‘I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all!’
It was the following morning, and Professor Simkiss had burst in some agitation into his Assistant’s room. Lockton was standing in front of his little gas stove, toasting his calves when he probably wanted to toast his bottom, and three or four students were sitting glumly round a small table with open notebooks before them. The study of literature was in some sense going forward – but now came abruptly to a halt. Everybody stared at the intruder, astonished and gratified to see that the dim little man on whom at least an uncomfortable chunk of their destinies depended was in some sort of obscure distress.
‘I think we’ll call it a day,’ Lockton said easily, and accompanied the words with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘The Professor has urgent business with me. Keep at it, and I’ll see you all next week.’ He waited until the young people had scurried from the room, and then turned to his chief. ‘So what?’ he said.
‘Hugh, I suppose you’ve read those books you gave me a list of?’
‘Certainly I have – and they’re only la crème de la crème. Have you come asking for more?’
‘You’ve read this one?’ Ignoring Lockton’s absurd query, Simkiss tossed Going Up on the table. ‘The wretched Henfrey’s novel?’
‘Of course I have. It’s quite amusing in its way.’
‘Hugh, let me be plain with you. I gravely doubt whether reading such a lubricious composure – let alone judging it amusing – can be regarded as other than morally reprehensible.’
‘Good Lord! But you’ve read it yourself?’
‘Certainly. I read it on the train, coming back from Nesfield yesterday evening.’
‘So at any time you could have tossed it out of the window?’
‘I felt a certain obligation to pursue it to the end. The man is, in a sense, a colleague. In two senses a colleague. He holds a Chair of sorts in a university of sorts, and – and he is a fellow-novelist as well. But the saturnalian violence of the thing—’
‘Saturnalian exuberance.’
‘Do not quibble, Hugh. It confounds me. A little mouse of a man – although a pedantic mouse too—’
‘Henfrey is just like—is like that? I suppose that when one is in the know about him, then, it adds a little to the piquancy.’
‘Piquancy! The thing is, from cover to cover, a libel on an honourable profession. Philological conferences as a mere cloak for—for drunken chambering! For whore-hunting, Hugh! For a luxuriance in esoteric postures that would disgrace Aretino!’
‘It has gone down very well. Let me show you, Geoffrey.’ Lockton picked up Going Up and turned to the verso of the title-page. ‘Just look. “Reprinted three times”, and only within as many months of publication. And it has won a prize, you know. The Pumblechook Prize for a satiric novel. And I’m told that the translation rights have been sold all over the world. The Japanese version is out already. And it’s sure to be pirated in Russia.’
Given this information, Professor Simkiss found himself silenced for perceptible seconds. He didn’t at all know why. That the lewd book had been a success was neither here nor there – except, indeed, that it spoke of the general depravity of the times.
‘But, Hugh,’ he then said, ‘consider the entire tone of the thing. It represents us collectively – dons, or whatever we are trying to be called – as given to a certain amount of shoddy intriguing and scrounging round in pursuit of promotion and casual emoluments. But in the main it depicts us as puppets in a mere sexual phantasmagoria.’
‘Just that. Henfrey’s book, and all the others more or less like it, aren’t meant to be taken au pied de la lettre.’ Hugh Lockton had a weakness for interlarding his conversation with phrases culled from the Concise Oxford French Dictionary. ‘Think of your old pal Charles Lamb on Restoration Comedy. “A fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening”. And so forth. “Altogether a speculative scene of things”. And, as I’ve said, amusing in its way.’
‘Well, yes—but—’
‘No call to behave like a wowser about it.’
‘Like a what, Hugh?’
‘Aussie slang, Geoffrey. A spoilsport type.’
‘I certainly don’t want to be that.’ Simkiss, although he was by no means as yet acknowledging the fact to himself, was finding something obscurely seductive in his junior colleague’s attitude.
‘Honestly now, Geoffrey. Didn’t you get a laugh or two out of Going Up? Isn’t it a damned sight less outright dull than that Cambridge thing you were talking about?’
‘Cambridge thing?’
‘The Masters, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, yes—but—’
‘And with quite as large a whack of our unredeemed human nature?’
‘I suppose that may be true.’
‘But it could be bettered, couldn’t it? By someone with a much larger talent as a writer than this Henfrey chap.’
‘No doubt whatever about that,’ Simkiss said.
Thus – as in some mediaeval morality – did Concupiscence, tempted by the distant trumpet of False Fame – overcome True Perceiving. Geoffrey Simkiss’s third book had tremendous success. A panel of persons prominent in literature placed it at once among the Fifteen Great Novels of the Century. Reviewers called it savage, hilarious, unsparing, riotous, one in the eye for Petronius, minutely faithful to academic life, a bawdy extravaganza, dispassionate, owning a masterly power of telling understatement, a lashing flail from cover to cover, and the best thing of its kind since Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. Then an organisation called the League for Moral Purity in the Home sought to have it suppressed, and this just turned a final and delicate scale. Film rights were negotiated for a sum which, although undisclosed, was understood to be very large indeed.
