HENRY MULCAHY’s contract was renewed late in February. He at once let it be known that he signed under pressure; the new contract contained no provision for the rise in salary to which length of service now entitled him. But faculty opinion, as he probed it, was neutral for once on a salary question. Nobody denied the facts, but nobody seemed anxious to act on them. There seemed to be a movement to flee from the subject, as from an embarrassing connection, even while it was being admitted that, yes, there was a certain “hardship,” as if the admission wholly relieved the speaker of the need of doing anything about it. Of all those who assured him, with an air of expert knowledge, that he had better settle down and forget it, nobody volunteered to tell him how he was going to support six people on thirty-two hundred a year. The common prescription was that he should try “creative” writing—with four children in the house!—even his wife, Cathy, subscribed to this vulgar success-dream and kept urging him to enter a contest sponsored by an influential quarterly for the best long short story by a person in academic life. To be told to write for money was the final insult to his talent and to a lifetime of sacrifice to an anti-commercial ideal. The very suggestion informed him that there was a new and subtle influence at work against him on the campus. He knew where it came from—Miss Domna Rejnev, who went about murmurously confessing that she had just sold some of her wretched mannerist verse to that same influential quarterly and advising everybody else to seek publication, like a woman in an advertisement who has found satisfaction in the use of Pond’s cold cream.
And it was this modest young lady who was daring to gibe at him to her classes under the pretense of deploring what she called the “scholasticism” of contemporary criticism, the egoism of the modern artist-figure; he recognized her characteristic touch in the phrase that he began to hear parroted by the students: “the theophany of modern literature,” ecod! She flushed whenever she saw him, and with good reason, for she could not face the plain fact that he and Cathy had dropped her; to hide this from her following, she always pretended to be concerned and friendly, asking about the children and threatening to “look in” on Cathy, “when she had a moment to spare.” She held her head very high these days, as though her pretty ears were burning; she ought to have known that to break with him and join the herd of success-mongers and philistines was going to be a risky play.
He watched her strolling about the campus with Bentkoop and Milton Kantorowitz, the painter, holding an arm of each and looking up earnestly into their faces, the square Dutch head and narrow, long-nosed Jewish one making, as the students said, an interesting pictorial composition, and he smiled to think that Domna regarded the two melancholy men as bucklers of invincibility, a very foolish illusion, since Bentkoop, according to his wife, was thinking of leaving Jocelyn to study for holy orders, and Kantorowitz was a learned simpleton like all painters and had no understanding whatever of the verbal disciplines and their problems and was more likely to embarrass Domna than to help her in a literary crisis.
And that, Mulcahy assured himself, was what was on the cards. Domna had made a cardinal error in using an attack on modern literature to strike at him through the students. True, the immediate trend on the campus might seem to justify her conduct. There was a moment in the spring when the whole Jocelyn sideshow seemed to be boarding the gravy train, on to fatter triumphs of platitude and mediocrity. Dr. Hoar won an award in the field of human relations and was presented with a scroll by a United Nations luminary at a little ceremony in the chapel. Warren Austin, through an emissary, consented to speak at Commencement, and the creator of Li’l Abner was to be made a Doctor of Letters. Aristide (the Just) Poncy copped a Fulbright to lecture on Amiel in Lebanon and promptly rented his house to a grateful Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, whose contract, as if by jinn-magic, found itself renewed. Considine Van Tour, at the age of forty, announced his engagement to a widow with a fortune of twenty thousand a year, whom he had met at a writer’s conference in Iowa during the previous summer. Grünthal, of Psychology, got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a study of the learning process, and his students were posted in every class, like Pinkerton men in a museum, observing and making assayments of the retention of auditory material. One of Furness’ long-tressed Ritas was promised a movie-test, and her father was reciprocating Furness’ introduction to an agent by a gift of a thousand dollars to finance a poetry conference, to be held in the chapel in April, with a panel of ten poets; already, of course, there was great rivalry over where they were to stay, who was to give the dinner for them, who cocktails, and so on. Yet this very poetry conference, at which Domna was expecting to scintillate, was going to teach her a little lesson in the workings of retribution—as her friend, Bentkoop, might have told her, you cannot serve God and Mammon, and she had had her first inklings of this truth at a recent departmental meeting when the committee for the conference was selected and her name was wonderfully not included.
