Poetic Justice (6 page)

“But none of that was the worst, you know; it only seemed the worst to those on the outside, who were appalled
at the actions of the students, or appalled at the actions of the police—when what I became so suddenly struck with was the fact that there had never really
been
a university. That a bunch of half-baked, foul-mouthed Maoist students could bring a great university to a standstill, could be followed in their illegal acts by nearly a thousand moderate, thoughtful students, but above all could reveal that the University had never really been administered at all. We had a president whom no one ever saw, whose understanding of the true condition of the University could not have been more inaccurate if his job had been running a yacht club in East Hampton; we had a Board of Governors who had never, literally never, spoken to a student nor visited the University except for the monthly meetings, when their chauffeurs drove them to the campus; we had a faculty so busy with its own affairs that it had not troubled to observe that there was no university, only separate egos, departments, schools, programs all staking claims.

“Do you know, Reed, my brothers, who needless to say were outraged to the last degree that a bunch of unwashed radicals could be allowed to wield such powers, could never understand that there was any fault at work but that of the students and perhaps their overindulgent parents. They could not understand that a fumbling, withdrawn administration and a self-indulged, indifferent faculty were as much to blame as a youthful generation’s failure to observe ‘law and order.’ There were students in those buildings, students I had known in class, who were no more Maoist than I was, who said that the communal life inside the buildings was the first vital experience they had had since they entered the
University. We let it all go dead on us, Reed. Whatever may have happened in other universities, whatever may have been the destructive glee of radical groups at other places—Berkeley, Columbia, or wherever—the blame for what happened to my university was mine—mine and my associates.’ ”

“Those kids were an outrageous group—the radical core.”

“They were. But to blame them for everything that followed is to blame the First World War on the assassin at Sarajevo. I am not, of course, very good at historical analogies. Auden says that:

I know all that; I know it is true of student rebellions at other universities now. But not of my university.”

“Are you going ahead with the University College crusade then in an attempt to grab some stones from the wreckage and build them into a more lasting edifice?”

“Sorry if I’ve been going on. All the same, it does intrigue me that the University College was the single unit in the University where the students, faculty, and administration did not automatically, or even eventually, assume they were working at cross purposes. The faculty at
The
College went about either in open disgust or like fathers who have done everything for their
sons only to be sneered at, treated with disdain and ingratitude. The graduate students revealed that they had long suffered agony from the outworn structures and grading systems of their schools. But Frogmore’s little domain held off chaos and went on with its work. That interests me.”

They stopped by the lake to watch the rowing. “Shall we rent a boat?” Reed asked. Kate shook her head.

“Sorry to run on so,” she said. “I keep trying to put it all into place. All right, I want to say, we were wrong; O.K., we were wrong, we will rebuild. But what a job! All the easy relations of the faculty, one with the other, gone. People have each other tagged now: radical, conservative, untrustworthy. Reed, I wanted to ask you something.”

“I know.”

“You do? How do you know?”

“Talented me, from the District Attorney’s Office. I’ve known you awhile, Kate. I always know when you have a speech ready, and I know that you do not proceed through martinis and champagne to Cherry Heering because Auden did. You couldn’t make the speech sober or, we now know, drunk. How about on a lovely fall morning? Shall we rent bicycles?”

“You have suggested everything but horses. And I haven’t ridden in—oh, since another lifetime. We could of course take one of those horse-drawn carriages.”

“Shall we?”

“Let’s walk. We can get a beer at the boathouse.”

They got the beers, walking in silence, and took them to a spot on a hill where they could watch the bicyclists,
most of them pushing the bikes but a few riding, straining to reach the top. Kate liked to watch the moment when those who had struggled up on their bicycles let the wind catch them, going down.

The life before last spring seems to have been a time of innocence. I am no longer certain of anything, Reed, but I think that in my uncertainty, I would like to live with you, if you will have me.”

“Live with me. What does that mean?”

“Even words don’t mean anything anymore. Live with you. Occupy the same premises, have the same address. Pretend to be married.”

“Pretend?” Reed leaned against a tree, with his hands in his pockets. “The one word I never expected to hear you use. I’ve asked you to marry me often enough; I don’t mind if you ask me.”

“I don’t believe in marriage; not at my age, anyway.”

“Kate, what I cannot pretend is that this University turmoil has improved you. You’ve developed all sorts of alarming symptoms, not least of which is a constant reference to yourself as on the brink of total decrepitude. People get married at your age, as you very well know, and indeed at twice your age. At any rate, if you are doddering, I am doddering even more, and do not find myself in the slightest inspired, as you seem to expect me to be, by the thought of a wife twenty years my junior, however luscious she might be.”

“Reed, I—even Auden wrote a
Dichtung und Wahreit
about love, and not a love poem. There are no words for the words I want to say.”

“May I suggest some? Simple, straightforward, unmistakable?”

“They would not be for what I want to say. I’ve funked it. Why the assurance of being me should be affected by the occupation of a President’s Office which I would not, in any case, have been able even to find, I can’t say. I don’t know. Now, being a woman alone doesn’t seem as easy as it has been. I need, for a time anyway, the sense of being part of a partnership; oh, I mean every petty thing you may wonder about: all the confidence of having a man. But none of that seems to me grounds for marriage.”

“What a very odd idea of marriage you must have. The only people who could possibly have lived up to it were Tristan and Isolde, and all they could do was die. In fact, now I come to think of it, all great lovers cannot choose but die because marriage is essentially mundane and quotidian and useful.”

“ ‘A game, like war, that calls for patience, foresight, maneuver, for those with their wander-years behind them,’ Auden once said.”