All this was, in fact, a little hard upon Professor Simkiss. If he wasn’t really a harmless little man neither was he (as some enthusiasts averred) a figure such as hadn’t been seen in Europe since the death of Voltaire. He was still reluctant to cut out of university life, and he rubbed along with his colleagues and students much as before. As before – meaning the period of his first two novels – nobody except Hugh Lockton ever said a word about his writing. Even when the top photographers of the day came down from London and focused him amid the university’s sham cloisters or in front of a blackboard scrawled with Anglo-Saxon remarks, people seemed unprompted to comment. Once, actuated by honest mischief, he invited Professor Henfrey to come over and examine with him. But Henfrey had nothing to say either about his own now somewhat eclipsed novels or about what might have been called Simkiss’s Second Manner.
Professor Simkiss set about his fourth book. He had to, since he had signed a contract for it and received a substantial advance. Perhaps he started in on it too soon, for almost from the first he felt himself subject to what he believed economists called the law of diminishing returns. He had to work a little more broadly – coarsely, even – to achieve his designed effects. And this, in turn, he conceivably a little overdid. He was conscious that the novel, when published, was received with a shade of reserve. Of course the book was funny, the reviewers said, but some of its diversions were a little on the scabrous side. One critic, addicted to a German dictionary much as Lockton was to a French one, used the adjective gemein. All this naturally made Simkiss somewhat uneasy.
Then one day he went into Staff House to lunch. He sat down at a long table with, on one side, a man he scarcely knew, but who had once told him, mournfully, that he worked on potatoes all the time. On his other side was a vacant chair – and almost immediately one of the bustling women came forward and tipped it up against the table. Simkiss didn’t make much of this. If one had arranged to talk over something with a colleague during the meal, and had arrived before him, one sometimes did this oneself.
A couple of minutes later, the Vice-Chancellor came in. He didn’t often lunch in Staff House; in fact he did so only on becoming conscious that it was time to be a little affable in a general way. Now the Vice-Chancellor looked amiably round the room, and his glance fell, seemingly quite casually, on this reserved seat. He strolled up, pulled it out, and sat down.
He glanced at the neighbour thus provided for him with an air of slight surprise.
‘My dear Simkiss,’ he said, ‘I don’t often have this pleasure. Quite some time, indeed, since we ran into one another. Yes, indeed. I hope you’re well?’
‘Thank you, yes, V.C.’ Without yet at all knowing why, Geoffrey Simkiss had to acknowledge to himself a distinct sense of apprehension.
‘Department okay? Young Burton pulling his weight?’
‘Lockton. I have no criticism of him at all. I sometimes feel – quite unreasonably about so young a man – that as a scholar he is surprisingly unacquainted with one or two obvious sources. Nothing of great consequence, you understand.’
‘Ah, yes.’ The Vice-Chancellor pretended no further interest in Hugh Lockton, but continued to converse cordially on one topic or another. Later in the meal he had a good deal to say to the university’s Registrar, who was sitting immediately opposite him at the narrow table, and he turned back to Simkiss only at the same time as he made a gesture of polite refusal to a woman proposing to provide him with a hunk of suet pudding.
‘I must just mention,’ he said, ‘the pleasure I have received from your new novel. Quite delightful, my dear fellow! Such seeming facility, to mention only its least arresting quality. It’s hard to imagine how you can think of it all.’
‘As a matter of fact, V.C., a good deal of effort is involved.’
‘Effort after something new, I suppose. You may be described as having bided your time, as it were.’
‘Bided my time?’ It was a shade suspiciously that Simkiss repeated the phrase.
‘I mean that you have made your contribution rather late in the development of the genre. Which accounts, conceivably, for one’s slight sense of a fellow scraping the dirty bottom of the barrel.’ The Vice-Chancellor got to his feet. ‘I can spare a few minutes for coffee upstairs. There are several people with whom I should like to have a short chat. So, my dear Simkiss, good day to you!’
And the Vice-Chancellor, with a friendly nod here and there, departed from the room.
Scraping the dirty bottom of the barrel . . . no hostile reviewer, willing alike to wound and to strike home, could quite equal the precise venom of that. Or so Professor Simkiss, perhaps in his sudden and deep perturbation exaggerating a little, told himself as he walked blindly round and round the dismal suburb in the centre of which the university lay. Some of his thoughts were entirely extravagant. He wondered whether, perhaps, the Vice-Chancellor had really been reading a book by the man Henfrey, and had got his authors muddled. He decided that Hugh Lockton had been as an Evil Angel to him, and he resolved to have him sacked. But – such is the disciplined clarity of the academic mind – such persuasions and fantasies didn’t last long. Returning to his Department, and entering his room, he was already murmuring to himself several relevant apophthegms in a learned tongue. Magna est Veritas et praevalebit. (Or was it prevalet, which was surely stronger and better?) Ne sutor ultra crepidam: prowling his bookshelves, Professor Simkiss saw that as comprising the nub of the matter. Yes, indeed: let not the cobbler go beyond his last. Suddenly, resolutely, with all passion spent, Geoffrey Simkiss put out a hand and took down a book. Its date was 1568, and its title De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus. He hadn’t been into it for quite some time, but he recalled thinking that, carefully studied, it could be made the occasion for a substantial contribution to a learned journal. He’d have a go at that.