay dating from Mahatma Gandhi’s persuading his countrymen that they could do their own spinning on their own doorsteps. Even the university, although barely twenty years old, was distinguishably coming out in sympathetic cracks and flakings. Simkiss and his colleagues thought poorly of it.