By Christopher Isherwood 3 страница. building, headed for the cafeteria.

building, headed for the cafeteria.

 

He starts across the largish open space which is the midst of the

campus, surrounded by the Art Building, the gymnasium, the Science

Building and the Administration Building, and newly planted with grass and

some hopeful little trees which should make it leafy and shadowy and

pleasant within a few years; that is to say, about the time when they start

tearing the whole place apart again. The air has a tang of smog--called "eye

irritation" in blandese. The mountains of the San Gabriel Range--which still

give San Tomas State something of the glamour of a college high on a

plateau of the Andes, on the few days you can see them properly--are hidden

today as usual in the sick yellow fumes which arise from the metropolitan

mess below.

 

And now, all around George, approaching him, crossing his path from

every direction, is the male and female raw material which is fed daily into

this factory, along the conveyer belts of the freeways, to be processed,

packaged and placed on the market: Negroes, Mexicans, Jews, Japanese,

Chinese, Latins, Slavs, Nordics, the dark heads far predominating over the

blond. Hurrying in pursuit of their schedules, loitering in flirty talk, strolling

in earnest argument, muttering some lesson to themselves alone--all book-

burdened, all harassed.

 

What do they think they're up to, here? Well, there is the official

answer: preparing themselves for life, which means a job and security in

which to raise children to prepare themselves for life which means a job and

security in which. But, despite all the vocational advisers, the pamphlets

pointing out to them what good money you can earn if you invest in some

solid technical training--pharmacology, let's say, or accountancy, or the

varied opportunities offered by the vast field of electronics--there are still,

incredibly enough, quite a few of them who persist in writing poems, novels,

plays! Goofy from lack of sleep, they scribble in snatched moments between

 

classes, part-time employment and their married lives. Their brains are dizzy

with words as they mop out an operating room, sort mail at a post office, fix

baby's bottle, fry hamburgers. And somewhere, in the midst of their

servitude to the must-be, the mad might-be whispers to them to live, know,

experience--what? Marvels! The Season in Hell, the Journey to the End of

the Night, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Clear Light of the Void.... Will

any of them make it? Oh, sure. One, at least. Two or three at most--in all

these searching thousands.

 

Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will

become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them,

right now, here, that it's hopeless?

 

But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately,

in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope

is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real

diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the

tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to

believe that it could conceivably be real.

 

Outside the cafeteria are announcements of the current student

activities: Squaws' Night, Golden Fleece Picnic, Fogcutters' Ball, Civic

Society Meeting and the big game against LPSC. These advertised rituals of

the San Tomas Tribe aren't quite convincing; they are promoted only by a

minority of eager beavers. The rest of these boys and girls do not really think

of themselves as a tribe, although they are willing to pretend that they do on

special occasions. All that they actually have in common is their urgency:

the need to get with it, to finish that assignment which should have been

handed in three days ago. When George eavesdrops on their conversation, it

is nearly always about what they have failed to do, what they fear the

professor will make them do, what they have risked not doing and gotten

away with.

 

The cafeteria is crammed. George stands at the door, looking around.

Now that he is a public utility, the property of STSC, he is impatient to be

used. He hates to see even one minute of himself being wasted. He starts to

walk among the tables with a tentative smile, a forty-watt smile ready to be

switched up to a hundred and fifty watts just as soon as anyone asks for it.

 

Now, to his relief, he sees Russ Dreyer, and Dreyer rises from his

table to greet him. He has no doubt been on the lookout for George. Dreyer

has gradually become George's personal attendant, executive officer,

bodyguard. He is an angular, thin-faced young man with a flat-top haircut

and rimless glasses. He wears a somewhat sporty Hawaiian shirt which, on

him, seems like a prim shy concession to the sportiness of the clothes around

 

him. His undershirt, appearing in the open V of his unbuttoned collar, looks

surgically clean, as always. Dreyer is a grade A scholar, and his European

counterpart would probably be a rather dry and brittle stick. But Dreyer is

neither dry nor brittle. He has discreet humor and, as an ex-Marine,

considerable toughness. He once described to George a typical evening he

and his wife, Marinette, spent with his buddy Tom Kugelman and Tom's

wife. "Tom and I got into an argument about Finnegans Wake. It went on all

through supper. So then the girls said they were sick of listening to us, so

they went out to a movie. Tom and I did the dishes and it got to be ten

o'clock and we were still arguing and we hadn't convinced each other. So we

got some beer out of the icebox and went out in the yard. Tom's building a

shed there, but he hasn't got the roof on yet. So then he challenged me to a

chinning match, and we started chinning ourselves on the crossbeam over

the door, and I whipped him thirteen to eleven."

