Читать онлайн «The Groves of Academe»
Автор Мэри МакКарти
The Groves of Academe
A Novel
Mary McCarthy
TO
Contents
Chapter I: An Unexpected Letter
Chapter II: Mulcahy Has an Idea
Chapter III: Mea Culpa
Chapter IV: Ancient History
Chapter V: In Camera
Chapter VI: Lucubrations
Chapter VII: Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave
Chapter VIII: The Deputation
Chapter IX: Discovered
Chapter X: Mulcahy Finds a Disciple
Chapter XI: What Would Tolstoy Say?
Chapter XII: The Poets Convene
Chapter XIII: The Tygres Heart Wrapt in a Player’s Hyde
Acknowledgments
A Biography of Mary McCarthy
HORACE, EP. II, ii, 45
Chapter I
WHEN HENRY MULCAHY, A middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President’s letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer. This was the last straw. How was he expected to take care of forty students if other demands on his attention were continually being put in the way? On the surface of his mind, this vagrant grievance kept playing. Meanwhile, he had grown pale and his hands were trembling with anger and a strange sort of exultation. “Your appointment will not be continued beyond the current academic year…. ” He sprang to his feet and mimed the sentence aloud, triumphantly, in inverted commas, bringing the whole force of his personality to bear on this specimen or exhibit of the incredible.
He had guessed long ago that Hoar meant to dismiss him, but he was amazed, really amazed (he repeated the word to himself) that the man should have given himself away by an action as overt as this one.
As an intellectual, he felt stunned not so much by the moral insensitiveness of the President’s move as by the transparency of it. You do not fire a man who has challenged you openly at faculty meetings, who has fought, despite you and your cabal, for a program of salary increases and a lightening of the teaching load, who has not feared to point to waste and mismanagement concealed by those in high places, who dared to call only last week (yes, fantastic as it seemed, this was the background of the case) for an investigation of the Buildings and Grounds Department and begged the dietitian toStill, the triteness of the attempt, the jejuneness and tedium of it, tried forbearance to the limit; at a progressive college, surely, one had the right to expect something better than what one was used to at Drake or Montana, and the very element of repetition gave the whole affair an unwarranted and unreal character, as of some tawdry farce seriously re-enacted. He had been in the academic harness long enough, he should have thought (and the files in the college office could testify) to anticipate anything, yet some unseen tendril of trust, he now remarked with a short harsh laugh, must have spiraled out from his heart and clung to the President’s person, or simply to the idea of decency, for him now to feel this new betrayal so keenly.
