Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  At noon he left his office. He hiked up the collar of his brown woolen sports jacket against the damp cold, traced the flight of a pair of grackles bisecting a long line of gray mist, and walked across the Old Pen from the library to Mallory, where the English Department taught its classes. Mallory was typical of aggressively modern campus buildings—ghastly yet expensive. The cinderblock walls were painted brown and had so gritty a texture that if one brushed exposed skin against them, it came away bloody. Ceiling lights were pinholes. Linoleum was the color of rotted lettuce.

  Yet Peace was comfortable there. He closed the classroom door behind him, sat at the greenish table that served as a desk, and looked out upon the faces of twenty-three people with whom he would talk for the following fifty minutes about nothing but the likes of Eliot, Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, W. D. Snodgrass, Theodore Roethke, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and today’s subjects, Marianne Moore and Richard Wilbur.

  Modern Poetry was conducted as a discussion group, though the class was larger than Peace would have ideally had it. He was a well-known softy, and many more students applied than the limit noted in the course catalog, figuring Professor Porterfield would always make room for one or two extra, or ten. Twice a week they met to give close readings to poems, usually organized around a common theme, but not always. He wanted to teach them how to read a poem, and more, to absorb the language of poetry so that they might learn to generate original language on their own.

  “Original language,” Peace told them at the first meeting, “is what distinguishes the real writer from the writer.”

  He quoted Twain’s dictum about the difference between the word and the right word being the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning—not to tell them something about the poets they were looking at, but something about themselves. As thinkers, as people, and, for a few perhaps as future writers, they should only aim to be in the lightning business. The right word as opposed to the word. He would show them a quatrain from Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect,” but with a word omitted—“suds”—what the darkly comic, beer-drinking, lecherous Sweeney wipes around his face as he prepares to shave. What right word did Eliot choose? he asked them. No, not soap; it gives you nothing but the shave. No, not cream; it suggests only the lechery. Same with “foam,” yet foam comes closer because it gets to the beer. And maybe to madness. And why is “suds” the right word? Because it contains the comedy, the lechery, the shave, and the beer. That’s why.

  He did not want to turn the students into poets. He wanted to make them see the world the way the poets see it, at least to see it that way some of the time. Because some of the time, the poet’s way of seeing the world is clearest.

  And this was the point as it applied to Peace himself. His wife and his best friend harassed him for not living in the world as it is—in Bollovate’s world, when one came down to it. Yet from Peace’s perspective, teaching and learning were as real as the world got. That may have been his problem. But it was also true. This is as good a place as any to note that if Livi was right and he resembled Candide, it was Candide with brains.

  “We must learn to imagine what we know,” he told his class. “That was Shelley’s idea. Do you see it? There is the life of facts and the life of dreams. And they come together in the imagination. Learn what has happened—history, biology, anything. Then imagine what you know and it fills the facts with noise, color, and light. Whatever you saw is the same but different all at once. Because you looked. Only you. You looked.”

  How often Max Byrd wrote to his folks in Alabama that Professor Porterfield was his reason for staying in college. What he was learning about computers he could pick up anywhere. Were it not for Porterfield, he’d have come home long ago to work for his dad. Max was mired in debt with student loans, and in many ways preferred his parents’ life, minus the poverty, to much of the esoterica and the claptrap hurled at him at Beet. Only Professor Porterfield seemed to speak for the value of learning, indeed for the value of growing up. “And he talks like a real person, Dad. You’d like him.”

  Even the grumpiest and most skeptical adored him. Why would they not? Peace was on their side. He didn’t pander to them any more than he pandered to his colleagues, though the students seemed to better intuit his motives. He didn’t agree with them automatically, and tell them how wonderful they were. He didn’t say everything they wrote was “brilliant, but…,” or “splendid, yet…” He never called student poems “interesting.” And once in a while he accused his classes point-blank of sloppy thinking and “English major bullshit.” He didn’t do anything overt to win them over. And he could not have cared less about student evaluations given at the end of every course, though his always shot through the roof. As he’d told Livi, all he wanted was for them to be more alert, more aware, more expressive, and generally smarter when he finished with them than when he began.

