Charles Snow: The Sleep of Reason

He poured out whiskies for us both, but became more ugly-tempered still. It was the kind of temper that is infectious, and I had to make myself keep my own. I told him that tomorrow’s meeting wasn’t just a matter of form: if he pressed for the Court to confirm his verdict, then he would certainly get a majority: some would vote against, certainly Geary, probably Leonard Getliffe and two or three of the younger academics. I should, I said in a matter-of-fact tone, vote against it myself.

“Vote against anything you like,” he snapped.

“I shall,” I said.

He would get a clear majority. But didn’t he realise that most of the people voting for him nevertheless thought he had been too severe?

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“It is, you know,” I said.

I tried another tactic. He must admit, I said, that most of the people we knew — probably most people in the whole society — didn’t really regard fornication as a serious offence. In secret they didn’t regard it as an offence at all.

“So much the worse for them,” he said.

How could he be so positive? I was getting rougher. Most people couldn’t find any moral sanction for such an attitude. I couldn’t. Where did he get his?

“That’s my business.”

“Not if it affects us all.”

“I’m not going to talk about my moral sanctions. I’m not going to talk about fornication in general.” His cheeks had gone puce. “We’re talking about a university, which you seem to have forgotten. We’re talking about a university which I’m in charge of. While I’m in charge of it, I’m not going to allow promiscuous fornication. I don’t see that that needs explaining. It gets in the way of everything a university stands for. Once you turn a blind eye, you’d make nonsense of the place before you could look round.”

Then I used my last resource. I said that I too was concerned for the university: and that he was valuable to it. He would never get any credit for that. But he had a single-minded passion for academic merit. As a Vice-Chancellor he couldn’t do some things, but he could do one superlatively: that is, he was a connoisseur of academic promise with as great accuracy as he was a connoisseur of wine. It wasn’t an accident that this obscure university had put in a bid for Leonard Getliffe. And Leonard Getliffe, though much the best of his collection, was not the only one. He had backed his judgment, appointed three full professors in their twenties and thirties: so that the university was both better staffed, and more adventurously staffed, than any of its class.

I hadn’t been flattering him. That was the fact. For the first time I had touched him. The smouldering rage dropped down for an instant, and he said: “Well, I’ve got hold of some good men.” He said it humbly.

If he left the place, no one else would have the same gift, I said. And it was possible that he would have to leave. You couldn’t fight all your opponents on all fronts. He was making opponents of people who needn’t be: they thought that he wasn’t living in the climate of his time: he gave them some excuse.

“I’ve no use for the climate of my time. To hell with it,” he said.

All I wanted him to do — I was being patient — was to make some compromise. The slightest compromise. Even just by permitting the four students to withdraw, as though of their own free will.

“I’ll compromise when I can,” he said. “Not when I can’t.”

I told him, as straight and hard as I was able, that if ever there was an occasion to offer a token compromise, then tomorrow was the time. With an angry pout, eyes flat and fixed, he shook his head.

I had had enough, and sat back, silent. Then he said, not so much in a conciliatory manner but as though he wanted me to understand: “I’ll tell you this. You say they may want to get rid of me. That’s their business. They won’t find it so easy as they think. But if I decide that I’m doing the place more harm than good, then I shall go next day.”

He had spoken in a brisk tone, his anger quite subsided, rather as though he were stating his plans for his summer holiday. In precisely the same tone, he added: “I shall decide. And I shan’t ask anyone else.”

Even more briskly, he said good night, and at something like a trot went out of the room and upstairs. I noticed that the lights were still on in the drawing-room, and there I found Vicky waiting up.

“Any change?” she asked.

“None,” I said.

She swore. “He’s hopeless.”

Then she, who usually was considerate, who noticed one’s physical state, went on as though I were neither jaded nor tired. Couldn’t I still do something tomorrow? I was used to this kind of business: couldn’t I find a way to smooth things over?

I’d try, of course, I said. But in real conflicts, technique never counted; when people clashed head on it was no use being tactful. I let myself say that, discouraging her because she was nagging at me, and I needed just to go to bed.

She seemed selfishly, or even morbidly, preoccupied about her father. But it was not truly so. No, she was compensating to herself because she did not want to think of him at all. She was dutiful, she could not shrug off what a daughter ought to feel and do. It was another kind of love, however, which was possessing her. She wanted to guard her father’s well-being, she wanted to get her conscience clear — so that she could forget it all and lose herself, as though on the edge of sleep, in thoughts of happiness.

MEETINGS. To twist an old statement, all happy meetings are like one another: every unhappy meeting is unhappy in its own fashion. But was that true? I had been to plenty of unhappy meetings in my time. Whether they were trivial or secret or (by the world’s standards) important, they all had a family resemblance. So had the Court meeting that Wednesday morning.

It began uncomfortably quiet, the good-mornings muted in the long room. The room was both extravagantly long and as light as though we were sitting in the open air, since one side was all window, looking southwards on to an arena-like court. The unrelieved lightness of the room — I had thought, on occasions before this one — drew people apart, not together. It was like the whole range of the university buildings, handsome, stark, functional, slapped down at prodigious expense in the fields, four miles outside the town. The Victorian buildings of the old college, where I had first listened to George Passant, had been abandoned, turned over to offices in one of the streets where my son and I had walked the previous afternoon. No dark rooms now: no makeshifts: no, the wide campus, the steel, concrete and glass, the stretches of window, at the same time bare, luxurious, unshadowed, costly.

Arnold sat at the end of the table, behind him on the wall — incongruous in the midst of the architectural sheen — a coloured plaque of the university arms. There were ten people on each side, Hargrave, who had some honorific title in the university, on the Vice-Chancellor’s right, Geary two or three places down, looking at ease and interested. I sat on Arnold Shaw’s left, and on my side sat Leonard Getliffe and several other academics, most of them under forty. The rest of the Court were older, hearty middle-aged local politicians and businessmen, four or five well-dressed strong-built women.

Item Number 3 on the agenda read, with the simple eloquence of official documents, Appeal by Four Students against Decision of Disciplinary Committee . The first two items were routine, and Arnold Shaw, who was a brisk decisive chairman, wiped them off. Then he said, in the same unexpansive fashion, not encouraging comment or setting people free to talk, that they all knew the background of the next piece of business: he had circulated a memorandum: the students had appealed to the Court, as was their constitutional right: they had now asked to appear before the Court in person. Whether they had this right as well was open to question: there was no ruling and no precedent. But Sir Lewis Eliot, as the students’ representative on the Court, had presented an official request from the student body — that the four students should be given the privilege. He, Arnold Shaw, had with some dubiety granted it. As to the case itself the facts were not in dispute. There was nothing to be said about them. We had better have the students in straight away.