Treece stopped, surprised. In a low, insistent, carefully modulated voice, Bates began to talk, taking quick advantage of the lull. ‘What do you mean, precisely, by organic?’ he demanded, taking up a point Treece had made a few moments before, and when Treece, a trifle disconcerted, did not answer immediately, he went on. ‘Well, it’s really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us . . . and nothing’, he added with a wet grin, ‘to some of us. It’s all very well using these coins, as long as we know what their value is, and agree on it. But do we?’
These near-impertinences drew looks of mingled consternation and amusement from the other two students. Treece looked a trifle uncomfortable, as if he had been invited to the wrong sort of party and had now been asked to sing. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but is this let’s-define-our-terms academicism really important at this early stage?’
‘Well, I think it is,’ said Bates, after considering this with a great appearance of sagacity.
‘Do you?’ said Treece. Generously, he felt, he granted the fact that Bates was simply trying to state a presence; I am here, was what this was all about, and, perhaps, I know all about logical positivism.
‘Well, is this ever irrelevant? When Coleridge called any aspect of Shakespeare’s work “organic”, he knew what he meant, and he left enough references elsewhere to make it clear what he meant when he used the word. We don’t. And in any case the word is debased currency, in my view, and has been ever since Coleridge. I mean, words are all very well, I grant you, and in the beginning was the word, which is to say that what thought is is articulation. Now it’s true that a play by Shakespeare can be described as “organic”, but if we consider that in, say, almost any one of the comedies, there is a large body of added matter that is, after all, apparently if not actually irrelevant to the main theme, the word doesn’t mean all that much until we’ve narrowed it down and clarified it. What are words for? How are words true? I mean, we want to know, don’t we?’
Of course Bates should have gone to Nottingham, where all the members of the English Department have read Wittgenstein, Treece thought; the truth is, Treece had to admit, that I don’t want to get mixed up in this kind of thing. He said so. ‘What seems of most value to us all just now is a discussion on a simple level, accepting simple meanings.’
‘Well,’ said Bates, ‘let’s see what the others think.’ He looked about him. ‘What do people feel?’ he asked.
Immediately all was embarrassment. Feet were shuffled, faces reddened, useless notes were consulted diligently. No one spoke; then Bates, who seemed unconcerned by, or completely insensitive to, the confusion, remarked, ‘Perhaps Mr Sykes will give us his opinion?’ Mr Sykes desperately fastened and unfastened his briefcase. ‘Mr Cocoran, then,’ said Louis.
Treece heroically took command. ‘The point must, I suppose, be a matter for some concern,’ he said, ‘but let’s save it up for your literary criticism tutorials. Here it’s rather a diversion than anything else.’
‘Why?’ asked Louis Bates.
Treece looked at him ominously.
‘I mean, isn’t it a matter wider than critical?’
‘No,’ said Treece. ‘And so, I think, back to Shakespeare.’
‘What happens when you cut off my head?’ demanded Bates and Treece wondered for a moment if he had actually threatened this aloud. ‘I’ll tell you,’ said Louis. ‘I die.’
‘I grant you,’ said Treece.
‘But if you merely cut off my feet,’ went on Bates triumphantly, ‘I live. Yet both are organic to me.’
‘That’s enough of that,’ said Treece.
On the fringe of the hour, when the corridor outside echoed with the amplified sound of thunderous feet and barbarous whoopings, Professor Treece dismissed his tutorial. ‘Good afternoon, Professor, thank you very much,’ said Mr Sykes and Mr Cocoran, bumping into each other as they rose, wondering what sort of an impression they had made, and whether they had, perhaps, worn too bright a tie or shoes too fancily stitched. ‘Thank you very much, Professor,’ each repeated in turn, with little smiles, as they jammed side by side in the doorway.
Louis Bates, meanwhile, sat firm in his chair, openly enjoying the performance, waiting for the jerky mood of embarrassment to subside. Then when the door was closed again, when Treece had taken his place at his desk once more and looked up questioningly across his papers, Louis commenced to speak, explaining in his carefully modulated tones just why he expected special treatment. He said that he hoped that Treece would not mind his taking him to task on the matter of the word ‘organic’, but he believed that it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The student could be, as it were (he said), the rubbing post for the thought of his teacher. Treece peered down at his desk and, picking up a pencil, drew great rotundities on a scrap of paper. Bates looked just the way a bassoon sounds – gruff, heavy footed, pompous. Let this be a lesson to you (thought Treece) not to have children after you’re forty; and with this came the uneasy recollection that he had only a year or so left. Him, Stuart Treece, forty! – why, he was just not built for it. Bates went on. He explained that he admired the tutorial atmosphere, though the resolute refusal of his colleagues to enrich discussion was a matter of some woe to him. He used that word – woe – right there in Treece’s office, and Treece supposed that it was the first time the word had been used there, in the ordinary passage of conversation, in forty years; one had this perpetual whiff of the Victorian when one talked to Bates. Bates now said that Treece would appreciate that he, Bates, was somewhat different from – indeed, he said, somewhat apart from – the other students in the University and suggested that the difference was, in part, one of maturity and energy of intellect. He went on to announce that, if Treece was prepared to cooperate, he could quite easily get a first. This was, he said, not sheer bravado on his part; on the contrary, he had come to the decision on a strict and critical assessment of skills and deficiencies. He reiterated his comment about the maturity and poise of his attitudes, adding that, moreover, he knew a bit about these degree examinations and had come to the conclusion that it was little more than a question of effort. What was necessary, he said, was that Treece and he should work together. ‘I must have someone to give my work direction,’ he said. ‘I see,’ said Treece.
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.
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