  And in the interests of caring about them, he cared about his subject. He cared so much about literature he worried about it aloud. “Is Juno and the Paycock a tragedy? Is Riders to the Sea? How could they both be tragedies? Why did Ellison write nothing of value after Invisible Man? Did John Donne suffer? What were Conrad’s politics? Does a real writer have politics? Why would Dr. Johnson never speak of death?” And so forth. The students overheard him, and beheld the imaginative teacher. So deep would he go in his private-public investigations, sometimes he would look up suddenly in class and blink like an awakening baby as if surprised to see anyone else in the room.

  “Mr. Porterfield?”

  “Yes, Sarah?”

  “I didn’t get the Marianne Moore poem at all.” Others nodded. They were about to take on “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.”

  “Let’s try to figure it out,” said Peace. “The mind is an enchanting thing. How so, Max?”

  “Because it is complicated?” said the boy.

  “In what way is the mind complicated?”

  “It moves in many ways,” said Jenny.

  “And it moves quickly. It darts,” said Leslie, a music major. “‘Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,’ Moore writes. She means the mind is quick and agile.”

  “Quick and agile,” said Peace, considering their words. “But so what? Everyone knows that the human mind is quick and agile. Why write a poem about it?”

  “Why write a poem about anything?” said Jenny, evoking a wave of light laughter.

  “Yeah,” said Peace. “Why do poets write poems?”

  “To give you something to teach,” said Lucky, a black kid from Andover, who could be counted on to say things like that.

  “Precisely,” said Peace, with a smile. “And what do I like to teach, Lucky?”

  “Deep meaning,” said the boy in a deep, dramatic bass, eliciting another laugh.

  “Quick and agile. And deep,” Peace said. “What makes a mind worthwhile? The use of a hand can be quick. The eyes can be quick and deep. The voice, too.” He imitated Lucky: “‘Deep meaning.’ But Marianne Moore is writing about the mind, which is the engine of the hands and the eyes and the voice, the center of everything. What makes that organ special to the poet?”

  “I can think of another organ that is quick, agile, and deep,” said Lucky.

  “I’m sure you can,” said Peace. “But try this once to stay on the subject.” More laughter, then a meditative silence.

  “It can change,” said Jenny. “The mind can change.”

  Peace read aloud the last lines of the poem: “‘It’s not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.’ Good for you, Jenny. And what was Herod’s oath? Why would it have been better had Herod changed his mind?” Several students offered the correct answer. Peace leaned back, clapped his hands once above his head, and gave them the thumbs-up. “What?” he teased. “You’ve read the Bible? What heresy is next? The Greeks?”

  So the class progressed, from Marianne Moore’s poem to Richard Wilbur’s “Mind,” which was on the s
ame subject but took a different turn. The mind is as blind as a bat, said Wilbur, that flaps about in the dark. Yet once in a glorious while, it can find a new flight path and “correct the cave.”

  They talked and talked. They looked up, they looked down—heads bent over books. So open, so private. This was the beauty of teaching—under the wheedling and the grappling, the strange loveliness of the enterprise. In their jeans, their baseball caps, even their nose rings and their saucy tattoos, the kids were, to him, breathtaking.

  “Professor Porterfield?” asked Jane of the dramatically long blond pigtail. “You’re always talking about original language. But I don’t really understand.”

  Peace nodded, acknowledging his use of the term might have been vague. “All these poets we study,” he said. “They reached into themselves to find words that were theirs alone. They took the effort to do this, not because they wanted to show off, or to baffle readers with strangeness for its own sake. They wanted to discover who they really were, what they really believed. And their own language would tell them. The words they used—the words we’re talking about today—they could have come from no one but Moore and Wilbur.”

  Jane was still searching. So, evidently, was Max, and if he was not getting this, no one would. On the spot, Peace came up with an exercise deliberately geared toward heartbreak.

  “I am going to do something now,” he told them. “And when I do it, I want you to write. Don’t think about it. No throat-clearing. Go with whatever comes to mind.”