Mulcahy himself took no credit for this stroke; he owed it to his protégé, young Ellison, an extraordinary poet in his own right, with a firm sense of true values, and no sentimental hesitations in making them operative. The boy’s doll-like exterior, pink cheeks, Episcopal-school manner and pale, hoarse voice were belying; he had a center of iron and absolute professional integrity. Domna, who contemptuously described him as a neo-traditionalist ultra, showed her own incapacity for assessing the true direction of the modern movement as well as a pitiable lack of judgment in selecting one’s adversary. The real enemies of the future of poetry, as Mulcahy could have told her, were the sentimental progressives, like Consy Van Tour, with his flaccid, prosy devotions to K.A.P., Hemingway, Lardner, Saroyan, and the bristling methodistical moralists, like Alma Fortune, who, following Leavis and the Cambridge school, pretended to see in a man’s style glaring revelations of his personal faults and evasions, the public health inspectors placarding Finnegans Wake and the late James as diseased—these were the trough-wallowers and the trimmers, whom Domna chose to rally with in today’s crisis in contemporary art. The rediscovery of George Eliot, indeed! As he laughingly remarked to Ellison, who’s traditionalist now?
It was Ellison, all honor to him, who had foreseen from the start the importance of keeping her off the committee and the ease with which this could be maneuvered, merely by conciliating Furness, who held the purse-strings and cared for nothing but that he should be allowed to put up two or three of the more réclames poets and give the official party for the conference in his handsome, dark-beamed, long living room. A few walks with Ellison, in his bohemian sweat-shirt and sneakers, and Furness was reluctantly able to see that to put Domna on the committee would make the wrong impression on the poets, who were surfeited with Radcliffe misses and faded libertarian poses. There was no fear in the boy and no truckling to convention. “Her verse isn’t taken seriously,” Mulcahy heard him explain to Furness, within Domna’s hearing, as if he were calmly citing some incontrovertible natural fact, and when Mulcahy poked him, he let his eyes rest square on her, coolly and neutrally, while continuing his exposition. All this, admittedly, excited Mulcahy very much; he felt something remarkable in this friendship, which reminded him, in some of its reversals, of the friendship of Verlaine and Rimbaud. Though he knew himself to be the boy’s intellectual superior, both in age and attainments, he often felt like his pupil in the ordinary affairs of life. Ellison seemed to have achieved, through youth and singlemindedness, a dizzying simplification; he did not recognize the existence of obstacles felt to be palpable by timid and second-rate people. The fact that he was not liked in the department neither grieved nor interested him; he saw that the voting strength was divided three to two against himself and Mulcahy, with Furness as the pivotal figure, and he treated Furness frankly for what he was—a pivot—making no attempt at friendship and merely assuming, at certain critical junctures, that Furness would want to be told how to vote. And simply by virtue of this assumption, his sway over Furness was near-absolute. He did not forget, either, that Domna had only half a vote, which seemed to him, in fact, her primary characteristic; he did not, like Mulcahy, worry over what she might think or do if she “caught on” to what was being planned against her. “She has only half a vote,” he replied tranquilly, whenever such conjectures were broached.
This foresight and lucidity made a great impression on Mulcahy, who watched with respect while the department voted, unanimously, on Ellison’s suggestion, for a committee of two. Ellison was then elected, without a single dissent, and immediately nominated Mulcahy to serve with him. This was the ticklish moment; Van Tour, with an aggrieved expression, nominated Domna; Furness, looking uneasy, proposed a secret ballot. When the votes were counted, Mulcahy had won easily—there were only two counters against him, Van Tour’s and Alma’s, as he ascertained from the wastebasket; it had been an unnecessary precaution to vote for himself. Irrationally—for it had all gone according to schedule—he felt a little ashamed and supinely gave in to Furness, who also appeared to have qualms and truculently insisted that Domna should be invited to chair the important afternoon session—a quite unnecessary concession, as Ellison remarked later to Cathy, who was in full agreement.
What fascinated Mulcahy about Ellison’s attitude toward Domna was the fact that it was completely literary and devoid of personal ill-feeling. He simply paid her no heed in extra-poetic connections, as if she were a superfluous quantity. So he treated all people who bored him and most general ideas. To people and ideas his adaptation was functional, as to food, drink, and clothing. He used only what was necessary to his immediate purpose, and his life, in Mulcahy’s eyes, in comparison to his own, had a wonderful spare, stripped beauty, like that of a Mondrian painting. When he came to the house in the evening, he brought his own bottle with him, which he placed on the floor beside him; he accepted a glass from Cathy and refilled it till the bottle was gone. He was fond of charades and singing. He made Cathy take up her music again, so that she could sing to him in the evenings. He liked to have Henry read Joyce to him, for the rhythms and vocabulary, he explained, though Joyce did not interest him as an author: his work was too naturalistic. He ate very little and often drank himself stiff—the legend put about by the students, that he wore nothing under his outer clothing, was correct, Mulcahy found, when he put him to bed on the sofa.
