Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  Mulcahy was not offended by these managerial gestures toward his wife. He recognized in them the creative impulse, the longing of every poet-Pygmalion to make his own Galatea; in Cathy’s milk-white skin he too could feel a temptation that was not of Eros but of Apollo. It pleased him, moreover, that his wife had decided to challenge Domna on her own ground. He himself, thus far at any rate, had been unable to muster Ellison’s objectivity; he was hurt by Domna’s covert attacks and mistrustful of the spread of her influence. Hearing of parties she had given, which he ought to have been asked to for form’s sake, he was heartened by Cathy’s successes with a growing circle of admirers. Thanks to Ellison, the news of Cathy’s poetry was spreading, and many people who had never been privileged to hear a line of it described it to each other in detail; the little house on the hill was rapidly becoming a center of literary and artistic pronouncements, for Cathy had the Irishwoman’s gift for pithy and prophetic utterance; her decrees began to be quoted, like the manifestoes in the latest little magazines in the library. Her admirers included Furness, who made a point of dropping in, offhandedly, to settle his little score with Domna, and to whom Cathy, in her whimsical femininity, had suddenly taken a fancy. The turn of fate which had brought him into the Mulcahys’ orbit while Domna plummeted into ignominy appealed, obviously, to his Proustian sense of pattern; Furness adored, as he frankly confessed, reversals and sudden shifts of fashion—the life of a small college charmed him as a microcosm of high society.

  He laid his cards lightly on the table, with a disarming emptying of the sleeve; Mulcahy, nevertheless, could not be persuaded quite to trust him, and Cathy’s cry, “But of course one can’t trust him, that’s the whole beauty of him,” was too Jamesian an accolade for his taste. It struck on his ears rather falsely, with a timbre of luxury and idleness, suggestive of a leisure-class life which could afford to collect people as objects—a far cry from the realities of Jocelyn. “He doesn’t matter,” said Ellison, expressing a truer view. To Ellison, it was of no importance that Furness still seemed to have a soft spot for Domna, despite everything Cathy had told him of how the girl used to malign him behind his back. Beyond a certain point, Furness did not care to hear her decried, and it amused him even to try to play the peacemaker between her and the Mulcahys. “We must all make friends before the poetry conference,” he announced sentimentally, throwing his arms around the Mulcahys, and he was threatening to give a pre-conference party at which everybody should pair off with his worst enemy. “That would be rather difficult,” observed Cathy, “since Domna has so many. For once, she would get her wish and have all the men to herself.” Furness laughed pacifically. “I will cede my place to Henry,” he said. What was behind this, Mulcahy suspected, aside from general perversity, was Howard’s indefatigable curiosity. He could not find out the reason for the coolness between the Mulcahys and Domna and naturally itched to know, since it would surely be discreditable to somebody. Mulcahy himself had stood firm; he did not propose to tell a story that would damn Domna forever with people of feeling—after all, she had once been his friend and he did not wish to provoke her into denials that would only make her uglier. That she had doubted him, unwarrantedly and without a second’s hesitation, was shameful, apparently, in retrospect, even to herself, for she had not said boo to anybody, so far as he knew, about that revealing evening and chose, rather, to hide her guilt in sallies against the modern movement and its “unholy alliance” with tradition, which meant, of course, in plain English the friendship between Ellison and himself. Everything he heard of her from the students inclined him to think that she had gone a little mad, as people will, on occasion, when they find that they have been seen in their true colors—one curious sign of this was the fact that she still refused to have anything to do with Furness, as though in her own occluded mind she inflexibly declined to admit a changed situation. She was adhering, that is, to the past, to a time prior to that fatal dinner, and this in its turn cast an interesting sidelight on her violent thrusts against the modern: what she hated about the modern was her own refusal to face the present.

