Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  THE GROVES OF ACADEME

  TO

  Jess

  Kevin

  Augusta

  Jay

  Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum

  HORACE, Ep. II, ii, 45

  CHAPTER I

  An Unexpected Letter

  WHEN HENRY MULCAHY, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President’s letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer. This was the last straw. How was he expected to take care of forty students if other demands on his attention were continually being put in the way? On the surface of his mind, this vagrant grievance kept playing. Meanwhile, he had grown pale and his hands were trembling with anger and a strange sort of exultation. “Your appointment will not be continued beyond the current academic year. . . .” He sprang to his feet and mimed the sentence aloud, triumphantly, in inverted commas, bringing the whole force of his personality to bear on this specimen or exhibit of the incredible.

  He had guessed long ago that Hoar meant to dismiss him, but he was amazed, really amazed (he repeated the word to himself) that the man should have given himself away by an action as overt as this one. As an intellectual, he felt stunned not so much by the moral insensitiveness of the President’s move as by the transparency of it. You do not fire a man who has challenged you openly at faculty meetings, who has fought, despite you and your cabal, for a program of salary increases and a lightening of the teaching load, who has not feared to point to waste and mismanagement concealed by those in high places, who dared to call only last week (yes, fantastic as it seemed, this was the background of the case) for an investigation of the Buildings and Grounds Department and begged the dietitian to unscramble, if she would be so good, for her colleagues, the history of the twenty thousand eggs. . . . A condolatory smile, capping this enumeration, materialized on his lips; the letter was so inconsonant with the simplest precepts of strategy that it elicited a kind of pity, mingled with contempt and dry amusement.

  Still, the triteness of the attempt, the jejuneness and tedium of it, tried forbearance to the limit; at a progressive college, surely, one had the right to expect something better than what one was used to at Drake or Montana, and the very element of repetition gave the whole affair an unwarranted and unreal character, as of some tawdry farce seriously re-enacted. He had been in the academic harness long enough, he should have thought (and the files in the college office could testify) to anticipate anything, yet some unseen tendril of trust, he now remarked with a short harsh laugh, must have spiraled out from his heart and clung to the President’s person, or simply to the idea of decency, for him now to feel this new betrayal so keenly.

  For the truth was, as Mulcahy had to acknowledge, pacing up and down his small office, that in spite of all the evidence he had been given of the President’s unremitting hatred, he found himself hurt by the letter—wounded, to be honest, not only in his amour propre but in some tenderer place, in that sense of contract between men that transcends personal animosities and factional differences, that holds the man distinct from the deed and maintains even in the fieriest opposition the dream of final agreement and concord. He had not known, in short, that the President disliked him so flatly. It was the usual mistake of a complex intelligence in assessing a simple intelligence, of an imagination that is capable of seeing and feeling on many levels at once, as opposed to an administrative mentality that feels operationally, through acts. Like most people of literary sensibility, he had been unprepared, when it came down to it, for the obvious: a blunt, naked wielding of power. And the fact that he had thought himself prepared, he bitterly reflected, was precisely a measure of the abyss between the Maynard Hoars of this world and the Mulcahys.

  The anomalies of the situation afforded him a gleam of pleasure—to a man of superior intellect, the idea that he has been weak or a fool in comparison with an inferior adversary is fraught with moral comedy and sardonic philosophic applications. He sat down at his desk, popped a peppermint into his mouth, and began to laugh softly at the ironies of his biography: Henry Mulcahy, called Hen by his friends, forty-one years old, the only Ph.D. in the Literature department, contributor to the Nation and the Kenyon Review, Rhodes scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, father of four, fifteen years’ teaching experience, salary and rank of instructor—an “unfortunate” personality in the lexicon of department heads, but in the opinion of a number of his colleagues the cleverest man at Jocelyn and the victim, here as elsewhere, of that ferocious envy of mediocrity for excellence that is the ruling passion of all systems of jobholders.