For his friends, he was full of energy and a multiplicity of plans. He discouraged Cathy from cutting her hair, in imitation of Domna, but counseled instead a permanent and large, regular old-fashioned waves, like those shown in the old Nestlé advertisements or in Morris Hirshfield’s women. One evening, he brought a shawl with him, which he said he had stolen off a piano; she put it on and danced while he blew on a mouth-organ which he produced from his dungarees’ pocket. It was he who got her to write poetry again and advised her not to show it to Henry, lest she be thought to be influenced by him. He promised to send it to Furioso, which had published some of his own verse, as soon as she accumulated enough and urged her meanwhile to write constantly, at every hour of the day, to develop that first verbal facility; he had her read Pope and Dante and listen to Caruso’s records. Encouraged, Cathy wrote steadily, on the backs of the children’s drawings, of laundry lists and achievement sheets; it was her fancy to stylize herself as a naïve or housewife poet, in the style of Grandma Moses—a shrewd idea, commended Ellison, and suggested she try Partisan Review, with an eye to being picked up by Life.
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 blighted; 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. “Choosing 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.
Yet now, in the presence of the department, Mulcahy experienced misgivings. Would the department swallow these poets, whom, to tell the truth, he himself had boggled at somewhat until Ellison had reassured him? He cast a curious look at Domna and at Furness, who appeared to be struggling with what he could not help but recognize as a desire to laugh. “Herbert,” said Furness, in a muffled voice, “the purpose of this conference is not to emulate Columbus. We need a few of the old landmarks—you know, Stevens, Dr. Williams, Miss Moore—to give the students their bearings.” Domna gave a delighted laugh. It was plain to Mulcahy that he and Ellison had erred, since she did not seem at all offended but truly and spontaneously amused. “The list,” she cried, “is perfect to be buried in a time-capsule. In twenty years, we will dig it up and find whether the promise has been fulfilled.” Ellison regarded her calmly. “You find bliss in your ignorance,” he stated, like one making a scientific discovery. Domna opened her mouth sharply to answer, but on a sudden placatory impulse Mulcahy intervened. “Who would you like to ask, Domna?” he queried, with an anxious, appealing smile. “Have we overlooked somebody whom you think important?” Furness’ smooth jaw dropped; he stared; everybody’s gaze followed his to Domna, who looked nonplussed and yet touched.
“My private opinion,” she said finally, “has no special right to be considered. There is always injustice when a conference claims to be representative—any tendency that exists, if only in one person, can demand a right to be heard. My real criticism of this list—please excuse me—is that it seems to be based on an expectation of cruelty in its confrontations. You have listed several pale, respectable old men, with a long history of publication, one man in middle life whose poetic reputation is in eclipse, and four or five fledglings who have published very little and are noted principally for a critical intransigency. What do you expect to happen? Those young men will tear their elders to pieces, to the joy of the student-body, and the older men will not retaliate because they are disarmed by their success and will not stoop to in-fighting with puny adversaries, who have no body of work to put at stake. You’re planning a Roman holiday, for what motives I can’t imagine, unless you expect publicity. And how is it you ask no women? Do you think that a sentiment of chivalry might be a deterrent to blood-thirst?”
“But it’s those pale respectable old men who have everything their own way in poetry,” protested Mulcahy, aggrieved. “Nonsense,” said Domna. “Every one of those old men lives in terror of some youthful thug who plays bodyguard to him and dictates whom and what he shall endorse. What you’re doing is asking them to come here without their customary protection—the poor things, it’s pathetic—to face a gang of hoodlums. You must show a certain piety by inviting the usual flappers and buffers: the poets of the middle ground.”
“What an appraisal of the poetic situation,” murmured Ellison. Domna flared up. “The trouble with the poetic situation,” she said, “is that it has become organized, like the Skull and Bones society, on the lines of mutual assistance, not to let the fellow-member down. With the advent of the new criticism to America, we’ve learned to become ‘readers’ of poetry and lost our critical standards. During the past fifteen years, criticism within the fold has been reduced to a minimum. On the other hand, no poet of any real merit has been excluded from the fold, so that complaints appear unjustified. You and your friends”—she turned to Ellison—“are too impatient. You want to make a putsch for the sake of tighter control, more daring methods of promotion, but violence is unnecessary. Time will bring you power.”
