Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Wendy still thinks Brian is a great man, a hero; she thinks that the book he is writing will be a great book. This need not be wholly naïveté: very likely, when Brian is with her he plays that part, or more than plays it—he really is serious, dignified, affectionate, etc. Brian always behaves best when people are watching him, especially people he does not know too well; and after all, it has taken Erica herself nearly twenty years to find him out. If Wendy were to know him as well—A faint idea, like the shadow of a small fast plane or a large bird flickering in weak sunlight high over a field, crosses Erica’s mind at this moment, and is gone. But Wendy will never see Brian as he really is now; she will go through life mourning him as a lost hero.

Whereas Erica, very soon, will have to see Brian again. If she puts it off much longer she will seem hysterical, unforgiving; everyone will blame her. Then she will have to let him move back into the house. And when she does so, it will become a sort of prison.

She remembers a conversation she had once with Sandy Finkelstein, coming home from The Magic Flute on the streetcar along Mass. Avenue. He had been reading Dante’s Inferno, and was saying how he didn’t think the sinners in the first circle, in the whirlwind, had it so bad, because they were with someone they loved passionately. The real hell, he said, would be to be with someone you couldn’t stand. “Or someone you once loved, but now you hate them,” Erica suggested. “Like my mother. That would be the worst.”

In that same conversation Sandy had said what really gave him the horrors was all those people drifting outside hell in that sort of dirty fog, the ones who did neither good nor evil, but were for themselves.

There must be some other solution for all of them, Erica thinks; some way out of that fog. A moment ago there was a sort of idea in her mind ...She looks out the kitchen window into the misty narrow backyard. The shadow of the idea is returning; nearer this time, darker, more distinct—Yes. Now she recognizes it.

9

TEACHERS, ESPECIALLY UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, often have an elective affinity with their subjects. Whether through original tropism, conscious effort or merely long association, language instructors born in Missouri and Brooklyn look and act remarkably like Frenchmen and Italians, professors of economics resemble bankers, and musicologists are indistinguishable from musicians. The similarity is usually only one of style; indeed most professors, at least at Corinth, tend to regard with suspicion and hostility any colleague who leaves the academy to practice what they preach.

These affinities also profoundly influence the functioning of the various Corinth University departments. They determine, for instance, which academic issues will take the longest to resolve and arouse the strongest feelings. Members of the math department tend to quarrel over the figures in their annual report, and members of the English department over its wording. In Psychology, analysis of the personality traits of candidates for promotion sometimes ends in ego-dystonic shouting; and the controversy over the new men’s washroom in the Architecture Building (during which two professors who had not designed an actual building in twenty years came to blows) has already passed into university annals.

But it is among Brian Tate’s colleagues that the effect of the law of affinities is most strongly felt. Since every member of the political science department is in outward manner and inner fantasy an expert political strategist, every issue provokes public debate and private lobbying. Even when there is little at stake, eloquent speeches are made; wires are skillfully pulled and logs rolled out of simple enjoyment of the sport.

In the past Brian has played the game with as much zest as any of his colleagues. Today it seems petty and tiresome. The transactions of the Curriculum Committee, of which he is chairman, appear vain playacting, and the question it is discussing very trivial compared to that on his own agenda, viz.: How is he going to cope with his wife’s crazy demand that he divorce her and marry Wendy Gahaghan?

The issue which is now before the committee, and which has been before it for an hour already, plus nearly as long on Tuesday before the whole department, is known as the Pass-Fail Option. It first appeared last week in the shape of a petition signed by thirty-two undergraduate majors in Political Science, nineteen in other departments, four teaching fellows, and three persons giving the names of “Thomas Paine,” “F. Kafka” and “Janis Joplin.” These fifty-eight real and imaginary persons demand that students in political science courses be allowed to choose whether they shall receive a letter grade or merely an indication that they have or have not passed a course.

In practice it is likely that the Pass-Fail Option would have little effect. The experience of the history department last spring suggests that the only students who will opt for it are those who would prefer the euphemism Pass to the letter C. Nevertheless, the matter has provoked great controversy: Brian’s colleagues have made long and sometimes emotional speeches containing phrases like “freedom of conscience,” “academic integrity,” “evasion of responsibility” and “moral cowardice”—the last two of which he has heard in another context recently, in fact only a few hours ago, when they were used by his wife to describe his conduct towards Wendy.

Brian’s committee, which is supposed to study the petition and make recommendations to the department, is divided on the issue. Each of the four other members has, as usual, taken up a philosophical position which he is arguing in his characteristic style. For not only do professors resemble their subjects; these resemblances are subdivided within each department. Just as some instructors in art history take on what they imagine to be the appearance, manner and opinions of Renoir, and others what they imagine to be those of Jim Dine, so each of Brian’s colleagues imitates a school of political thought, if not a specific politician.

John Randall, the grand old man of the department, last survivor from the days when it was known as the Department of Government, appears to Brian in the role of Cordell Hull. He is a large stiff elderly man, somewhat pompous and slow on the uptake, but with remarkable staying power; a Hegelian who lectures on political philosophy, often quoting by memory from Plato. It is John Randall’s view that if they admit the Pass-Fail Option, they will be breaking their moral contract with the university and failing to recognize true excellence. Students at Corinth are created equal in opportunity to attend lectures in Government (as he still calls it), but not equal in ability to comprehend these lectures. The petition should therefore be rejected, politely but in a firm and dignified manner.

Brian’s principal enemy in the department, C. Donald Dibble, also opposes the petition, but more violently; just as he has for years opposed every proposal and blocked every suggestion for curriculum change made by Brian. It is largely due to him that the committee has accomplished almost nothing since September. A tense, talkative, rather paranoid bachelor, Don Dibble designates himself in interviews, of which he gives many on varied topics, as a “radical conservative.” Brian has privately designated him as Metternich. Dibble is a political philosopher of a more recent school than Randall’s, but he also quotes Plato frequently—and in Brian’s view deceptively. He has been trained at the University of Chicago to hunt out the basic political principles which are hidden in the undergrowth of even apparently obscure events. Occasionally he fails to flush any significant issues from the shrubbery, and refrains from involvement in the ensuing discussion; but not today. Hidden in the Pass-Fail Option, Dibble has discovered a wedge-shaped animal something like an elephant. If his colleagues let it into the department, he insists, they will be abdicating the responsibilities of power and yielding to mob pressure. Presently larger and larger elephants will enter behind it, and trample them all to death, which will be no more than they deserve.