 

George is charmed by this story. Somehow, it's like classical Greece.

 

"Good morning, Russ."

 

"Good morning, sir." It isn't the age difference which makes Dreyer

call George "sir." As soon as they come to the end of this quasi-military

relationship, he will start saying "George," or even "Geo," without

hesitation.

 

Together they go over to the coffee machine, fill mugs, select

doughnuts from the counter. As they turn toward the cash desk, Dreyer slips

ahead of George with the change ready. "No--let me, sir."

 

"You're always paying."

 

Dreyer grins. "We're in the chips, since I put Marinette to work."

 

"She got that teaching job?"

 

"It just came through. Of course, it's only temporary. The only snag is,

she has to get up an hour earlier."

 

"So you're fixing your own breakfast?"

 

"Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her

pregnant." He visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he

know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It

wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my

glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head

carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.)

 

"Say, that reminds me," Dreyer is saying, "Marinette wanted me to

ask you, sir--we were wondering if you could manage to get out to us again

before too long? We could cook up some spaghetti. And maybe Tom could

bring over that tape I was telling you about--the one he got from the audio-

visual up at Berkeley, of Katherine Anne Porter reading her stuff--"

 

 

"That'd be fine," says George vaguely, with enthusiasm. He glances

up at the clock. "I say, we ought to be going."

 

Dreyer isn't in the least damped by his vagueness. Probably he does

not want George to come to supper any more than George wants to go. It is

all symbol-ic. Marinette has told him to ask, and he has asked, and now it is

on record that George has accepted, for the second time, an invitation to

their home. And this means that George is an intimate and can be referred to

in after years as part of their circle in the old days. Oh yes, the Dreyers will

loyally do their part to make George's place secure among the grand old

bores of yesteryear. George can just picture one of those evenings in the

1990's, when Russ is dean of an English department in the Middle West and

Marinette is the mother of grown-up sons and daughters. An audience of

young instructors and their wives, symbolically entertaining Dr. and Mrs.

Dreyer, will be symbolically thrilled to catch the Dean in an anecdotal

mood, mooning and mumbling with a fuddled smile through a maze of

wowless sagas, into which George and many many others will enter, uttering

misquotes. And Marinette, permanently smiling, will sit listening with the

third ear--the one that has heard it all before--and praying for eleven o'clock

to come. And it will come. And all will agree that this has been a memorable

evening indeed.

 

As they walk toward the classroom, Dreyer asks George what he

thinks about what Dr. Leavis said about Sir Charles Snow. (These far-off

unhappy Old Things and their long ago battles are still hot news out here in

Sleepy Hollow State.) "Well, first of all--" George begins.

 

They are passing the tennis courts at this moment. Only one court is

occupied, by two young men playing singles. The sun has come out with

sudden fierce heat through the smog-haze, and the two are stripped nearly

naked. They have nothing on their bodies but gym shoes and thick sweat

socks and knit shorts of the kind cyclists wear, very short and close-fitting,

molding themselves to the buttocks and the loins. They are absolutely

unaware of the passers-by, isolated in the intentness of their game. You

would think there was no net between them. Their nakedness makes them

seem close to each other and directly opposed, body to body, like fighters. If

this were a fight, though, it would be one-sided, for the boy on the left is

much the smaller. He is Mexican, maybe, black-haired, handsome, catlike,

cruel, compact, lithe, muscular, quick and graceful on his feet. His body is a

natural dark gold-brown; there is a fuzz of curly black hair on his chest and

belly and thighs. He plays hard and fast, with cruel mastery, baring his white

teeth, unsmiling, as he slams back the ball. He is going to win. His opponent,

the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touch-lug gallantry in his

 

defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his

classical cream marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game

inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He

should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, and force the cruel

little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond

boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and

humiliation rather than break them. His helpless bigness and blondness give

him an air of unmodern chivalry. He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman,

until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all

through Ins life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind

of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent

who is quick and clever and merciless?