  Mulcahy’s freckled fist came down on the desk. A tall, soft-bellied, lisping man with a tense, mushroom-white face, rimless bifocals, and graying thin red hair, he was intermittently aware of a quality of personal unattractiveness that emanated from him like a miasma; this made him self-pitying, uxorious, and addicted also to self-love, for he associated it with his destiny as a portent of some personal epiphany. As a prophet of modern literature in a series of halfway-good colleges, he had gladly accepted an identification with the sacred untouchables of the modern martyrology—with Joyce, the obscure language teacher in Trieste; with tubercular Kafka in Prague, browbeaten by an authoritarian father; with the sickly, tisane-drenched Proust; with Marx, even, and his carbuncles; with Socrates and the hemlock. He carried an ash-plant stick in imitation of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus; subscribed to Science and Society, the Communist scholarly publication; and proclaimed the Irish, his ancestors, to be the ten lost tribes of Israel. The unwholesome whiteness of his long, pear-shaped body, the droop of his trousers, his children’s runny noses and damp bottoms, his wife’s woman’s complaint, the sand sprinkling the lashes of his nearsighted, glaucous eyes, which had made him the butt of students, were not antipathetic to him but on the contrary lovable, as a manifesto of ethical difference, like the bleeding holy pictures of his childhood, the yellowed palms from Palm Sunday, the vessel of holy water blessed by the Pope. A symbolist, he was purposefully saturated in a sort of folkish traditional poverty of the lower middle class, in the Freudian family romance—the steam of the tea-kettle and the laundry tub; diapers drying on the radiators and on the rusty shower rod of the bathroom; nightgowns, kimonos, medicine cabinets; the smell of unaired closets; nose rags, cleaning rags, lint, broken toys, potties. He and his wife together dearly loved a midnight “spread,” candy bars, frosted cupcakes, nuts and pickles, second helpings of mashed potatoes; he was defiantly conscious of a porous complexion, bad teeth, and occasional morning halitosis.

  All this, in a progressive community where the casserole and the cocktail and the disposable diaper reigned, where the handsome President and his wife entertained with sherry or sat, Bennington-style, on the floor, listening to Bach and boogie-woogie, had, as he was perfectly aware, a heretical flavor, a pungent breath of class hatred and contempt. He knew, without being told, that he and his wife were criticized for the condition of the children’s clothes, little Mary Margaret, as every wife on Faculty Hill could say positively, having been sent home twice by her first-grade teacher with a note calling attention to the absence of buttons from her dress. But except, he supposed, for the courage of the outstanding boy in his Proust-Joyce-Mann course, he might have remained ignorant of the sobriquet, Dr. Stuck-Up, pinned on him by the campus rowdies, in reference to the bits of toilet paper (the result of cuts when shaving) that sometimes stuck to his chin during the eight-o’clock tutorials, and of the newest slander, spread only ten days ago, that the Student Self-Help Bureau made excuses not to send him sitters, because the girls complained of the smell of urine in the house.

  “Bravo!” he impulsively murmured, blowing a saturnine kiss from his fingertips. “Bis, bis!” The critic in him, he thought, could not help applauding the consonantia of the President’s action; any other dénouement to the saga of his stay at Jocelyn would have been lac
king in inevitability. Moving to the casement window, he stared out across the snowy amphitheatre of the campus, down the long line of hemlocks, to the arch of the Administration Building, where the President had his paneled offices. “I congratulate you, Maynard Hoar,” he softly apostrophized, “Carleton College, B.A., Wisconsin, Ph.D., disciple of Alexander Meiklejohn, lover of the humanities, guitar-player, gadfly of the philosophical journals, defender of academic freedom! Accept my felicitations on the clean-cut way you have handled this disagreeable task!” Pondering, he drew out his watch, inherited from an uncle in Tammany, glanced vaguely at it, hearing the Phi Beta Kappa key jingle; he was feeling more than half tempted to take the letter over to the main hall and post it on the faculty bulletin board, before the arrival of his eleven-o’clock tutee could force him to maturer reflection.

