By Christopher Isherwood 4 страница

 

Mr. Propter has no sex life. This makes him unconvincing as a character.

 

Mr. Propter's sex life is unconvincing.

 

Mr. Propter is a Jeffersonian democrat, an anarchist, a Bolshevik, a proto-John-Bircher.

 

Mr. Propter is an escapist. This is illustrated by the conversation with Pete about the Civil War in Spain. Pete was a good guy until Mr. Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God.

 

Huxley really understands women. Giving Virginia a rose-colored motor scooter was a perfect touch.

 

And so on and so forth....

 

George stands there smiling, saying very little, letting them enjoy themselves. He presides over the novel like an attendant at a carnival booth, encouraging the crowd to throw and smash their targets; it's all good clean fun. However, there are certain ground rules which must be upheld. When someone starts in about mescaline and lysergic acid, implying that Mr.

Huxley is next door to being a dope addict, George curtly contradicts him.

When someone else coyly tries to turn the clef in the roman--Is there, couldn't there be some connection between a certain notorious lady and Jo Stoyte's shooting of Pete?--George tells him absolutely not; that fairy tale was exploded back in the thirties.

 

And now comes a question George has been expecting. It is asked, of course, by Myron Hirsch, that indefatigable heckler of the goyim. "Sir, here on page seventy-nine, Mr. Propter says the stupidest text in the Bible is 'they hated me without a cause.' Does he mean by that the Nazis were right to hate the Jews? Is Huxley anti-Semitic?"

 

George draws a long breath. "No," he answers mildly.

 

And then, after a pause of expectant silence--the class is rather thrilled by Myron's bluntness--he repeats, loudly and severely, "No--Mr. Huxley is not anti-Semitic. The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause....

 

"Look--let's leave the Jews out of this, shall we? Whatever attitude you take, it's impossible to discuss Jews objectively nowadays. It probably won't be possible for the next twenty years. So let's think about this in terms of some other minority, any one you like, but a small one--one that isn't organized and doesn't have any committees to defend it...."

 

George looks at Wally Bryant with a deep shining look that says, I am with you, little minority-sister. Wally is plump and sallow-faced, and the care he takes to comb his wavy hair and keep his nails filed and polished and his eyebrows discreetly plucked only makes him that much less appetizing.

Obviously he has understood George's look. He is embarrassed. Never mind!

George is going to teach him a lesson now that he'll never forget. Is going to turn Wally's eyes into his timid soul. Is going to give him courage to throw away his nail file and face the truth of his life....

 

"Now, for example, people with freckles aren't thought of as a minority by the non-freckled. They aren't a minority in the sense we're talking about. And why aren't they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary. Anyone here disagree with that? If you do, just ask yourself, What would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority overnight? You see what I mean? Well, if you don't--think it over!

 

"All right. Now along come the liberals--including everybody in this room, I trust--and they say, 'Minorities are just people, like us.' Sure, minorities are people--people, not angels. Sure, they're like us--but not exactly like us; that's the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see any difference between a Negro and a Swede...." (Why, oh why daren't George say "between Estelle Oxford and Buddy Sorensen"? Maybe, if he did dare, there would be a great atomic blast of laughter, and everybody would embrace, and the kingdom of heaven would begin, right here in classroom. But then again, maybe it wouldn't.)

 

"So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and-think differently from us and hay faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo liberal sentimentality. If we're frank about our feelings, we have a safety valve; and if we have a safety valve, we're actually less likely to start persecuting. I know that theory is unfashionable nowadays. We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish....

 

"Where was I? Oh yes. Well, now, suppose this minority does get persecuted, never mind why--political, economic, psychological reasons.

There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution itself is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is?

What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?

