Читать книгу The Hemingway Caper - Eric Wright - Страница 10

Did I say something wrong?” I enquired of Ginger.

“I’d say that your last question was paternalistic, at least, which you might have got away with, but also possibly, to her e ar, chauvinistic, and quite likely racist.”

“Oh, fuck off. How come?”

“Would you have asked me that on my first day?” He went into a parody of how I looked when I asked the question, leaning forward nearly hunch-backed, open-mouthed, wet-lipped, a soppy smile on my face. “If you had asked me, I’d have told you to stuff it up your jacksie. As she did.”

I sighed. I do my best to rid myself of all the prejudices and attitudes I was brought up with, but it’s not easy to stop feeling protective when a pretty creature like Masaka flies too close to the flame, and to remember that “protective” these days is spelt “chauvinist”.

The door opened. The psychologist across the corridor put his head in. “Hambone,” he said.

I was puzzled. This man used to enjoy testing us on literary or grammatical matters—Richard Costril had theorized that he yearned to be regarded as an honorary member of the department—but we had not heard from him for a long time.

Feeling a trick, but having a go anyway, I began “You mean the bone ...”

Ginger cut me off. “Mr. Bones,” he said. “A hambone’s a white comedian, working in blackface and with an accent like Jack Benny’s Rochester. I played the part once in a variety show in grammar school. You couldn’t do it now, even in Scunthorpe.”

“Who are you?”

I introduced him to Ginger, realizing that probably that was what he wanted.

“Well done,” I said to Ginger, when the psychologist had disappeared. “That true?”

“As I sit here,” Ginger said. “Now, what do you think of the new roommate.” He got up and closed the door.

“You have your eye on her?”

“Don’t be silly. I had coffee with her yesterday, when she first arrived.”

Why was that silly? Had he finally met a pretty girl he didn’t like? She seemed to me a perfect quarry, for him. Me, I am naturally monogamous. I’m not puffed-up about it; maybe it’s just that I have a fairly low libido, compared to Ginger, at least. So why was I being silly? Did just asking the question show how silly or naïve I am?

I pondered the possibility that it was obvious to Ginger that Masaka was bespoke, or utterly celibate, or a Japanese nun, and decided that maybe Ginger was just saying that you don’t make passes at office mates because of the impossibility, especially for the other office mates, of living an ordinary day-to-day existence afterwards. I said, “You mean it would create an atmosphere?”

He looked at me, then at his hands on the desk, then, in apparent mild despair at his inability to find the language for what was so obvious, looked away from me, waiting for the coin to drop, then said, after another pleading look, “Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” Then he changed the subject. “You’ve heard the news?” he asked.

I could tell by the way he lowered his voice and glanced at the door he didn’t mean the news from Beirut or even Ottawa. Department news, possibly even college news. I shook my head. “I just walked in,” I said. “I saw the crowds running along the halls, but I just assumed the dam had broken. No?”

“Sarky fooker,” he said. “I’ll tell yer: Fred’s been made Dean. We’re lewkin’ for a new chairman. Temporary, I would think.”

I’m doing my best here to indicate that Ginger slips into dialect occasionally, especially when he’s savouring a piece of news and wants to put a ribbon round his words.

“What happened to Peer Gynt?”

The dean’s name is Peder Gaunt and he’s Swedish by descent not Norwegian, but he had once been nicknamed Peer Gynt by a sophisticated security guard and it had stuck. Nobody bore him any malice; it was just a crude mnemonic.

“He’s become Associate Vice-President.”

“Christ! That makes three of the buggers.” When I came to Hambleton there was just one assistant vice-president; now there are about ten of them, associates and assistants.

“No, no. He’s replacing someone called Sam Coombs.”

“Who’s become a full vice-president?”

“I understand he’s been called to The Buildings. That’s what I heard. ’He’s been called to The Buildings,’ Nell said.” Nell is the department secretary. “What does that mean?”

“It means the government wants Coombs as an assistant deputy or some such because the Ministry of Education is screwing up again. When someone is ’called to The Buildings’ he has to go right away. So we need a new chairman.”

“That’s reet, laddie,” Ginger crowed, his chair legs crashing down. “Now you’ve got it. So who shall we have?”

I felt a mild impulse to administer a small snub. Ginger was a new boy and to put himself eye-to-eye with someone very much his senior, without asking, was presumptuous, and then I remembered in plenty of time that tenured people felt exactly that way about me. And Ginger was only saying that he and I were equal in one respect: neither of us would get to vote for the new chairman.

“This is going to be fun to watch,” I said. “Who is applying?”

“No one so far that I’ve heard. Who is eligible?”

“Everybody.”

“You?”

“No. I’m Nobody, like you, remember?”

“Ah, right.”

I had already let Ginger know that within the class system of Hambleton, as in most North American universities, we were the underclass. Our job is to do the same work as the tenured faculty for half the pay. We are “temporary” for the same reason that the drivers of some of the parcel delivery companies are—it makes it easier to fire us. As a result of thirty years of agitation, sessional teachers at Hambleton have quarried out a kind of security by organizing into an association in imitation of the Faculty Association. This has created a kind of permanency for the longer-serving sessionals, like myself, as well as some privileges like the right to use the gym alongside the tenured faculty. The situation is analogous to those unions of black workers that existed in the States at one time, side by side with the white folks.

