It has always been thus.

Should those who lament the corporatization of the University--I'm looking at you, Lars Iyer, among many others--take heart from the fact that Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong (1959) reminds us that it's been going on for a long, long time? Or should it be yet another source of distress? From the novel:

Treece had never really wanted to come to the ball in the first place. It was the Vice-Chancellor, who spent the weeks before these student occasions in indefatigable effort, gathering up members of the faculty to go along in order, as he liked to express it, "to put up a bit of a show," who had tempted him here. The Vice-Chancellor, like all vice-chancellors, had clear ideas of what a university should look like, and taste like; vice-chancellors all share in common a Platonic ideal for a university. For one thing, it should be big. People should be coming to look at it all the time. There should be a special place for parking Rolls-Royces. There should be big sports grounds, a science building designed by Basil Spence, and more and more students coming every year. There should be new faculties--of Business Administration, of Aeronautical Engineering, of Sanitation, of Social Dancing. Vice-chancellors want big universities and a great many faculties; professors want small universities and only the liberal arts and pure sciences. Vice-chancellors always seem to win.

It's not quite Iyer's nightmare-born "Faculty of Sport," but it's close.

A different approach to parties

On Monday, I shared a party scene from Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong in which an early guest made himself a bit too much at home. Today I'll share a passage where that party's host, now attending a do at someone else's house, makes himself at home in a less intrusive, but hardly more appropriate way:

"Did you bring a book to read?" asked Viola, when Treece had had time to thaw a little. This was a reference to the fact that, at parties, Treece had a habit of reading in a corner, with his back to the assembled company; there was a famous occasion when, at a faculty dinner, he got through A Farewell to Arms.

I am not at my best at parties. I have a bad habit of finding the people I know and sticking close to them, then leaving fairly early. But at least I'm not that bad. The most I've ever gotten through at a party is a very short story.

Party-going

Comic novels often reach their heights in party scenes. It's the perfect situation, after all, bringing together drunkenness, awkward conversation, and shifting groups of characters. (And did I mention drunkenness?) To my mind, they're second only to hangover scenes as a chance for a comic novelist to really cut loose and have fun.

While Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong is sadly devoid of hangover scenes, it is rife with parties, all quite funny. The best is held by the protagonist, Treece, for some of the students he works with, and the funniest part of that party is built around the breach of social etiquette that opens it: Louis Bates, an awkward student, arrives far too early.

[Treece] was straightaway presented with a major social quandary: could one fairly ask the too-early guest to wander about the cold winter streets and return in an hour, when the sandwiches would be made and the preparations completed, the old pair of working trousers and the frilly apron replaced by a suit--or must one invite him in and perhaps even entertain him? Louis, on the other hand, had no such social doubts, and politely and firmly indicated what he considered appropriate:

"I'm afraid I'm a little early," he said, "but that's because I didn't want to be late. I have no sense of time."

"I think we said four o'clock, didn't we?" asked Treece, opening the door no wider. "It's now not quite three."

"I know," said Louis, and at that point it dawned on Treece that Louis actually intended to stay, for some abstruse purpose.

"None of your colleagues has arrived yet," Treece said.

The remark did not perturb Louis at all. "Apres moi, le deluge," he said.

Treece saw that he had no alternative and gave way, and Louis stepped confidently into the hall, unbuttoning his coat and looking with interest about him at the decoration. "I thought we might have a little chat about how I was getting on, you know," said Louis.

"I think we might try and preserve this as a social occasion," said Treece.

Leading Louis into the drawing room and helping him out of his huge overcoat, "which he had somehow contrived to wind about him like a shroud," Treece apologizes:

"You must excuse me if I leave you here, but I haven't finished getting things ready yet, and I have to change," said Treece. Louis appeared at first hurt, and then baffled, by this news. He was well awared that if he was left alone in an empty room he would quickly be nibbled by misfortune; he would pull over a bookcase while trying to take out a book, or be discovered by an unwarned housekeeper and accused of burglary. He knew himself and he knew his gods; he knew the rotation of his misfortunes. "This is a nice room," he said quick-wittedly.

Treece looked around, surprised; it had not changed, it was as it was, and that was patently the last thing that could be said of it. If he was the sort of person who liked nice rooms, he was damned if this was the sort of room he would be living in.

As Treece attempts to flee to the kitchen, it gets no better:

"Isn't there anything I can be doing?" [Louis] suggested. "I'm afraid there isn't," said Treece, nervous of Louis's desire to please. He made hastily for the door and Louis planned an even more desperate move. "Do you think I could have a bath?"