 

"And I'll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority-

-not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they're all persecuted, the nastier they become! Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn't! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you're being persecuted, you hate what's happening to You, you hate the people who are making it happen; you're in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn't recognize love if you met it! You'd suspect love! You'd think there was something behind it--some motive--

some trick…"

 

By this time, George no longer knows what he has proved or disproved, whose side, if any, he is arguing on, or indeed just exactly what he is talking about. And yet these sentences have blurted themselves out of his mouth with genuine passion. He has meant every one of them, be they sense or nonsense. He has administered them like strokes of a lash, to whip Wally awake, and Estelle too, and Myron, and all of them. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

 

Wally continues to look embarrassed--but, no, neither whipped nor awakened. And now George becomes aware that Wally's eyes are no longer on his face; they are raised and focused on a point somewhere behind him, on the wall above his head. And now, as he glances rapidly across the room, faltering, losing momentum, George sees all the other pairs of eyes raised also - focused on that damned clock. He doesn't need to turn and look for himself; he knows he must be running overtime. Brusquely he breaks off, telling them, "We'll go on with this on Monday." And they all rise instantly to their feet, collecting their books, breaking into chatter.

 

Well, after all, what else can you expect? They have to hurry, most of them, to get someplace else within the next ten minutes. Nevertheless, George's feathers are ruffled. It's been a long time since last he forgot and let 36

 

 

himself get Up steam like this, right at the end of a period. How humiliating!

The silly enthusiastic old prof, rambling on, disregarding the clock, and the class sighing to itself, He's off again! Just for a moment, George hates them, hates their brute basic indifference, as they drain quickly out of the room.

Once again, the diamond has been offered publicly for a nickel, and they have turned from it with a shrug and a grin, thinking the old peddler crazy.

 

So he smiles with an extra benevolence on those who have lingered behind to ask him questions. Sister Maria merely wants to know if George, when he sets the final examination, will require them to have read all of those books which Mr. Huxley mentions in this novel. George thinks, How amusing to tell her, yes, including The Days of Sodom. But he doesn't, of course. He reassures her and she goes away happy, her academic load that much lighter.

 

And then Buddy Sorensen merely wants to excuse himself. "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't read the Huxley cause I thought you'd be going through it with first." Is this sheer idiocy or slyness? George can't be bothered to find out.

"Ban the Bomb!" he says, staring at Buddy's button; and Buddy, to whom he ha said this before, grins happily. "Yes, sir, you bet!"

 

Mrs. Netta Torres wants to know if Mr. Huxley hail an actual English village in mind as the original of his Gonister. George is unable to answer this. He can only tell Mrs. Torres that, in the last chapter, when Obispo and Stoyte and Virginia are in search of the fifth Earl, they appear to be driving out of London in a southwesterly direction. So, most likely, Gonister is supposed to be somewhere in Hampshire or Sussex.... But now it becomes clear that Mrs. Torres' question has been a pretext, merely. She has brought up the subject of England in order to tell him that she spent three unforgettable weeks there, ten years ago. Only most of it was in Scotland, and the rest all in London. "Whenever you're speaking to us," she tells George, as her eyes fervently probe his face, "I keep remembering that beautiful accent. It's like music." (George is strongly tempted to ask her just which accent she has in mind. Can it be Cockney or Gorbals?) And now Mrs. Torres wants to know the name of his birthplace, and he tells her, and she has never heard of it. He takes advantage of her momentary frustration to break off their tete-a-tete.

 

AGAIN George's office comes in useful; he goes into it to escape from Mrs.

Torres. He finds Dr. Gottlieb there.

 

Gottlieb is all excited because he has just received from England a new book about Francis Quarles, written by an Oxford don. Gottlieb probably knows every bit as much about Quarles as the don does. But Oxford, towering up in all its majesty behind this don, its child, utterly overawes poor little Gottlieb, who was born in one of the wrong parts of Chicago. "It makes you realize," he says, "the background you need, to do a job like this." And George feels saddened and depressed, because Gottlieb obviously wishes, above all else in life, that he could turn himself into that miserable don and learn to write his spiteful-playful, tight-assed vinegar prose.