  The conviction that it would embarrass Hoar to have the letter made public had come to him just now in a flash, as though by divination. Hoar was counting on his silence. He knew this to be true by a sixth political sense, by a depth-sounding of the bureaucratic character, without yet knowing why, or what use to make of the discovery. A man in Mulcahy’s position (he mimicked the President’s reasoning), a man with Mulcahy’s unfortunate record, could not afford to proclaim this new dismissal from the housetops; he could be reckoned on, in fact, to go quietly, with a letter of recommendation as his price. Mulcahy smiled. What the President apparently did not know, he thought with satisfaction, was the finality of his instructor’s predicament—the literally scores of fruitless letters Mulcahy had written and had had written for him during the year and a half between jobs, when he had lived with his mother-in-law in Louisville while his wife clerked in a department store and he stayed home and wiped the snot from the children’s noses and worked on the Joyce concordance that no commercial publisher believed in. During that year and a half, he reflected, he had had a salutary foretaste of what he could expect in the future from the old friends and teachers who had stood by him thus far, but with what pipe-pulling, pursing of the lips, frowning airs, and due consideration! Jocelyn, their letters now apprised him, was his last chance, though they did not put the caveat in so many words but inquired deftly after Catherine and the children; praised Maynard Hoar, “a humanist and a gentleman,” who was having a hard time, so they heard, between an unruly student-body and an unsympathetic board of trustees; and finished by chiding their friend Hen, half playfully, for “an engaging tendency, apparent already in your undergraduate years, to go off half cocked.”

  Mulcahy’s jaw tightened. He felt a sudden stiffening of the will. What these well-wishers augured for him, what he could augur for himself, he very simply and calmly declined, with thanks. To be fired at this juncture, when he was halfway to tenure, was unthinkable. Consequently, he refused to be fired. The moment he had enunciated this principle, in a cool and dispassionate inner voice, he recognized that from the very beginning he had never taken the President’s letter seriously, never intended to be fired, and had been inwardly self-possessed and resolute while outwardly excited and incoherent.

  Yet it was just this incoherence and illogic, he perceived, beginning to pace the floor again, that constituted the strength of his position. That clear sense of blame and wrong, of the unjustified and the unwarranted, that at the beginning of any dispute dominates the imagination and orders the facts of the case into an appearance of sequence became, as he knew, gradually blurred and was finally lost irrecapturably as the quarrel unfolded in all its organic complexity; he feared this development in the present case, this attrition of the issues, and saw that, in order to win, it would be necessary to shut his mind even to its own settled purpose, to be furious, voluble, contradictory, incapable of “listening to reason.” What was required, in a word, was just that obstinate feigned madness of Hamlet’s, the rejection of all outcomes and explanations, the determination to make trouble, to be inconvenient, obstructive to the general weal, like a sidewalk demonstrator who declines to “move on” when the word from above is given.

  And for that matter, Mulcahy said to himself, dropping into his swivel chair and commencing to polish his glasses, who had the more to lose by publicity, he himself or the college? Was it not Maynard Hoar, precisely, who could not “afford” to have it known that he had got rid of an inconvenient critic—Maynard Hoar, author of a pamphlet, “The Witch Hunt in Our Universities” (off-printed from the American Scholar and mailed out gratis by the bushel to a legion of “prominent educators”); Maynard Hoar, the photogenic, curly-haired evangelist of the right to teach, leader of torch parades against the loyalty oath, vigorous foe of “thought control” on the Town Meeting of the Air? Especially when it so happened that the inconvenient critic had been under fire, not so long ago, by a state legislature for “Communistic, atheistic tendencies,” as evidenced by a few book reviews in the Nation, of all places, a single article in the old Marxist Quarterly (“James Joyce, Dialectical Materialist”), and a two-dollar contribution to the Wallace campaign. A faint speculative gleam appeared in Mulcahy’s eyes; he lodged a third peppermint in his cheek and tapped musingly with a pencil on his teeth, a quick rat-a-tat-tat of estimate and conjecture.