 

This game is cruel; but its cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot

excitement. He feels a thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their

response; too often, now, they seem sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks

these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they

have done to make this moment marvelous to him, and life itself less

hateful...

 

Dreyer is saying, "Sorry, sir--I lost you for a minute, there. I

understand about the two cultures, of course--but do you mean you agree

with Dr. Leavis?" Far from taking the faintest interest in the tennis players,

Dreyer walks with his body half turned away from them, his whole

concentration fixed upon George's talking head.

 

For it obviously has been talking. George realizes this with the same

discomfiture he felt on the freeway, when the chauffeur-figure got them

clear downtown. Oh yes, he knows from experience what the talking head

can do, late in the evening, when he is bored and tired and drunk, to help

him through a dull party. It can play back all of George's favorite theories--

just as long as it isn't argued with; then it may become confused. It knows at

least three dozen of his best anecdotes. But here, in broad daylight, during

campus hours, when George should be on-stage every second, in full control

of his performance! Can it be that talking head and the chauffeur are in

league? Are they maybe planning a merger?

 

"We really haven't time to go into all this right now," he tells Dreyer

smoothly. "And anyhow, I'd like to check up on the Leavis lecture again.

I've still got that issue of The Spectator somewhere at home, I think... Oh, by

the way, did you ever get to read that piece on Mailer, about a month ago--in

Esquire, wasn't it? It's one of the best things I've seen in a long time...."

 

 

 

 

GEORGE'S classroom has two doors in its long side waII, one up front, the

other at the back of the room. Most of the students enter from the back

because, with an infuriating sheep-obstinacy, they love to huddle together,

confronting their teachers from behind a barrier made of empty seats. But

this semester the class is only a trifle smaller than the capacity of the room.

Late comers are forced to sit farther and farther forward, to George's sly

satisfaction; finally, they have to take the second row. As for the front row,

which most of them shun so doggedly, George can fill that up with his

regulars: Russ Dreyer, Tom Kugelman, Sister Maria, Mr. Stoessel, Mrs.

Netta Torres, Kenny Potter, Lois Yamaguchi.

 

George never enters the classroom with Dreyer, or any other student.

A deeply rooted dramatic instinct forbids him to do so. This is really all that

he uses his office for--as a place to withdraw into before class, ', imply in

order to re-emerge from it and make his entrance. He doesn't interview

students in it, because these offices are shared by at least two faculty

members, and Dr. Gottlieb, who teaches the Metaphysical Poets, is nearly

always there. George cannot talk to another human being as if the two of

them were alone when, in fact, they aren't. Even such a harmless question as

"What do you honestly think of Emerson?" sounds indecently intimate, and

such a mild criticism as "What you've written is a mixed metaphor and it

doesn't mean anything" sounds unnecessarily cruel, when Dr. Gottlieb is

right there at the other desk listening or, what's worse, pretending not to

listen. But Gottlieb obviously doesn't feel this way. Perhaps it is a peculiarly

British scruple.

 

So now, leaving Dreyer, George goes into the office. It is right across

the hallway. Gottlieb isn't there, for a wonder. George peeps out of the

window between the slats of the Venetian blinds and sees, in the far

distance, the two tennis players still at their game. He coughs, fingers the

telephone directory without looking at it, closes the empty drawer in his

desk, which has been pulled open a little. Then, abruptly, he turns, takes his

briefcase out of the closet, leaves the office and crosses to the front

classroom door.

 

His entrance is quite undramatic according to conventional standards.

Nevertheless, this is a subtly contrived, outrageously theatrical effect. No

hush falls as George walks in. Most of the students go right on talking. But

they are all watching him, waiting for him to give some sign, no matter how

slight, that the class is to begin. The effect is a subtle but gradually

increasing tension, caused by George's teasing refusal to give this sign and

the students' counterdetermination not to stop talking until he gives it.