“Is she accusing me of being a fascist?” said Ellison, speaking to the room at large. There was no answer. Furness coughed. “Why don’t you make a practical suggestion, Domna?” But Domna suddenly turned obstinate. “The omissions are obvious,” she declared. “You have a wide choice—Tate, Ransom, Miss Moore, Empson, Jarrell, Shapiro, Auden, Winters, Roethke, Lowell, Miss Bishop. Who am I to say?” At the mention of these names, Ellison shuddered and directed his gaze out the window. With the defection of the two poets, Furness stepped into the breach and made two or three recommendations. The meeting adjourned.
Henry caught up with Domna as she was passing through the swinging doors into the other part of the building. He touched her on the sleeve. “Domna,” he said, “I don’t want you to misunderstand Herbert. He meant nothing personal, I promise you. You and he are not really far apart; the very things you said this afternoon I’ve had him tell me a dozen times. It’s the old business of the ins and the outs. He’s a natural out like you and me and deeply fears any compromise. This makes him standoffish and touchy, just like you.” Domna shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “Not like me. I’m not a natural out.” He swung into step beside her as she started across the campus. “Domna,” he said, suddenly, “who was behind that meeting?” Domna’s face froze; the faint, musing smile died on her lips. He felt her stiffen as he took her arm. “Was it Furness?” he asked. Domna shook her head. “Or Alma?” he prompted, more softly. “No,” she cried. “It was all of us, the whole department.”
Henry smiled. “Dear Domna, I was not born yesterday. There is always an initiator. Who spoke first? I think I have a right to know.” “We all did,” she reiterated. Henry laughed aloud. “I can find out very easily, you know, but let’s try guessing and you will tell me if I hit it right the first time.” He held up his bare hand and began to count on the plump, shortish fingers, as though playing with a child. Domna continued to shake her head, but he could see that she was curious to know whether he guessed right. “We’ll eliminate poor old Consy,” he said. “He bears no grudges and knows nothing about poetry. If it had been a short story conference, we might have expected him to fight. You?” He scrutinized her carefully, down to her narrow fine-leather shoes. “No. I think not. If it had been you, you would have said so, out of sheer incontinence. It is Furness, then, or Alma. Which one? On the whole, I think Alma. A little bird has been telling me that Alma is angry with me. Somebody has put it into her head that I am ‘angling’ for her job and trying to push her into leaving Jocelyn.” Domna flushed, uncontrollably. “Just ask her,” he went on, “whether she remembers the morning when I pleaded with her not to go through with her resignation. Now, naturally, it’s too late and she has only herself to blame if she can’t find another position. I’ve done all I could, God knows, written stacks of letters for her, but nobody seems to want her. Let’s say, then, I guess Alma. Do you deny it?” “No,” said Domna, stopping in her tracks and whirling on him. “I don’t deny it or assert it. You have no right to ask such things.” She hesitated. “But if you’re going to suspect Alma, I’ll tell you. You’re wrong. It was me.” Henry gave a pitying laugh. “Dear Domna, don’t you think I know that you and I have no students in common? If a student betrayed my confidence to a teacher, it could not have been to you. You gave yourselves away when you told me you had student sources. The others were too canny to do that. It was you who made the slip.”
Domna drew a long breath. “As it happens,” she announced, “you’re wrong. We do have a student in common, but it was not that student who told me. I beg you, leave this thing alone. Nobody meant you any harm; we were merely thinking of the college and of the unfortunate effect on the students of a débâcle at the poetry conference. If Ellison was planning some outrage, we owe you a debt of gratitude for telling your students about it. There was no intent to injure you, only a public solicitude which was possibly exaggerated. You must not harbor vindictive feelings against anyone, including your students, who acted also for what they thought was the best.”
Henry squeezed her arm. “I don’t harbor them against you, Domna,” he said cheerily. “I congratulate you for a valiant attempt to shield your friend, Alma.” He doffed his old gray hat to her and turned quickly back on his steps. In the Administration Building, in the registrar’s office, he found the class-file he was looking for. “Miss Rejnev, Oral French, Sheila McKay (transfer),” he noted and hurriedly slipped the card back.