Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The lively bustle in the streets outside eventually became a temptation Darconville couldn’t bear to ignore. Distinction, implying a difference, only meant isolation, and while he still felt a general indifference to the suffrage of the public he took again to roaming about, often observing in the streets a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to reveal to a hairsbreadth in mutable flesh what at that time he yearned to find in durable shape. Strangely, he felt so bad about Isabel’s silence and her absence that it became almost like having her there! And yet he tried not always to think about her. There were, at first, small conversatioas with the yardcops. Then he accepted the invitations of several students to visit their final clubs, affairs called “rum sociables,” during which he sat uncomfortably by himself in discreet paneled rooms watching beautiful arrogant children— golden-haired phaeacians with perfect heads and supercilious preppies in striped ties — as they smoked bulldog pipes, sang ribald songs, and played poker for exorbitant stakes.

There were also faculty parties at Harvard, a pinched hour or so once a week in some upper room or other where vile little caphtorim for whom ideology, like science, put a ring around the world and professors of both sexes, working their rubber faces, stood around in the pavisade of closed circles, sipping sherry and earnestly trying to solve the vexata quaestio of who shouldn’t be given tenure, while their voices, a blend of the servile and the congratulatory, the deferential and the condescending, rose at moments of histrionic laughter or dropped at moments for serious inquiry — conversations, in fact, that proved to be little more than the gossip of swivel-chair tacticians and the less-than-witty exaugurations of academical women hardfaced as execution, crafty little critics, and anxiety-ridden sculptresses from Radcliffe with complexions like drakonite who taught art and somehow all specialized in phallic and mammary bronzes. The men stuttered; the women mimped; and the cumulative effect, often rising to a pitch of sensibility hardly to be distinguished from madness, only seemed to recapitulate in the babble what tragic consequences lay in store for those who would build towers to the heights of their Goddamned ambitions. Most of them had reputations, not for any particular wisdom, but for having authored with indefatigable manufacture books of eighth-rate criticism which they approached like cutting serge, getting their thruppence ha’penny change, and writing “settled” at the bottom of their manifests with the pencil that had blacked their teeth.

There was for instance the head of the English department, a showboat-fat idler in American Lit. — a salesman disguised as a catalogue— who, with his hands in his pockets, rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet and upon being introduced to Darconville said, “Ah, the scrivener.” Another one, expert on Wordsworth, simply snorfled sherry and talked about His Book. A group of men, introduced collectively as the Personnel Committee, tidily kept themselves to the rule of proportion and excluded anyone else from their charmed circle. It was all in all a gathering of self-important and inaccessible fame-suckers who ate too much, rarely taught classes, and had more sabbaticals in their lives than Saturdays — copyright pirates, purveyors of secondhand sunshine, and empiriocritical yahoos all ferreting and rummaging in the quis-quiliae of time, making books out of a judicious mixture of other books, and carrying owls to Athens. They were all at once silly, unimportant, and ambitious, minds which were logical and positive without breadth, without suppleness, and without imagination and their scholarship was nothing but a school of peculation which suffered less in the lack than in the excess of attention. The laurels about which one dreamt wouldn’t let the other sleep; another dreamt that his laurels wouldn’t let yet another sleep; and that one couldn’t sleep because only another dreamt of the very laurels he himself was disallowed.

Darconville would remember one particular afternoon at such a party: a colleague in his department happened, dared , to introduce herself as Isabel, and he was suddenly astonished to see how immeasurably sad he grew — excusing himself, in haste, to run immediately over to Adams House for a look into his mailbox, with no luck.

There was, of course, an outer edge of vanity and pretension to these occasions, these people, but the distractions were welcome. Anything that came to his mind became a preoccupation. A rough sea, he thought, leaves a smooth beach. And one morning that idea seemed confirmed in a wonderful way. A letter arrived: the wedding date was set in London at Westminster Cathedral for December 23! He called that night to tell Isabel. There was no answer. Quickly, he wrote her a letter asking her if he could come down to see her.

The master of Adams House, meanwhile, had noticed that Darconville not only kept aloof at the faculty parties but also took his meals alone in the dining-hall and so encouraged him to come to the Wednesday open-houses up in the Senior Common Room — a weekly get-together for associates, tutors, and affiliated professors where one had the opportunity to meet other members, chat, and have a drink. It was enjoyable, a versatile group of scholars, musicians, and lovely intelligent girls who, brimming with laughter and smelling of hot puffs of hairwash, effortlessly stood in to discuss their studies, vivisect the worth of a movie, or explain what they wanted to achieve in their careers. Several — the master among them — had read Darconville’s book, which even became the subject of some discussion there. He began to look forward to these occasions, the congeniality and quiet civility in that room, with its noble bust of John Adams, keeping his spirits up. By happenstance, one afternoon, Darconville noticed a person who looked like a pale slug crossing furtively along the wall to the exit of that room, walking with a kind of hop in his gait and frowning at the floor. It was none other than the blond shabrag of a lad who had so nervously accosted him in the dark that night on the top floor of Adams House.

“Excuse me,” asked Darconville, interrupting someone, “who is that?”

A few people turned: then they all knowingly exchanged glances. There were raised eyebrows, excipient whistles of sarcasm, and one or two exaggerated reviews of the ceiling. One girl, sucking her tongue in disgust, looked away. The senior tutor smiled and shook his head.

“That,” he replied, “is part of the caricaturama of Harvard. His name is Lampblack.”

And he ran errands. But no one knew much of anything else about him, whether he was a graduate student or how long he’d lived in Adams House or in fact where he’d come from. Nobody could guess his age. The only incontrovertible fact, it seemed, common knowledge apparently, was that he was a lackey, a little aide-de-camp of sorts whose services at some time or other had been secretly (and, it was suggested, diabolically) given over — if one could believe the report— to one of the strangest human beings on the face of the earth: some mad apple, a creature few had ever really seen, they said, in fact, a professor emeritus at Harvard who lived his life out alone on the interdicted reaches of the top floor of Adams House. As those in the common room spoke of him, it was as if of ruin or disgrace, as if some diseased and unpentecostal wind had suddenly blown up in that room to scandalize their young tongues and yet somehow force them to pronounce, not without an uneasy, almost disbelieving hitch in the throat, the discreditable confession that was his name: Dr. Crucifer.

It was whispered that this remote figure held an absolute and malevolent jurisdiction at Harvard and, to Darconville’s skeptical amusement, that he not only controlled everything there but that a good many members of the faculty, about whom he supposedly knew everything, had been brought to the university on the strength of nothing less mysterious than the power of his own secret command. “I take it he’s a wizard?” asked Darconville, smiling. But no one laughed — in fact, as he spoke, he happened to notice the senior tutor, closely watching him, suddenly look away.