As I’ve said, this happens to suit me because I don’t have a family to support, and instead of grubbing away on Saturday afternoons in Robarts Library in search of material to help cobble together an article every year, I can read Superman comics if I like.

All this Ginger has now picked up on, but after only six weeks he hasn’t had time to get bitter, like Richard Costril his predecessor, or—the word for me is ’philosophical’.

I said, “Klimpt will apply, he always does.”

“He seems harmless enough. Is he unpopular, then?”

“Not when he’s not running for chairman. But he believes the core of our work should be ’Business Correspondence’, and he is silly enough to say so in the interviews. He’s not serious, or rather, he’s not serious about wanting to teach it; he really wants to warn us that we have to be ready for the day when all the professional faculties will decide to drop English unless it can be shown to be useful like Economics, or Psychology. He says we should keep our eye on the smart cookies in the Philosophy department who are working up a course in ’Business Ethics’ to offer to the M.B.A. program. They’ll always have work, he says, and we will, too, if we develop an area like ’Correspondence and Report Writing’. So far his colleagues haven’t been frightened enough to agree with him.”

“Who else?”

“Well, basically, there are two main factions in the department. There are the traditionalists like Bankier and Maisie Potter and Friedman; old hands, trained to teach the texts as if they say what they mean, believing that if you read the thing carefully you can find out what Keats, say, is going on about, and that if you want to bring a dash of psychology or biographical information to bear, you might overhear something extra. Most of these people are well into their fifties and don’t want to be disturbed, so they will urge one of their own to run. Call them the Blacks.

“In opposition are the ’New Men’ and the ’New Women’, though some of these are getting a bit long in the tooth, too. These are the people from whom you will hear words like ’deconstruction’, ’post-modern’, ’structuralism’, Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault. I expect for a recent graduate of— where was it? Leeds?—you would find even these terms a bit passé, but we’re not in the mainstream and at Hambleton these are the words you will still hear. Call these people the Reds.”

“What does it matter if you’ve got tenure?”

“The Reds can still frighten some of the Blacks. If the new chairman is a Red, then we shall be facing five years of bickering as he attempts to drag the department into the seventies. There was a candidate last time—all this is hearsay, you understand?”

“Stop poncing about. What do you mean ’hearsay’?”

“You know, don’t you, that sessional lecturers like us are not eligible to serve on the search committee for the new chairman?”

“No, I didn’t know that, no.”

“This was something the Faculty Association negotiated. They argued that the temporary staff do not have the same long-term interests as the tenured faculty, so all important matters should be decided by the tenured faculty.”

“What are the unimportant matters?”

“As in the old joke, there are no unimportant matters.”

“Why? Why don’t they give us a look-in?”

“Different reasons in each department. In this one, the two factions I just mentioned are united in their desire to keep out the even newer ideas that sessionals bring with them from the graduate schools. See, the new boys I was talking about are new in the sense that they are the newest, but in this department we haven’t hired a full-time person for twenty years, except for Richard Costril. Think of New College, Oxford.”

“Do we get any fookin’ say in anything? At all?”

“The Faculty Association encourages the tenured staff to consult us informally.”

“And do they?”

“Going home on the subway sometimes.”

“So when will the politicking start?”

“We seem to have an emergency, so my guess is right away.”

At eleven I was in the classroom, teaching the D.H.Lawrence story “You Touched Me” to an assortment of second year students. I long ago discarded Lawrence’s novels as fevered, over-written, and too long, but someone put his short story collection, England, My England, on the course and I had learned through these stories that I was completely wrong. Having failed to hear what Lawrence was banging on about in the novels, even in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I had assumed that the fault was his. But these stories blew my mind, took the top off my head, knocked me out, and left me gasping. The students liked them, too, or they seemed to.

The thing is, I’ve boiled the teaching of literature down to a single question: “Have you noticed this?” That’s all. I chat for a bit, of course, on related matters like what Lawrence thought of Freud and vice versa, but it all leads to the point when I ask the question. I’m talking about allegory, of course, which I’ve come to believe is what all teaching of all literature is about. In the case of “You Touched Me,” what I have to offer second year students is that the story is really the Sleeping Beauty fable, except that it is the hero who wakes up when touched. There’s even the high hedge around the house/palace. That, plus the orgy at the end, has students generally agreeing that it is the best of a very fine collection. They like “Tickets, Please” too, but “You Touched Me” is a revelation.

I mention this, not by way of a digression, but because much of the in-fighting in English departments these days is about literary theory. I have no theory; that is, I do not think talking about books in a particular way is more valid than talking about them in some other way, as long as you are talking about the books and not yourself. But without the allegory to look for, I’m soon reduced to reading aloud. And yet I must get this straight: I know that Dickens said that the function of allegory is to make your head ache, and I don’t think the allegorical approach is better than any other approach. It is just the one I find most interesting and the most, well, fun. It’s the one that can make for lively classroom discussion. Successful teaching of literature consists of keeping the students intrigued by a work long enough that they will go away from the course remembering the words Shakespeare used.

How you do it doesn’t matter.