 

Having held the book in his hands for a moment and turned its pages with appropriate respect, George decides that he needs something to eat. As he steps out of the building, the first people he recognizes are Kenny Potter and Lois Yamaguchi. They are sitting on the grass under one of the newly planted trees. Their tree is even smaller than the others. It has barely a dozen leaves on it. To sit under it at all seems ridiculous; perhaps this is just why Kenny chose it. He and Lois look as though they were children playing at being stranded on a South Pacific atoll. Thinking this, George smiles at them. They smile back, and then Lois starts to laugh, in her dainty-shamefaced Japanese way. George passes quite close by their atoll as a steamship might, without stopping. Lois seems to know what he caricatures; I mean, you seem to see what each one is about, and it's very crude and simplified. One's absurdly vain, and another is literally worrying himself sick, and another is longing to pick a fight. And then you see a very few who are simply beautiful, just because they aren't anxious or aggressive about anything; they're taking life as it comes.... Oh, and everything becomes more and more three-dimensional: Curtains get heavy and sculptured-looking, and wood is very grainy. And flowers and plants are quite obviously alive. I remember a pot of violets--they weren't moving, but you knew they could move. Each one was like a snake reared up motionless on its coils.... And then, while the thing is working full strength, it's as if the walls of the room and everything around you were breathing, and the grain in woodwork begins to flow, as though it were a liquid. •.. And then it all slowly dies down again, back to normal. You don't have any hangover. Afterwards I felt fine. I ate a huge supper."

 

"You didn't take it again after that?"

 

"No. I found I didn't want to, particularly. It was just an experience I'd had. I gave the rest of the capsules to friends. One of them saw pretty much what I saw, and another didn't see anything. And one told me she'd never 38

 

 

been so scared in her whole life. But I suspect she was only being polite.

Like thanking for a party--"

 

"You don't have any of those capsules left now, do you, sir?"

 

"No, Kenny, I do not! And even if I had, I wouldn't distribute them among the student body. I can think of much more amusing ways to get myself thrown out of this place."

 

Kenny grins. "Sorry, sir. I was only wondering.... I guess, if I really wanted the stuff, I could get it all right. You can get most anything of that kind, right here on campus. This friend of Lois's got it here. He claims, when he took it, he saw God."

 

"Well, maybe he did. Maybe I just didn't take enough." is, for she waves gaily to him exactly as one waves to a steamship, with an enchantingly delicate gesture of her tiny wrist and hand. Kenny waves also, but it is doubtful if he knows; he is only following Lois's example. Anyhow, their waving charms George's heart. He waves back to them. The old steamship and the young castaways have exchanged signals--but not signals for help. They respect each other's privacy. They have no desire for involvement. They simply wish each other well. Again, as by the tennis players, George feels that his day has been brightened; but, this time, the emotion isn't in the least disturbing. It is peaceful, radiant. George steams on toward the cafeteria, smiling to himself, not even wanting to look back.

 

But then he hears "Sir!" right behind him, and he turns and it's Kenny.

Kenny has come running up silently in his sneakers. George supposes he will ask some specific question such as what book are they going to read next in class, and then leave again. But no, Kenny drops into step beside him, remarking in a matter-of-fact voice, "I have to go down to the bookshop." He doesn't ask if George is going to the bookshop and George doesn't tell him that he hasn't been planning to.

 

"Did you ever take mescaline, sir?"

 

"Yes, once. In New York. That was about eight years ago. There weren't any regulations against selling it then. I just went into a drugstore and ordered some. They'd never heard of it, but they got it for me in a few days."

 

"And did it make you see things--like mystical visions and stuff?"

 

"No. Not what you could call visions. At first I felt seasick. Not badly.

And scared a bit, of course. Like Dr. Jekyll might have felt after he'd taken his drug for the first time. And then certain colors began to get very bright and stand out. You couldn't think why everybody didn't notice them. I remember a woman's red purse lying on a table in a restaurant--it was like a public scandal! And people's faces turn into Kenny looks down at George.

 

 

He seems amused. "You know something, sir? I bet, even if you had seen God, you wouldn't tell us."

 

"What makes you say that?"

 

"It's what Lois says. She thinks you're--well, kind of cagey. Like this morning, when you were listening to all that crap we were talking about Huxley--"

 

"I didn't notice you doing much talking. I don't think you opened your mouth once."

 

"I was watching you. No kidding, I think Lois is right! You let us ramble on, and then you straighten us out, and I'm not saying you don't teach us a lot of interesting stuff--you do--but you never tell us all you know about something...."