 

 

Meanwhile, he stands there. Slowly, deliberately, like a magician, he

takes a single book out of his briefcase and places it on the reading desk. As

he does this, his eyes move over the faces of the class. His lips curve in a

faint but bold smile. Some of them smile back at him. George finds this

frank confrontation extraordinarily exhilarating. He draws strength from

these smiles, these bright young eyes. For him, this is one of the peak

moments of the day. He feels brilliant, vital, challenging, slightly mysterious

and, above all, foreign. His neat dark clothes, his white dress shirt and tie

(the only tie in the room) are uncompromisingly alien from the aggressively

virile informality of the young male students. Most of these wear sneakers

and garterless white wool socks, jeans in cold weather, and in warm weather

shorts (the thigh-clinging Bermuda type--the more becoming short ones

aren't considered quite decent). If it is really warm, they'll roll up their

sleeves and sometimes leave their shirts provocatively unbuttoned to show

curly chest hair and a St. Christopher medal. They look as if they were ready

at any minute to switch from studying to ditch-digging or gang-fighting.

They seem like mere clumsy kids in contrast with the girls, for these have all

outgrown their teen-age phase of Capri pants, sloppy shirts and giant heads

of teased-up hair. They are mature women, and they come to class dressed as

if for a highly respectable party.

 

This morning George notes that all of his front-row regulars are

present. Dreyer and Kugelman are the only ones he has actually asked to

help fill the gap by sitting there; the rest of them have their individual

reasons for doing so. While George is teaching, Dreyer watches him with an

encouraging alertness; but George knows that Dreyer isn't really impressed

by him. To Dreyer, George will always remain an academic amateur; his

degrees and background are British and therefore dubious. Still, George is

the Skipper, the Old Man; and Dreyer, by supporting his authority, supports

the structure of values up which he himself proposes to climb. So he wills

George to be brilliant and impress the outsiders--that is to say, everyone else

in the class. The fanny thing is that Dreyer, with the clear conscience of

absolute loyalty, feels free to whisper to Kugelman, his lieutenant, as often

as he wants to. Whenever this happens, George longs to stop talking and

listen to what they are saying about him. Instinctively, George is sure that

Dreyer would never dream of talking about anyone else during class: that

would be bad manners.

 

Sister Maria belongs to a teaching order. Soon she'll get her credential

and become a teacher herself. She is, no doubt, a fairly normal,

unimaginative, hardworking good young woman; and no doubt she sits up

front because it helps her concentrate, maybe even because the boys still

 

interest her a little and she wants to avoid looking at them. But we, most of

us, lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus

exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising

medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive. An unwilling

conscript in Hell's legions, he faces the soldier of Heaven across the front

line of art exceedingly polite cold war. In every sentence he addresses to her,

he calls her "Sister"; which is probably just what she doesn't want.

 

Mr. Stoessel sits in the front row because he is deaf and middle-aged

and only lately arrived from Europe, and his English is terrible.

 

Mrs. Netta Torres is also middle-aged. She seems to be taking this

course out of mere curiosity or to fill in idle hours. She has the look of a

divorcee. She sits up front because her interest is centered frankly and

brutally on George as George. She watches rather than listens to him. She

even seems to be "reading" his words indirectly, through a sort of Braille

made up of his gestures, inflections, mannerisms. And this almost tactile

scrutiny is accompanied by a motherly smile, for, to Mrs. Torres, George is

just a small boy, really, and so cute. George would love to catch her out and

discourage her from attending his class by giving her low grades. But, alas,

he can't. Mrs. Torres is listening as well as watching; she can repeat what he

has been saying, word for word.

 

Kenny Potter sits in the front row because he's what's nowadays called

crazy, meaning only that he tends to do the opposite of what most people do;

not on principle, however, and certainly not out of aggressiveness. Probably

he's too vague to notice the manners and customs of the tribe, and too lazy to

follow them, anyway. He is a tall skinny boy with very broad stooped

shoulders, gold-red hair, a small head, small bright-blue eyes. He would be

conventionally handsome if he didn't have a beaky nose; but it is a nice one,

a large, humorous organ.

