Honest Doubt by Amanda Cross Page A

more digressions, which is to say more and more details. I didn’t interrupt often, and then only with a question to refuel his energy for compulsive talking. Not that I blamed him for the way he felt about Clifton; and I thought he’d certainly been smart to get out and move away. But at the same time, I could tell that the likelihood of his forgetting, or forgiving, or getting over the Clifton experience was not great.
    He spoke of the dynamic of relationships in the English department there. Sick, he called them, and I could hardly doubt it. The “old boys,” as he dubbed them, meaning everyone who had been there since forever, joined ranks to defeat any new appointment or promotion to tenure they found in any way threatening, which Rick said was all of them. They promoted and hired only clones of themselves. At the same time, he insisted, these older types didn’t exactly like each other much either, and bickering went on between them, at meetings and in the corridors, punctuated by insincere greetings to whoever was passing. One of them, according to Rick, would shout out, “Fine,” if anyone seemed to be greeting him, although he was too deaf to know what the greeting was or if anyone was asking him how he felt.
    Meanwhile, he and Antonia, and three of the four assistant professors, including the one who was away this year, had joined into a group supporting one another, and letting off steam at regular intervals. He and Antonia and the assistant professor, Catherine Dorman, who had been turned down for tenure, were the closest. Rick’s partner, Frank, had gotten to enjoy the group as well. The four of them often met at Rick and Frank’s apartment to discuss department conditions and possible maneuvers. Well, Rick said, Catherine was gone now, and he and Frank lived in New Jersey, but he sure as hell missed Antonia, seeing her on a regular basis, talking with her, laughing together.
    â€œWhat did you laugh at, mainly?” I asked. He was getting a little repetitive, and I thought concentrating on some particulars was not a bad idea.
    â€œTennyson,” Rick said. “Tennyson, and Haycock’s idiotic books on him. Harold Nicolson, in a book written in the Twenties, had referred to Tennyson’s ‘polluted muse,’ and Haycock had written volumes, absolute volumes, refuting, or trying to, that hideous phrase. Antonia looked it up and found that Nicolson was actually quoting a review on Tennyson’s early work; it also referred to Tennyson’s ‘feminine feebleness’—never will I forget that phrase. Obviously Haycock refused even to quote it in anger; the idea of Tennyson as feminine, let alone feeble, was more than he could countenance. And should anyone suggest that Tennyson and Hallam had loved not wholly in the pure way of manly men—well, I need hardly tell you what old Haycock would have thought of that. Actually, he might have burst a blood vessel and saved whoever did it from murdering him.”
    I looked puzzled, and I was. “You think it all sounds mad?” Rick asked.
    â€œNot mad, perhaps, but hardly what I imagined academics went on about. They sound more like kids arguing over the relative skill of baseball players.”
    â€œOf course they do. You’ve seen too many professors in movies, Woody, my love. Haycock had given his whole working life to Tennyson, he liked to think of himself as the world’s authority on Tennyson, and he suspected that Antonia was trying to take Tennyson, which is to say his life, away from him.”
    â€œWas she?”
    â€œNo, of course not. If he’d been a little more sensible about everything, including women and Tennysonian criticism, he’d have played around with it, and everyone would have been happy. But instead he fought Antonia and everything she stood for, including, alas, Catherine Dorman, who, one has to admit, joined Antonia in whooping up the Bloomsbury view