But Treece had gone. He had withdrawn to the kitchen and, up to his elbows in pastry (Mrs. Watson had taught him how to make cakes), was wondering what Louis was doing and what would have happened to the room when he got back. In fact, Louis passed through all the stages of privation in a strange house--he examined the ornaments on the mantel, looked at the pictures on the walls, noticed the books in the bookcase and read the spicier pages of the medical directory, peered at his teeth in the mirror, made sure his fly buttons were fastened--and he was cutting his hair at the back with a pair of scissors found in an open drawer of the bureau when Treece returned, nearly an hour later, to start the fire. "I ought to have done this before I came," said Louis Bates.

And all of the before anyone's had a drop to drink!

The modern novel

As I write this, it's late on a hot Fourth of July, and through our open windows we can hear the constant barrage of celebration. Illegal celebration, as Illinois doesn't allow fireworks--and all the more entertaining (at a distance) therefore.

But against that backdrop, do you really think I'm going to write a post titled "The modern novel"? Seems like too big a task on a night like tonight. So I'll turn the topic over to Malcolm Bradbury, from Eating People Is Wrong:

"You are not converting me," cried Treece furiously. "All the modern novel seems to have discovered since Lawrence is that there are some people in England who change their shirts every day. I knew that already. I don't need to read modern novels."

"But you should," said Viola.

"Why?" cried Treece. "I read this one because someone said I was in it. And I am. Do you realise that the story about the professor who left the script of one of his articles among some student essays, and another tutor gave it C minus, is about me? Someone must have told this man. Even down to the bit about, 'This is good lower second stuff.' It was B minus actually. That makes it worse."

"Poet's licence," said Viola.

The joke itself is fun, of course, but what I love most about this passage is the earnestness of Treece's complaint about the modern novel. He really is an Edwardian at his core, and an early Edwardian at that--he's no Victorian, no prude, he wants to be a liberal intellectual, with all the doubting and questing that that entails, but the new and the now simply do not appeal. Usually, he can hide his distaste under the openness and relativism of his creed, but once in a while . . . it emerges in a cry straight from the heart.

"A Rupert Brooke without a Gallipoli"

Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong is full of great comic moments--from the level of observations (the lobby's "huge leather armchairs that looked like cows; you wouldn't have thought it odd if someone had come along to milk them") to extended scenes and exchanges of dialogue. The book is so good that I feel I should put all my (admittedly limited) resources to nudging it out of the long shadow of Lucky Jim, so I'll be sharing bits from it through the next few posts.

Today, I'll share a description that I admire not merely for how it captures a type of person that we can still picture now, long after the reference points Bradbury uses have ceased to be alive in our world, but also for how, not content to simply come up with a funny comparison, Bradbury gives them one further nudge, developing them until he's wrung every last bit of humor out of each. Here you go:

Merrick, if he was anything, was a gentleman. He was, it always seemed to Treece, a typical Cambridge product gone to seed; he was the bright young man of fifty, handsome, fair-haired, bursting with romantic idealism, the sort that nice girls always loved, the sort that had gone off in droves to fight the First World War. There was something passe and Edwardian about Merrick. He was conceited, cocksure, a public school and Cambridge Adonis fascinated by what he called "the classical way of life." Treece privately described him as a Rupert Brooke without a Gallipoli, and this was really almost fair; he seemed as if he had outstayed his lease on the earth, and now his romanticism was turning into a kind of Housman-like light cynicism, his open and frank assurance curdling, his Grecian-god looks becoming almost grotesque with wrinkles. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out a gold cigarette case: "Gasper?" he said. He would, naturally, wear a waistcoat; cigarettes he would call, of course, "gaspers." He smiled brilliantly at Emma and put his cigarette case before here; you felt that, like Bulldog Drummond, he would say, "Turkish on this side; Virginias on that."

You can see him, no? Pocket watch as well, I trust, and possibly a very narrow mustache? Or even a monocle?

Blimey! It's slang time!

A couple of novels I've read recently have thrown up some slang terms that seemed worth a bit of a look into, so, to deploy a new gleaning from the Urban Dictionary, I won't ramp with you--I'll get right to it:

1 That word--"ramp"--is actually the first one, though not, it seems, used with any of the meanings offered by the Urban Dictionary. I encountered it in Malcolm Bradbury's wonderfully funny campus comedy Eating People Is Wrong (1959). A faculty member is irritated that coffee in the faculty lounge must be paid for by departmentally issued tickets, and she says, "Isn't it a ramp?" A colleague then reflects,

Treece admired Viola's indignations. She was always full of protest about ramps, and over charging, and overcrowding in houses, and lack of toilet facilities at the bus station: her principles were always directed against tangible objects, whereas Treece's, these days, could fix on nothing save unresolvable complexities.