 

George finds himself almost continuously aware of Kenny's presence

in the room, but this doesn't mean that he regards Kenny as an ally. Oh, no--

he can never venture to take Kenny for granted. Sometimes when George

makes a joke and Kenny laughs his deep, rather wild, laugh, George feels he

is being laughed with. At oilier times, when the laugh comes a fraction of a

moment late, George gets a spooky impression that Kenny is laughing not at

the joke but at the whole situation: the educational system of this country,

and all the economic and political and psychological forces which have

brought them into this classroom together. At such limes, George suspects

Kenny of understanding the in-nermost meaning of life--of being, in fact,

some sort of a genius (though you would certainly never guess this from his

 

term papers). And then again, maybe Kenny is just very young for his age,

and misleadingly charming, and silly.

 

Lois Yamaguchi sits beside Kenny because she is his girl friend; at

least, they are nearly always together. She smiles at George in a way that

makes him wonder if she and Kenny have private jokes about him--but who

can be sure of anything with these enigmatic Asians? Alexander Mong

smiles enigmatically, too, though his beautiful head almost certainly

contains nothing but clotted oil paint. Lois and Alexander are by far the most

beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants,

seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.

 

All this while, the tension has been mounting. George has continued

to smile at the talkers and to preserve his wonderful provocative

melodramatic silence. And now, at last, after nearly four whole minutes, his

silence has conquered them. The talking dies down. Those who have already

stopped talking shush the others. George has triumphed. But his triumph

lasts only for a moment. For now he must break his own spell. Now he must

cast off his mysteriousness and stand revealed as that dime-a-dozen thing, a

teacher, to whom the class has got to listen, no matter whether he drools or

stammers or speaks with the tongue of an angel--that's neither here nor there.

The class has got to listen to George because, by virtue of the powers vested

in him by the State of California, he can make them submit to and study

even his crassest prejudices, his most irresponsible caprices, as so many

valuable clues to the problem: How can I impress, flatter or otherwise con

this cantankerous old thing into giving me a good grade?

 

Yes, alas, now he must spoil everything. Now he must speak.

 

"AFTER many a summer dies the swan.' " George rolls the words off

his tongue with such hammy harmonics, such shameless relish, that this

sounds like a parody of W. B. Yeats reciting. (He comes down on "dies"

with a great thump to compensate for the "And" which Aldous Huxley has

chopped off from the beginning of the original line.) Then, having managed

to startle or embarrass at least a few of them, he looks around the room with

an ironical grin and says quickly, schoolmasterishly, "I take it you've all read

the Huxley novel by this time, seeing that I asked you to more than three

weeks ago?"

 

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Buddy Sorensen's evident

dismay, which is not unexpected, and Estelle Oxford's indignant now-they-

tell-me shrug of the shoulders, which is more serious. Estelle is one of his

brightest students. Just because she is bright, she is more conscious of being

a Negro, apparently, than the other colored students in the class are; in fact,

she is hypersensitive. George suspects her of suspecting him of all kinds of

 

subtle discrimination. Probably she wasn't ii the room when he told them to

read the novel. Damn, he should have noticed that and told her later. He is a

bit intimidated by her. Also he likes her and is sorry. Also he resents the way

she makes him feel.

 

"Oh well," he says, as nicely as he can, "if any of you haven't read it

yet, that's not too important. Just listen to what's said this morning, and then

you can read it and see if you agree or disagree."

 

He looks at Estelle and smiles. She smiles back. So, this time, it's

going to be all right.

 

"The title is, of course, a quotation from Tennyson's poem `Tithonus.'

And, by the way, while we're on the subject--who was Tithonus?"

 

Silence. He looks from face to face. Nobody knows. Even Dreyer

doesn't know. And, Christ, how typical this is! Tithonus doesn't concern

them because he's at two removes from their subject. Huxley, Tennyson,

Tithonus. They're prepared to go as far as Tennyson, but not one step farther.

There their curiosity ends. Because, basically, they don't give a shit,.

 

"You seriously mean to tell me that none of you knows who Tithonus

was? That none of you could be bothered to find out? Well then, advise you

all to spend part of your weekend reading Graves's Greek Myths, and the

poem itself. I must say, I don't see how anyone can pretend to be interested

in a novel when he doesn't even stop to ask himself what its title means."

 

This spurt of ill temper dismays George as soon as he has discharged

it. Oh dear, he is getting nasty! And the worst is, he never knows when he's

going to behave like this. He has no time to check himself. Shamefaced now,

and avoiding all their eyes--Kenny Potter's particularly--he fastens his gaze