 

George feels flattered and excited. Kenny has never talked to him like this before. He can't resist slipping into the role Kenny so temptingly offers him.

 

"Well--maybe that's true, up to a point. You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked."

 

They have reached the tennis courts. The courts are all in use now, dotted with moving figures. But George, with the lizard-quick glance of a veteran addict, has already noted that the morning's pair has left and that none of these players is physically attractive. On the nearest court, a fat, middle-aged faculty member is playing to work up a sweat, against a girl with hair on her legs.

 

"Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly,

"before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested...."

 

Kenny is silent. Is he thinking this over? Is he going to ask George something right now? George's pulse quickens with anticipation.

 

"It's not that I want to be cagey," he says, keeping his eyes on the ground and making this as impersonal as he can. "You know, Kenny, so often I feel I want to tell things, discuss things, absolutely frankly. I don't mean in class, of course--that wouldn't work. Someone would be sure to misunderstand...."

 

Silence. George glances quickly up at Kenny and sees that he's looking, though without any apparent interest, at the hirsute girl. Perhaps he hasn't even been listening. It's impossible to tell.

 

"Maybe this friend of Lois's didn't see God, after all," says Kenny abruptly. "I mean, he might have been kidding himself. I mean, not too long after he took the stuff, he had a breakdown. He was locked up for three months in an institution. He told Lois that while he was having this 40

 

 

breakdown he turned into a devil and he could put out stars. I'm not kidding!

He said he could put out seven of them at a time. He was scared of the police, though. He said the police had a machine for catching devils and liquidating them. It was called a Mo-machine. Mo, that's Om--you know, sir, that Indian word for God--spelled backwards."

 

"If the police liquidated devils, that would mean they were angels, wouldn't it? Well, that certainly makes sense. A place where the police are angels has to be an insane asylum."

 

Kenny is still laughing loudly at this when they reach the bookshop.

He wants to buy a pencil sharpener. They have them in plastic covers, red or green or blue or yellow. Kenny takes a red one.

 

"What was it you wanted to get, sir?"

 

"Well, nothing, actually."

 

"You mean, you walked all the way down here just to keep me company?"

 

"Sure. Why not?"

 

Kenny seems sincerely surprised and pleased. "Well, I think you deserve something for that! Here, sir, take one of these. It's on me."

 

"Oh, but--well, thank you!" George is actually blushing a little. It's as if he has been offered a rose. He chooses a yellow sharpener.

 

Kenny grins. "I kind of expected you'd pick blue."

 

"Why?"

 

"Isn't blue supposed to be spiritual?"

 

"What makes you think I want to be spiritual? And how come you picked red?"

 

"What's red stand for?"

 

"Rage and lust."

 

"No kidding?"

 

They remain silent, grinning almost intimately. George feels that, even if all this doubletalk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. Then Kenny pays for the pencil sharpeners and waves his hand with a gesture which implies casual, undeferential dismissal.

"I'll see you around."

 

He strolls away. George lingers on in the bookshop for a few minutes, lest he should seem to be following him.

 

 

 

IF eating is regarded as a sacrament, then the faculty dining room must be compared to the bleakest and barest of Quaker meetinghouses. No concession here to the ritualism of food served snugly and appetizingly in togetherness. This room is an anti-restaurant. It is much too clean, with its chromium-and-plastic tables; much too tidy, with its brown metal wastebaskets for soiled paper napkins and used paper cups; and, in contrast to the vast human rattle of the students' dining room, much too quiet. Its quietness is listless, embarrassed, self-conscious. And the room isn't even made venerable or at least formidable, like an Oxford or Cambridge high table, by the age of its occupants. Most of these people are relatively young; George is one of the eldest.

 

Christ, it is sad, sad to see on quite a few of these faces--young ones particularly--a glum, defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can't enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporation executives. But isn't it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn't it some tiny satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn't it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn't hopelessly corrupt?

 

For these glum ones, apparently not. They would like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job, and now they have got to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off from the majority--the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters--by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge--discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What's the use of knowing something if you don't make money out of it? Ant the glum ones more than half agree with him and fee privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.