So a "ramp" is a scam, perhaps? An irritation? A bureaucratic irritation? English readers--is this a familiar term and I've just never encountered it?

2 The second term was in Matthew Specktor's new novel of Hollywood, American Dream Machine, one of the best books I've read this year. (It's like a more realistic, less distanced cousin to Steve Erickson's Zeroville--whereas Erickson deliberately offered up a naive cipher as his protagonist, and let Hollywood roil around him almost like a fever dream, Specktor gives us a number of fully realized, convincing characters and shows what happens when dreams become business, rebellion gets rich, and every human relationship takes a backseat to questions of success and fear of failure. It's perceptive, smart, funny, and beautifully written, with an emotional honesty and intensity that makes the prose sing.)

At two points in the book, younger characters address each other as "holmes," as in, "Hey, holmes." Now, the word itself isn't new--I'm not hip, but I'm not that not hip. My surprise came from the spelling: I'd always assumed it was "homes," from "homeboy."

And according to the Urban Dictionary it is. "Holmes," however, is also correct--and here's where the Urban Dictionary shows its weakness: a real dictionary would explain which was the preferred, or more common usage. Instead, we're left on our own. Me, I'll stick with "homes." The other version just makes me feel like Watson.

3 I'll close with a locution that's not slang, but seems to fit today's theme nonetheless: "tailor style," used to describe cross-legged sitting, with the lower legs toward the body and crossed low on the ankle. It's one of Donald Westlake's favorite descriptive terms--if I remember right, a murder victim in Plunder Squad is even impaled on a sword while sitting tailor style. Aside from Westlake, however, I've only ever encountered it in the work of Lawrence Block--who, as a friend of Westlake, I thought might have picked it up from him (or vice versa).

Wikipedia, however, assures me that it's a common term. The entry for "Sitting"--good glorious god, there's an entry for "Sitting"--says it is found in several European languages (though the link to the Wiktionary entry does come up empty).

So now you have an assignment: Come up with a sentence that uses all three terms, and leave it in the comments. Don't let me down, homes.

Back in the Saddle Again, or, Gene Autry never mentioned the sores!

Though I make no promises, tonight marks an attempt to get back to blogging more reliably following my Getaway Car–induced slowdown. (I've turned in the manuscript, and while there are still many hurdles still to leap, things are moving along nicely--and best of all, I really like the book as it's come together. In the course of assembling it, re-arranging it, and typing large parts of it, I've read the whole thing probably three times now, and I find myself enjoying Donald Westlake's company just as much every time--a good sign.) There's a better than reasonable chance that upcoming travels and work stress will keep me from returning to a regular schedule until autumn, well, to quote Sampson Starkweather, "It's true, people cannot be trusted / but do it anyway. It's great! Trust me."

As with any pursuit you let lie fallow for a while, it takes a bit of stretching and plodding to get back into it. Neglected muscles grumble; skills, disregarded, refuse to answer the call. (You should--or, more properly, shouldn't--hear me at the piano after a week on the road. Good god.)

So for tonight, I'll merely praise Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong (1959), a book that, as a mid-fifties campus comedy, molders unfairly in the shadow of Lucky Jim. Oh, there's no doubt that Lucky Jim is the better, funnier book, but more than a half-century on from the publication of the two, I think there's room enough for both. As I ease back into all this nonsense, I'll likely share a number of passages from it that made me laugh out loud. For now, however, I'll simply share two invocations of Shakespeare, both of which get at the genius at the book's heart--the attempt to portray the ultimate dilemma facing the liberal intellectual: once we admit that all can (and should) be doubted, where can we find firm footing, and how can we ever hope to move beyond self-criticism (and self-analysis to support that criticism) to grapple with the world as such? (The title sums it up brilliantly: Yes, eating people is clearly wrong, but when one considers . . . )

Herewith, passage one:

There are people to whom life seems so simple, and so pleasantly simple, that when you look at them you wonder, "Well, look, perhaps I just haven't through this through far enough--I, and Shakespeare, and the rest of us."

It would be a good line, a funny line, if its only joke was the so-English diffidence of "Well, look, perhaps." But the late, and, one assumes, reluctant, invocation of Shakespeare raises it to genius.

Then there's this:

Of course, in a way Hamlet was a man of action--look how he was always killing people.

I know that this isn't necessarily the aspiration of all comic writing, but is there any higher praise than this: that line could have been delivered by Bertie Wooster.