  All this, of course, gave grounds for pity, and he would have pitied her wholly, if she had not been dangerous. It was unfortunate that he himself, in an unpardonable fit of rashness, had given her weapons with which she could do harm. He had not yet heard of any direct charges linking himself with the Communist party, but he lived in quiet expectation of the inevitable anonymous letter posted to the local authorities. It was distasteful to him to have to ascribe such potentialities to her, even in self-protection, but history, alas, had shown to what lengths an hysterical anti-Communism, combining with a personal grudge, could carry an unbalanced woman who had a score to settle with herself. She had no corroborative evidence, naturally, which our legal system still weakly asked to see, and her own unsupported statement that he had “confessed” membership to her would not carry much weight with impartial minds, but who in these days was impartial or even wished to be? Luckily, whatever currency the tale had gained on the campus could be shown to be traceable to Domna, and to her alone—it had been his good angel, he now saw, that had guided his reluctant hand when he had agreed to let her assume full charge of his destiny. He could not be made responsible for her fabrications on his behalf, however well meant they were—so any sane person would admit—and the fact that she had no backing from him, in this matter of the “confession,” ought to have warned sensible people against giving her too much credence. He was too honest, of course, to deny to himself that the inspiration for the story had come from him, but who would have thought that the crazy girl would make so much of so little? She had apparently had a real wish to believe him a Communist, to take him au pied de la lettre when he had spoken metaphorically—a foreshadowing, had he but guessed it, of her later attitude toward him, which was one of cold-hearted crimination.

  How weirdly irresponsible this was could be judged by a comparison with Furness. Furness, for all his malice, was a man of the world who used reasonable prudence in his estimates of other human beings. If he was no knight errant, on the one hand, he was no credulous clown on the other. It was plain that he had taken Domna’s wild stories of Party membership with the requisite grain of salt, which was the thing that perhaps, even now, she could not bring herself to forgive him. Indeed, even to Mulcahy’s mind, he rather overstepped the bounds of what was permissible in jocular allusions to the “thirteenth floor,” “Gospodin Mulcahy,” and so on. What Mulcahy found tiresome about this was the assumption, so characteristic of Furness, that we are all a parcel of rogues and confidence-men; he seemed to regard Mulcahy as Domna’s confederate in a hoax on the college’s credulity. His wised-up air was as irritating, though not of course so dangerous, as Domna’s exaggerations. His little store of worldly knowledge had made him overweening and captious: he knew just enough to know that Mulcahy was not Party timber and not enough to see that Domna was but the latest of a long series of persons who, for good or bad reasons, had chosen to think otherwise. Since the idea of Mulcahy as a Communist was fantastically comic to his mind, it diverted him, evidently, to regard it as Mulcahy’s own fantastic invention, but for Mulcahy, who had suffered because of this mistaken idea, the joke was not funny and did not gain by repetition. It stung him to see that Furness had so little appreciation of his life—the supposition that he might have been a Communist was not so far-fetched as all that. To be told that we would be ludicrous in any life-role, even an uncongenial one, is an insult to our sense of human possibility.

  The first premonitory signs of Furness’ treachery came to light late in March, along with the skunk-cabbages in the damp places and the first bouquet of spring beauties brought by Alma Fortune to the department office. The whole campus was, as usual, unsettled by the vernal influence and the prospect of Easter vacation: hitherto well-satisfied students came before the department wanting to change their major or their tutor and were dissuaded with the greatest difficulty; roommates broke up; love-affairs were bl
ighted; girls wept in the washroom; Miss Rejnev’s Russian literature class sent her a petition that they had had enough of Dostoievsky. But it was the coming poetry conference that provided a focus for the general restlessness and disaffection. From nowhere and everywhere, all at once, came the cry that this affair—the first of its kind ever to be held at Jocelyn—be run on democratic principles. The campus, suddenly, was seething with rumors of a “loaded” panel; it was said that Mulcahy and Ellison were planning to use the symposium for an attack on contemporary verse, on formlessness, on “pure” poetry, on “impure,” i.e., paraphrasable, poetry, on the idea of progress, on progressive education. Conflicting stories circulated, but every story run down by Mulcahy agreed on two prime assumptions: (a) that the conference would not be representative and (b) that it would be the scene of an attack.

  At first blush, these rumors and spiteful charges seemed merely amusing, as illustrating the perennial tendency of philistia to suspect what it does not understand, but as they grew in volume to a regular chorus of detraction, Mulcahy felt his smile becoming thinner and anxious. He was tired of denying the weary old lies that were carried to him by his students from every corner of the campus. It was all very well for Ellison and Cathy to advise him to pay them no attention; his nature, unfortunately, thanks to long ill-usage, had become a gallèd jade that chafed at the needless and quivered to the goad of baseness. The number and variety of these stories made him fear, moreover, that there was more than one force at work against him in the college. As with all symposia and anthologies, criticism fastened on omissions. It was claimed that certain allegedly leading figures had not been invited: Dr. Williams, W. H. Auden, Cummings, Yvor Winters. Humbugs like Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones were expressing the gravest diplomatic concern over the affront to Mr. Robert Hillyer, as though the slight to his poetic gift were an international incident capable of world-wide repercussions.