 

George goes through into the serving room. On the counter are steaming casseroles from which the waitresses dish you out stew, vegetables or soup. Or you can have salad or fruit pie or a strange deadly-looking jelly which is semitransparent, with veins of brilliant green. Gazing at one of these jellies with a kind of unwilling fascination, as though it were something behind glass in a reptile house, is Grant Lefanu, the young physics professor who writes poetry. Grant is the very opposite of glum, and he couldn't be less de-feated; George rather loves him. He is small and thin, and has glasses and large teeth and the maddish smile of genuine intellectual 42

 

 

passion. You can easily imagine him as one of the terrorists back in Czarist Russia a hundred years ago. Given the opportunity, he would be that kind of fanatic hero who follows an idea, without the least hesitation and as a matter of course, straight through to its expression in action. The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad. On Grant's face you often see such a smile--of embarrassment, almost, at having had to express his meaning so crudely. He is like a shy mumbler who suddenly in desperation speaks much too loud.

 

As a matter of fact, Grant has recently performed at least one act of minor heroism. He has appeared in court as a defense witness for a bookseller caught peddling some grand old sex classic of the twenties; it used to be obtainable only in the lands of the Latins, but now, through a series of test cases, it is fighting for its right to be devoured by American youth. (George can't be absolutely sure if this is the same book he himself read as a young man, during a trip to Paris. At all events, he remembers throwing this, or some other hook just like it, into the wastebasket, in the middle of the big screwing scene. Not that one isn't broadminded, of course; let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?)

 

Grant Lefanu's heroism on this occasion consisted in his defense of the book at the risk of his academic neck. For a very important and senior member of the STSC faculty had previously appeared as a witness for the prosecution and had guaranteed the book dirty, degenerate and dangerous.

When Grant was called to the stand and cross-examined by the prosecuting attorney, he begged, with his shy smile, to differ from his colleague. At length, after some needling and after having been cautioned three times to speak up, he blurted out a statement to the effect that it wasn't the book, but its attackers, who deserved the three adjectives. To make matters worse, one of the local liberal columnists gleefully reported all of this, casting the senior faculty member as a reactionary old ass and Grant as a bright young upholder of civil liberty, and twisting his testimony into a personal insult. So now the question is, Will Grant get his tenure prolonged at the end of the academic year?

 

Grant treats George as a fellow subverter, a compliment which George hardly deserves, since, with his seniority, his license to play the British eccentric, and, in the last resort, his little private income, he can afford to say pretty much anything he likes on campus. Whereas poor Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.

 

"What's new?" George asks him, implying, What has the Enemy been up to?

 

"You know those courses for police students? Toda a special man from Washington is addressing them on twenty ways to spot a Commie."

 

"You're kidding!"

 

"Want to go? We might ask him some awkward questions."

 

"What time is it?"

 

"Four-thirty."

 

"Can't. I've got to be downtown in an hour."

 

"Too bad."

 

"Too bad," George agrees, relieved. He isn't absolutely sure if this was a bona fide dare or not, however. Various other times, in the same half-serious tone, Grant has suggested that they go and heckle a John Birch Society meeting, smoke pot in Watts with the best unknown poet in America, meet someone high up in the Black Muslim movement. George doesn't seriously suspect Grant of trying to test him. No doubt Grant really does do such things now and then, and it simply does not occur to him that George might be scared. He probably thinks George excuses himself from these outings for fear of being bored.

 

As they move down the counter, ending up with only coffee and salad--George watches his weight and Grant has an appetite as slender as his build--Grant tells about a man he knows who has been talking to some experts at a big firm which makes computers. These experts say that it doesn't really matter if there's a war, because enough people will survive to run the country with. Of course, the people who survive will tend to be those with money and influence, because they'll have the better type of shelter, not the leaky death traps which a lot of crooks have been offering at bargain prices. When you get your shelter built, say the experts, you should go to at least three different contractors, so nobody will know what it is you're building; because if the word gets around that you have a better type shelter, you'll be mobbed at the first emergency. For the same reason, you ought to be realistic and buy a submachine gun. This is no time for false sentiment.