When the organisation’s one hundred per cent efficiency has been demonstrated a sufficient number of times, the population will slowly begin to learn that Uncle George’s will must be obeyed instantly and without question.
But does Uncle George want to be obeyed? Doesn’t he prefer to be defied, so he can go on killing and killing – since all these people are just vermin, and the more of them that die the better? All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim’s death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it, even though they never knew he existed. But, when George gets in as deep as this, Jim hardly matters any more. Jim is nothing, now, but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America. . . . George’s jaws work, his teeth grind, as he chews and chews the cud of his hate.
But does George really hate all these people? Aren’t they themselves merely an excuse for hating? What is George’s hate, then? A stimulant – nothing more; though very bad for him, no doubt. Rage, resentment, spleen; of such is the vitality of middle age. If we say that he is quite crazy at this particular moment, then so, probably, are at least half a dozen others in these many cars around him; all slowing now as the traffic thickens, going downhill, under the bridge, up again past the Union Depot. . . . God! Here we are, downtown already! George comes up dazed to the surface, realising with a shock that the chauffeur-figure has broken a record; never before has it managed to get them this far entirely on its own. And this raises a disturbing question: is the chauffeur steadily becoming more and more of an individual? Is it getting ready to take over much larger areas of George’s life?
No time to worry about that now. In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. In ten minutes, George will have to be George; the George they have named and will recognise. So now he consciously applies himself to thinking their thoughts, getting into their mood. With the skill of a veteran, he rapidly puts on the psychological makeup for this role he must play.
No sooner have you turned off the freeway on to San Tomas Avenue than you are back in the tacky sleepy slowpoke Los Angeles of the thirties, still convalescent from the depression, with no money to spare for fresh coats of paint. And how charming it is! An up-and-down terrain of steep little hills with white houses of cracked stucco perched insecurely on their sides and tops, it is made to look quaint rather than ugly by the mad hopelessly intertwisted cat’s cradle of wires and telephone poles. Mexicans live here, so there are lots of flowers. Negroes live here, so it is cheerful. George would not care to live here, because they all blast all day long with their radios and television sets. But he would never find himself yelling at their children; because these people are not The Enemy. If they would ever accept George, they might even be allies. They never figure in the Uncle George fantasies.
The San Tomas State College campus is back on the other side of the freeway. You cross over to it by a bridge, back into the nowadays of destruction-reconstruction-destruction. Here the little hills have been trucked away bodily or had their tops sliced off by bulldozers, and the landscape is gashed with raw terraces. Tract upon tract of low-roofed dormitory-dwellings (invariably called homes and described as a new concept in living) are being opened up as fast as they can be connected with the sewers and the power-lines. It is a slander to say that they are identical; some have brown roofs, some green, and the tiles in their bathrooms come in several different colours. The tracts have their individuality, too – each one has a different name, of the kind that realtors can always be relied on to invent: Sky Acres, Vista Grande, Grovenor Heights ,
The storm-centre of all this grading, shovelling, hauling and hammering is the college campus itself. A clean modern factory, brick and glass and big windows, already three quarters built, is being finished in a hysterical hurry. (The construction-noises are such that, in some classrooms, the professors can hardly be heard.) When the factory is fully operational, it will be able to process twenty thousand graduates. But, in less than ten years, it will have to cope with forty or fifty thousand. So then everything will be torn down again and built up twice as tall.
However, it is arguable that, by that time, the campus will be cut off from the outside world by its own parking lots, which will then form an impenetrable forest of cars abandoned in despair by the students during the week-long traffic jams of the near future. Even now, the lots are half as big as the campus itself and so full that you have to drive around from one to another, in search of a last little space. Today, George is lucky. There is room for him on the lot nearest his classroom. George slips his parking-card into the slot (thereby offering a piece of circumstantial evidence that he is George); the barrier rises in spastic mechanical jerks, and he drives in.
George has been trying to train himself, lately, to recognise his students’ cars. (He is continually starting these self-improvement projects; sometimes it’s memory-training, sometimes a new diet, sometimes just a vow to read some unreadable Hundredth Best Book. He seldom perseveres in any of them for long.) Today he is pleased to be able to spot three cars – not counting the auto-scooter which the Italian exchange-student, with a courage or provincialism bordering on insanity, rides up and down the freeway as though he were on the Via Veneto. There’s the beat-up not-so-white Ford coupe belonging to Tom Kugelman, on the back of which he has printed Slow White. There’s the Chinese Hawaiian boy’s grime-grey Pontiac, with one of those joke-stickers in the rear window: The only ism I believe in is abstract expressionism. The joke isn’t a joke in his particular case, because he really is an abstract painter. (Or is this some super-subtlety?) At all events, it seems incongruous that anyone with such a sweet chessycat smile and cream-smooth skin and cat-clean neatness could produce such gloomy muddy canvases or own such a filthy car. He has the beautiful name of Alexander Mong. And there’s the well-waxed spotless scarlet MG, driven by Buddy Sorensen, the wild watery-eyed albino who is a basketball star and wears a ban the bomb button. George has caught glimpses of Buddy streaking past on the freeway, laughing to himself as if the absurd little sitzbath of a thing had run away with him, and he didn’t care.
So now George has arrived. He is not nervous in the least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building towards the Department Office. He is all actor now; an actor on his way up from the dressing-room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, ‘Good morning!’
And the three secretaries – each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style – recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply ‘Good morning!’ to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don’t we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be unthought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)
Every teacher in the English Department has his or her pigeon-hole in this office, and all of them are stuffed with papers. What a mania for communication! A notice of the least important committee meeting on the most trivial of subjects will be run off and distributed in hundreds of copies. Everybody is informed of everything. George glances through them all and then tosses the lot into the waste-basket, with one exception: an oblong card slotted and slitted and ciphered by an IBM machine, expressing some poor bastard of a student’s academic identity. Indeed, this card is his identity. Suppose, instead of signing it as requested and returning it to the Personnel Office, George were to tear it up? Instantly, that student would cease to exist, as far as San Tomas State was concerned. He would become academically invisible, and only reappear with the very greatest difficulty, after performing the most elaborate propitiation ceremonies; countless offerings of forms filled out in triplicate and notarised affidavits to the gods of the IBM.
George signs the card, holding it steady with two fingertips. He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic; the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma, we cannot make a mistake. Their magic consists in this, that whenever they do make a mistake, which is quite often, it is perpetuated and thereby becomes a non-mistake. . . . Carrying the card by its extreme corner, George brings it over to one of the secretaries, who will see that it gets back to Personnel. The secretary has a nail-file on her desk. George picks it up, saying, ‘Let’s see if that old robot’ll know the difference’ and pretends to be about to punch another slit in the card. The girl laughs, but only after a split-second look of sheer terror; and the laugh itself is forced. George has uttered blasphemy.
Feeling rather pleased with himself, he leaves the Department 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 conveyor-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 humour, 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, all symbolic. 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 nineteen nineties, when Russ is dean of an English Department in the Middle West and Marinette is the mother of grownup 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, permanendy 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 rubber gym-boots and knit shorts of the kind cyclists wear, very short and close-fitting, moulding 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 touching gallantry in his defence. 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 his 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 marvellous 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 realises 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 favourite 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 onstage 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 wall: 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 barricade of empty seats. But, this semester, the class is only a trifle smaller than the capacity of the room. Latecomers 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, simply 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’ counter-determination 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 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 teenage 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 funny 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 and 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 frontline of an 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.