  But more disturbing than these manifestations from the extreme right was a notice posted one night on the bulletin-board by somebody unknown—WHERE ARE THE POETS OF THE MASSES?—lettered in crude red ink. Mulcahy, hurrying into the store to find Ellison, discovered the room buzzing with it. It was a student prank, perhaps, as some of the old guard tried to assure him, but he could not help but suspect something uglier and more personal behind it. And he was not alone in thinking that there was a faculty hand involved. Fraenkel of Social Sciences was explaining, in his usual dry-as-dust way, that the student body this year conformed to a national trend observed in a New York Times survey in being conspicuously a-political; hence he did not think, and so on, meticulously, ad infinitum, while Consy Van Tour, giggling, pointed out that the word, where, was spelled correctly, which proved faculty assistance. Mulcahy, not finding Ellison and spotting Domna and Kantorowitz and Bentkoop in one corner with their heads together, as usual, turning in concert to survey him, was on the verge of leaving in some alarm and dubitation when Furness appeared, a large frown writ on his forehead, and called a department meeting.

  “I don’t like this, Hen,” he announced, when the flock was gathered in his office. He had just been seeing Maynard and had carried away with him, apparently, something of Maynard’s fussy severity. “Maynard tells me the whole campus is in turmoil over this poetry conference. We can’t seem to find out who posted that notice, but the wildest stories are going around about some coup you boys are supposed to be planning. What’s up, anyway?” A note of pugnacious cajolery edged into his voice. “Let Uncle Howard in on the plot.” To Mulcahy’s surprise, everybody was looking at him, tensely, almost accusingly, except Ellie Ellison, who was leafing through a volume of Apollinaire that he had selected from Furness’ bookshelves. “Yes,” reinforced Van Tour, full of breathless righteousness. “Where are the poets of the masses? That strikes me as a very good question.”

  Faced with all those eyes, gleaming on him expectantly, Mulcahy reacted with laughter. “Am I on trial?” he demanded. “What are you accusing me of?” Furness scraped his clean jaw and glanced, as if for succor, at Alma, who at once took charge of what was apparently to be an inquisition. “We’ve been told,” she declared forthrightly, “that the conference is going to be rigged. A certain elderly poet is going to be asked here, to be attacked by his juniors and by certain members of our faculty. The same treatment, we hear, is to be accorded a well-known foreign poet who is a guest of this country. The panel is being organized to exclude all contemporary tendencies except those of the attackers and of those under attack. A manifesto for a new kind of verse, calling itself the Mythic, is supposed to be drawn up, if all goes according to plan. One of our own members is also to be under fire and to be censured, poetically, from the podium. We’ve all heard this and don’t wish to believe it, but there it is. The students who tell us these things are resentful also, evidently, of a conference that isn’t fairly representative of the leading tendencies in verse and of a symposium that will reach conclusions already prearranged. That, I presume, is the meaning of the placard we all saw this morning, if it is not simply a joke at the expense of Jocelyn and of the department.”

  Her leathery face flushed; her jaw clamped shut suddenly. All eyes turned again to Mulcahy, who in his just shock and fury thought for a moment that he would not deign to answer such trumpery charges, but Furness’ blue eye gave him a look like a nudge, which he interpreted as an encouragement to turn the tables on his accusers. “You hear these things from the students, Alma?” he said gently. “It surprises me that you believe them unless there’s a prior wish in you to take me at a very low valuation. I understand all too well the mechanism that makes this possible. You defended me once in a crisis and now you fear that I may not have been worth defending, so that you take at their face value the first ugly stories you hear that seem to corroborate this little fear. In a word, you now feel responsible for me, all of you good people, and there’s no richer soil for mistrust than an awareness of responsibility.” He smiled. “Didn’t it occur to you to doubt the veracity, I won’t say of the students, but of those who fed them this rubbish to regurgitate back to you?”