  With that he stood, walked to the classroom door, opened it, and closed it. Then he looked back at the students looking at him. He opened the door again, and closed it again. The tumblers in the lock were heavy, clear, and loud.

  “That is what I’d like you to write about,” he said. “The sound of a closing door.”

  They went right at it. When fifteen minutes had passed and the class time was nearly over, he called upon several students to read aloud what they had put down.

  Robyn wrote something that began: “In my father’s house there were no doors.” She went on to tell that she had grown up on a navy base, and she and her mom lived in a trailer. “No walls,” she said. “And no doors.”

  Lucky, not a joke in him now, wrote of clinging to his father’s pants cuffs as the old man was walking out on him and his mother, brothers, and sisters, for good. He had left on a Sunday. After the door had closed forever, the family had sat down to eat blueberry pancakes.

  Lucille wrote of having been hauled off to a police station in her hometown in Louisiana when she was twelve; she had heard a jail door close. Prentice wrote of the breakup with his partner, who had told him, “We just don’t click.” But, “The door clicked.”

  Peace leaned forward and gave them a hard look. “Original language, you see, has nothing to do with arcane or fancy words,” he said. “Most often it is composed of the simplest words. But they come from you, only from you.”

  At ten to one the class was over, but everyone kept his seat a moment longer. “That’s another thing about the mind,” said Jenny, gathering her books and talking to no one in particular. “It can make itself sad.”

  “Yes, it can,” said Professor Porterfield.

  CHAPTER 10

  IN THE WEEK BETWEEN THE INCIDENT AT MACARTHUR HOUSE in campus folklore the seizure of the building was downgraded to an incident) and the class in Modern Poetry that Professor Porterfield had just taught, a number of things happened regarding Beet College that struck those who observed them as out of the ordinary. There were other events that went unobserved—equally odd, if not plain weird. And they all occurred in a remarkably short span of time.

  On one occasion, men and women bearing tripods, theodolites, and miniature blue and orange flags on metal sticks were seen pacing out steps on the campus periphery, where they planted their flags. When asked what they were doing there by reporter Ferritt Lawrence, who tended to ask that question of everyone, they explained they were measuring the shoulders of the college roads in order to dig more trenches for the rainy season. This explanation satisfied Lawrence, who did not think the event worthy of a story for the Pig’s Eye. But it was considered unusual by others, since the strangers with tripods and tiny flags were doing their work hundreds of yards from any of the campus roads. And in New England all seasons are rainy.

  On another occasion, small parties of men in suits and recent haircuts were noticed being led on what appeared to be a walking tour of the campus. Behind them trailed a hard-looking blonde in red tights and a black leather miniskirt, holding a clipboard. The tour guide was President Huey himself. And though no one could hear what he was telling the group, he was clearly happy and overexcited, making the exulting noises of an appliance salesman. He flapped his arms like a gull on a trash bin, and one could even make out a faint yet ecstatic screak.

  In autumn on a college campus most everyone is too busy to pay sustained attention to such sporadic irregularities, so while these events might have been mentioned in passing once or twice, more urgent topics were being discussed, such as how clownish Dean Henry Muddler looked on his Moped, whether or not the galootish Dean Smitty Smith was a true albino, was Dean Jenina McGarry a dyke or a wannabe, and wasn’t Dean Wee Willy Baedeker a horse’s ass. The CCR’s progress or lack of it bore deep into everyone’s minds, which was why it had become more the subject of brooding than of chatter, though some faculty members, armed with basic survival instincts, made plans to work elsewhere.

  And yet there were more extraordinary occurrences.

  One day over lunch at the Faculty Club, Keelye Smythe was wondering, in the presence of Professors Lipman, Kettlegorf, Booth, Kramer, and Heilbrun, about a certain matter for which this rump meeting of the CCR had been convened. The Faculty Club had served as an abattoir in the 1880s, and though the structure’s walls were taken down and replaced a dozen times in the interim, and were now covered in mauve fabric erupting in hydrangeas, still, every so often someone complained of smelling blood.