“He has said a good deal, I’ll grant him that. Do you know what I think? I think you would have changed anyway, even if your university had not come falling down like London Bridge. It’s simple enough; all we do is find a pig with a ring on the end of his nose, and get married.”

“Reed, I do want a ring, from a pig or merely from Tiffany’s, I want to be half of a pair, as though the world and every dinner party were Noah’s ark and one could
not attend except in pairs, but I don’t want actually, legally to get married. I want you to be legally free.”

Reed laughed. “You want a sham, a plain, unadorned sham, because you won’t allow yourself to be someone’s wife, like any other proper woman. You can’t share my apartment unless you marry me, so there!”

“It seems to me shameful to turn to you now and say let’s get married because I now need a security I didn’t in the least mind scorning before. What I meant about all the luscious young women is simply a recognition of the fact that it is easier for men to marry.”

“I am not ‘men,’ and I doubt that I should find it easy at all to marry. Shall I tell you what worries you? No, don’t stop me. I’ve never known you to balk at the truth, and you shan’t now. From some new-found weakness, like one recovering from an illness, you are seeking to belong—to me, as it so fortunately happens. Not only does it seem unfair to you to capitulate in weakness to what you refused in strength, but you know that the love you have for me is not of the same timbre, not even of the same scale, as the love I have for you. Don’t protest. I know it makes little sense. I agree it makes little sense. I a handsome, talented, affable man in the prime of life, you an aging, argumentative, irrational spinster. But sense or not, I love you, and if we marry it shall be properly, with a ring and a judge and a license so that if you decide to leave me or I you I shall at least not be cheating some lawyer out of the chance to arrange a divorce. Do your brothers have to come to the wedding? I’m glad to hear they don’t, because frankly the thought of your brothers terrifies me. Kate, let’s get married on Thanksgiving. That way, we don’t have to
remember the date even, we can just celebrate on the last Thursday in every November—which will be a holiday, so much more convenient if you stop to think about it. Aren’t you going to say something?”

“I was thinking,” Kate said, “that I never really asked the daisies, and they never told me, but this fall, all the asters knew.”

“I am willing enough to put up with Auden,” Reed said with lapidary phrasing, “I am even willing to quote a bit of Auden now and then on my own, but I want to make
quite
clear that I will not put up with the poetry of Sara Teasdale.”

K
ATE
had been astonished at Frederick Clemance’s invitation to lunch. She felt as nervous, she told Reed, as a teenager on a first date. I mean, she tried to explain, I have worshipped him, or close to it, and what can we possibly find to say now, over an atrocious vegetable omelette at the Faculty Club. I know, Kate said, I am terrified, in Auden’s words, of discovering that a god worth kneeling-to for a while has tabernacled and rested.

Yet her first thought, when she and Clemance were seated, was how old he looked. The spring occurrences had aged him. He had allowed his white hair to grow long, which became him, since he now resembled not so much Emerson as Kate’s idea of Emerson. Yet it was not his white hair nor lined face nor sixty years which
most distressed Kate, sitting opposite him, as his indefinable air of regret, perhaps even of despair.

“So it took a revolution for us to lunch together,” he said. “That is too bad. Well, perhaps it is all destiny—I think, you know, the Greeks were right: family curses are easier to live with than personal failure.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure,” Kate said. “It must be aggravating to find yourself in trouble ‘because of a great-great-grandmother who got laid by a sacred beast.’ ”

Clemance smiled. “How
was
the Auden dissertation?” he asked. “I quite forgot, with all these goings-on. You were good to help me out.”

Kate decided that the details of that particular event were perhaps best glossed over. “It was an excellent dissertation—it managed to appreciate Auden’s poetry without patronizing him or his life. Mr. Cornford was blessed with the understanding that while a new poem of Auden’s is an event in all
our
biographies, we have no business meddling with his.”

“Wouldn’t you like to meet him, all the same?”

“No,” Kate said. “Not for a moment. Oh, I do rather hope one day to hear him read his poems, or catch him again on the telly. But meet him: no. I should be afraid of boring him to death; or worse, going on, like the juggins he mentions in the poem to MacNeice, who went on about Alienation. If I met him I would be certain to be so nervous I would go on about
something.
Besides, Auden’s just a man: as full of demons and petty irritations and unkindnesses as the rest of us—he’s bound to be. What I cherish are the poems, and the persona, the literary biography of him I’ve accumulated over the years.”

“Your instincts are probably right. As Auden says in one of his small humorous poems: ‘I have no gun, but I can spit.’ What are the main events you’ve accumulated in the biography of Auden’s persona?”

Kate looked at Clemance. She admired enormously his attempts at lightness. Kate found herself thinking of Auden’s poem to T. S. Eliot:

“Well,” she said, “what I have is a series of snapshots, really, caught by Auden’s friends. Isherwood describing Auden’s hats: the opera hat, ‘belonging to the period when he decided that poets ought to dress like bank directors, in morning cutaways and striped trousers or evening swallowtails. There was a workman’s cap, with a shiny black peak, which he bought while he was living in Berlin, and which had, in the end, to be burnt, because he was sick into it one evening in a cinema.’ There was a Panama with a black ribbon, representing Auden’s ‘conception of himself as a lunatic clergyman; always a favorite role.’ Isherwood is really the richest source of Auden lore. My favorite of all is Auden in China in 1938 listening with Isherwood to the translation of a poem written in their honor in Chinese. Not to be outdone, Auden replied with a sonnet he had finished writing the day before. Auden had a visiting card in China with his name on it:
Mr. Au Dung.
” Kate chuckled.
“There’s much more, but, of course, you know him, so it seems …”

“Do, please, go on,” Clemance said.