  Confronted with a charge of bias, Hoar, of course, would forensically repudiate any political motive in the termination of the contract, but rumor, working in secret, might tell a different story. . . . Mulcahy’s pale eyebrows wryly lifted; he shrugged off a twinge of conscience: in the split modern world, he lightly posited, we are too often the dupes of appearance; let us look at the underlying reality. A year and a half ago (cf. the Convocation Address), Jocelyn had been officially enraptured to welcome Dr. Mulcahy to its staff, as an exemplar, a modern witness to the ordeal by slander, etc., etc., passim (see also the New York Times magazine for the fearless administrator’s account of the factors that influenced his decision), but since then Dr. Fuchs had confessed; Mr. Hiss had been convicted; Mr. Greenglass and others (including a former Jocelyn physics student) had been tried for atomic spying; Senator McCarthy had appeared; at Jocelyn there had been a suicide among the former Students for Wallace, an attack from a Catholic pulpit, the withdrawal of a promised gift, a deepening of the budgetary crisis. And though the college still officially counted on “a swing of the pendulum back to the old native freedoms,” Hoar, only this winter—under pressure, it was said, from the Alumni Fund Chairman—had reluctantly removed his name from the Stockholm Peace Petition. Mulcahy laughed comfortably. To those familiar with Maynard Hoar’s history, he ventured to predict, the dismissal of an outspoken teacher, at this turning point in the college’s affairs, might seem a leetle too opportune, especially if it could be shown that the teacher in question had engaged in political activities of the type now considered suspect.

  Mulcahy sprang blazing to his feet. Surely (he saw it all now) he had been observed at the meeting of the Partisans for Peace, which, it so happened, he had gone to, with no special enthusiasm, at the invitation of a former colleague and fellow-Joycean who was scheduled to speak on the program. He looked in now and then on such affairs out of contempt for mob opinion, as a sheer exercise of his individual liberties, but would Hoar dare deny that his instructor of literature’s presence there had been duly noted and reported on the campus by some vigilant F.B.I. agent?

  He clapped his hand to his head. “Dummkopf!” he cried. “Dummkopf!”—awestruck at his own blindness. The clue had been in his hands as long ago as the Christmas reception. Hoar had tipped him off, but he, of course, had been too witless to heed it. He began to laugh intemperately, till the tears dampened his eyes, recalling the holiday scene in the President’s living room, the damnable Swedish glögg and pfeffernuesse, candles, yule log, holly, students dressed as waits singing outside the window, and within, on an oak bench, Maynard Hoar, in heavy ribbed sweater, genially asserting that he could as soon, in these times, as president of a small, struggling college, appear at a “peace” rally as be found playing strip poker on Sunday in a whorehouse (laughter). Ho
w he, Henry Mulcahy, could have heard these words and failed to apply them to himself passed human understanding; disgust, he supposed, with the falsity of the tone, with the specious air of rueful openness, must have palsied his own powers of inference. Or possibly, he appended, his inner censor had simply declined to pass such rubbish as affecting himself in any fashion. What retort had Hoar expected from him anyway—explanations, promises of amendment, apologies?

  Yet the joke was on Mulcahy this time, he had to admit, chuckling. Here he had been scrupling about ascribing bias to the President when the President had not scrupled to put that bias on record. There could be no doubt, certainly, he interjected, sobering, that he had been warned by Hoar, in public, before witnesses, and that he had seemed deliberately to ignore that warning; worse still, to repulse it. For some flippant demon had led him, of all people present, to frame an answer to Hoar. He had wondered aloud idly: Was Christianity compromised by the Magdalen? To which Hoar had replied, in a voice of cogent rebuke, “I’m unable, Hen, to identify myself with Jesus. I don’t know about you.”