The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) by Mary McCarthy

not into conspicuous entertaining. Among the older married teachers, there were a number of those husband-and-wife “teams” that progressive colleges like to hire and others, for some reason, do not—for them the double income made a low salary practicable. And even such an instructor as Henry Mulcahy, tortured by debt, doctor bills, coal bills, small personal loans never paid back, four children outgrowing their clothes, patches, darns, tears, the threatening letters of a collection-agency, knew himself well off here in comparison to many an instructor at state university or endowed private college, where a stipend of twenty-five hundred would not be considered too low. Jocelyn, in this respect, followed the progressive pattern of offering a reasonable security to those in its lowest rank, while holding out few prospects of advancement or of juicy plums at the top of the tree. In this way, it had been able to recruit a faculty of poets, sculptors, critics, composers, painters, scene-designers, and so on, without academic experience and without, also, academic ambitions of the careerist sort—as well as beginners in history, science, or philosophy fired with the love of a subject and impatient of graduate-school norms; plus a certain number of seasoned non-conformists and dissenters, sexual deviants, feather-bedders, alcoholics, impostors.
    All these, on the instructorial or assistant-professor level, constituted the bulk of Jocelyn’s faculty, which included many transients and floaters, here one year and gone the next. Behind them, on the associate or full-professor level, was the staple minority of family men, Fathers of the progressive republic, kindly, genial, older statesmen wedded to pipe and tobacco-pouch, steeped in a beneficent content, rather in the Swiss style, fond of bierstube, lieder, mountain-climbing, ice-skating, aperitifs on the plaza of a well-loved foreign town, chary of commitment, generous of praise, prudent, thrifty, foresighted—the best type, in short, of bourgeois summer-wandering scholar who saw events, as it were, three-dimensional, through the broadening stereopticon of travel. Such men had been drawn into the progressive life more or less by accident, through a chance recommendation, a meeting on a promenade deck, a college friendship kept up, and stayed in it partly from habit and partly from that taste for a foreign yet familiar environment that governed their vacation schedules: the scandals and oddities of the successive years at Jocelyn were preserved in their reminiscences like views of the Bay of Naples or, more appropriately, like the graffiti at Pompeii. Unlike their younger colleagues, they were able to find extenuating circumstances for any piece of rascality; seasoning had made them tolerant. Like all long-time residents in an alien environment, they used a double standard, one for themselves and another, more lenient, for the native folkways.
    Such a man was Aristide Poncy, professor of French and German, head of the Languages department of the Literature and Languages Division, a Swiss in actual derivation as well as in temperament, brought to America by his parents when he was six years old, educated at Zurich and the University of North Dakota—a middle-aged, fatherly man with large, smooth chaps and an outing taste in dress that suggested Sherlock Holmes. He had been at Jocelyn from the beginning without making an enemy; he taught his pupils, by preference, out of secondary-school textbooks and was himself engaged in a lifelong study of Amiel, on whom he had already published an admirable bibliography and two pertinent articles. None of his students, alas, could be got to share this interest; they preferred to read Sartre and Camus or, rather, to hear about them—he himself had lost patience with the French novel about the time of Maurice Dekobra. Under his multilingual auspices a variety of rather curious younger people had come to teach at Jocelyn. He had perhaps a