  What was unusual about this CCR meeting was the absence of the chairperson. And the subject about which Professor Smythe was wondering, since they were running out of time, when all things were considered, when one really faced facts, when one took into account, after due deliberation, the competing pros and cons of the matter, was whether—he was just wondering—Professor Porterfield were the right person to serve as chair.

  “He’s very amiable, and of course he’s a personal friend of mine—why, I believe I was the first to welcome him to the department four years ago. I think it was I who proposed recruiting him from Yale. Yes, I’m sure of it. I might venture to say I am his closest friend in the college. And I really, really truly like him.”

  Smythe would have gone on like this for a dozen more such sentiments, but the scientist Booth, impatient for the end of the equation, waved him toward a finish.

  “I’m simply not certain,” said Smythe, “if he’s in touch with the times.”

  “Exactly,” said Lipman. “I’m sure he’s a fine teacher, and a fine scholar, though you gentlemen, and lady [Kettlegorf beamed], would know more about that than me…I.” (Lipman’s only advanced degree was from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she had written her master’s thesis, “The Media: Is It in Trouble?”) “But,” she said, “the way he runs our meetings, he’s a bit old-fashioned.”

  “Exactly,” said Heilbrun, who was dressed in a Brocton—a gray double-breasted lounge suit and a shirt with a white wing collar.

  “Exactly,” said Kramer at nearly the same time.

  “What our esteemed colleague does not seem to realize,” Smythe went on, taking a quick, surreptitious glance around the club to assure himself that the esteemed colleague was not nearby (he need not have bothered; Peace never went near the place), “is that we require a curriculum with some zip to it, pizzazz, something new. Innovation!” He banged the table lightly. “That’s the ticket. That’s what the trustees are looking for. I mean, Peace
is a very nice man—”

  “Very nice,” said Heilbrun. He dabbed on a touch of lip balm.

  “Exceptionally nice,” said Kramer.

  “But,” continued Smythe, “I just don’t know. Something is missing.”

  “Missing,” said Kramer.

  “I mean, he’s very intelligent,” said Smythe.

  “Very intelligent,” said Kramer, whose echolalia had begun to get on the group’s nerves three weeks earlier.

  “And very nice,” said Heilbrun.

  Kramer was about to say, “Very nice,” but Smythe cut him off. “I just don’t know,” he said, as if actually contemplating the matter. “Something is different about him. I didn’t see it at first.”

  “A bit standoffish,” said Booth.

  “A bit standoffish,” said Kramer before anyone could stop him.

  Before anyone could stop her, Kettlegorf made it through the opening bars of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair”—causing people at the other tables to turn their heads in alarm.

  The group continued in this vein through the consommé, into the salmon fillet, past the seasonal fruits, and toward the decaf cappuccino. By the time they stood to leave, they had reached no firm conclusion save that Professor Porterfield was a very nice, very amiable, very intelligent fellow, and that they all liked him tremendously.

  So there was that unusual event, to be added to the others, if anyone had been doing the adding, that is.

  And there was Akim’s random numbers-and-letters generator. Like a cyclopean eye, his laptop shone in the dark of the cave. The numbers rolled, the letters rolled. Hour after hour, day after day, the generator kept searching for the Homeland Security Department code without success. That was unusual.

  And then there was this event, which occurred off campus during a gray mizzle.

  Joel Bollovate and Matha Polite met in town for drinks at the High on the Hog Lounge in the Pigs-in-Blankets Bed ’N Breakfast. Now, this was very unusual, both for the fact that the chairman of the board of trustees had invited an undergraduate for a drink, and because no one ever had drinks at the High on the Hog until after ten at night, when the locals showed up for pinball, sang along with “Roxanne” on the jukebox, played with action figures, and compared symptoms of PTSD. Bollovate and Matha had the lounge to themselves, except for one barely visible ectomorphic figure, half draped by shadows, who remained very still in the corner and to whom they paid no attention. They sat under the print of the dogs playing poker and drank cabernets.