  Domna suddenly spoke out. “Henry,” she said boldly, “the one who fed them this rubbish is you. We have it from students who heard the plan for the conference from your own lips, in confidence. We did not seek this information. It was brought to us by students who felt that what you were planning was not fair to the poets and a bad thing for the college. They felt someone should be warned.” Henry moistened his lips. “How many students?” he demanded, quickly, to catch her off her balance. Domna’s eyes calculated. “Three,” she replied, obviously lying—he set it down at two. He himself made a rapid calculation. “I would like to be confronted with the students who so valiantly abused my confidence.” He sat back in his chair, smiling, arms folded; a disobedient muscle twitching in his soft cheek.

  Furness shook his head. “No,” he remonstrated. “Nix on that stuff, Hen. Come off it. There’s no accusation. The department’s merely asking you to take it into your confidence. A report from the conference committee. What has it got up its sleeve?” The pleading note had come into his voice again, a strange raucous sound, like that of an itinerant hand-organ. Ellie Ellison looked up. “If you wish to know who posted the placard—if that is what this meeting is about—I can tell you. I did.” Everybody swung around to stare at him, Mulcahy along with the others. At the boy’s self-possessed words, he felt tears of relief and admiration well into his eyes. “Why?” demanded Alma, shrilly. “I think it’s outrageous,” said Considine. There was a babel of curiosity and reproach. But Furness’ white teeth flashed in a smile of complaisant understanding; his love of mystifications was fired. “It seemed an appropriate device,” explained Ellison, “for stirring up interest in the conference. There can be no proper debate if the passions are not roused. You mistake what Hen and I have been doing, sowing fear and anticipation among the students. They’re being taught to take poetry seriously, like a baseball game.” His look lightly dropped on Domna. “C
hoosing up sides. It’s the only way to run these things, to give them the quality of a mythic contest. We intend, by all means, to have a poet of the masses, if only for our private scapegoat. But first it seemed advisable to create a demand for him. I should not wish to be held responsible for inviting one for poetic reasons; they all write so badly that they can be interesting only as specimens, embodiments of a class myth.” His tone was matter-of-fact and serious; he looked startled when Furness laughed. He drew a paper from his hip-pocket and handed it to Furness. “Here’s the invitation list,” he said and looked on, detachedly, while the department gathered round and peered over Furness’ shoulder. There were four or five well-known names followed by five or six others, belonging, for the most part, to friends of his, whom Van Tour and Alma had never heard of. “That is the most important poet writing today,” he remarked, casually, pointing to one of them. “This is the greatest poetic talent, which may or may not realize itself.” His forefinger tapped a third name. “That’s the poet of the masses. Like so many of his inspiration, he lives out West, in Carmel, but I think we shall be able to get him if we simply pay his bus fare.” He folded the list and put it back in his pocket.

  Mulcahy eyed him with trepidation. He was conscious of being out of touch himself with contemporary poetry, owing to the perplexing fact which often troubled him in his friendly relations with Ellison: most “new” poets were hostile to Joyce’s work. Even in Eliot’s recognition, duly paid out like a tithe, he sensed something official and perfunctory, cautiously charitable and concessive. The true attitude of Eliot, he suspected, was manifest in his disciples, who in all their voluminous New Criticism had given Joyce scarcely a word of exegesis. Auden could shed a tear on the grave of James at Mount Auburn; a whole band of singers could hymn the dead Fitzgerald; but where was the Lycidas for the blind minstrel who was the greatest voice of all of them? The pipes of Ransom were silent and the reed of Tate was hollow. The envious neglect of the “new” poets had embittered him against their verses, perhaps unjustly so, for he could see in Ellison’s new poem, for example—an experiment with a modern epic form, based on the heroic couplet, but relying on assonance and a syllabic line—unmistakable evidence of the influence of Ulysses, whatever Ellison himself might choose to say about it. The poem dealt with the life of Jocelyn in a mythic semblance, using the plot of the Epigones, that is, of the Seven who came after the Seven, and the structure of the whole was that of a series of Epicycloids arranged around a fixed circle. Mulcahy, who was going to figure as Adrastus, was enchanted with the conception of the poem and with the few lines he had heard of it—a thing which had made him trust more willingly to Ellison’s judgments of his contemporaries in drawing up the list for the conference. Between them, they had elected to give an interesting version of the pocket-veto to certain stuffy figures whom the department had insisted on inviting: Ellison had disposed of them with his usual economy by deciding not to write to them at all, but Mulcahy had had a safer idea—he had written without mentioning any honorarium, which had achieved the desired effect in all but one instance, where the poet had accepted with joy, not even inquiring about the railroad fare, and had sent on several of his records as a gift to the college library.