Opposite each other, facing an unlit electric fire, sat a pair of hippies. One of them, presumably the doctor, waved his hand at me and said, without looking up :
The room across the corridor. Five minutes.’
There was a further hippie in the room across the corridor.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘What’s going on around here ? Are you next ?’
‘What’s your name ?’
‘Highway.’ What’s yours? Manson?
‘Right. I’m after you.’
‘Is Dr Knowd the one in there with the longer hair?’
He looked straight ahead and nodded. ‘I hear he’s quite a cool guy. About the coolest guy in Oxford. Around now.’ He went on nodding. ‘Seminars on Berryman. Snodgrass. Sexton. Guys like that.’
‘Christ. What will you be telling him about ?’
He bunched his fist and swirled it in the air, as if making some lazy threat. ‘If I can just get into Robert Duncan. Or Hecht, maybe…’
Who were these people? I had studied neither the Extremists nor the Liverpudlians.
While I undid my top four shirt-buttons, took off my tie and noosed my forehead with it, put on my jacket inside out (the lining, thank heaven, was slightly torn), and tucked my trousers into my boots, the hippie asked, ‘Hey. What are you doing?’
‘Bit hot,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Hey look, just how old is he, do you know?’
Twenty-five. Six. He’s very active.’
‘Active?’
‘For reform.’
‘What do you mean?’ Letting girls stay in until midnight rather than eleven thirty? Serving breakfast ten minutes later? ‘What sort of reform? Political?’
‘Yeah. Political reform.’
‘Oh shit.’
The door opened.
‘Highway?’ The second hippie gestured with his beard.
I raced towards him. ‘That’s me.’
‘You’re next.’
‘Hey, how did it go?’ I whispered.
Gatty, it must have been, paused on the stairs. ‘Okay, I think. Don’t worry, he’s pretty friendly. Nice cat.’
‘What did you talk about?’
The Russian neo-symbolists.’
*
Dr Knowd had moved to a cushionless window-seat in the far corner of the room where the December breeze playfully tangled the errant curls of his hair.
‘Does the air bother you?’ he asked, in a voice without much in the way of accent; rather like my own.
‘Not at all. Do you mind if I take my jacket off, actually?’
‘Not at all.’
I could see my exam-papers resting on his thighs. They were marked in red ink.
‘Sit,’ the man said.
On the floor. No: too obvious – too simplistic. From a choice of sofa, two armchairs and a stool, I took the last. For Knowd, who continued to sift unemphatically through my papers, was in urban-guerrilla dress: variegated, camouflage-conscious green and khaki canvas suit; beetle-crusher, pig-stomper boots; beret. Jack-Christ face and hair. Softly I hummed the Internationale, in order to stop my teeth chattering.
‘Mr Highway … do you like literature?’
Oh come on. What kind of question is that ? What novels have you been reading recently? What are your problems?
I smiled. ‘What kind of question is that?’
‘I beg your pardon.’ He glanced up at me. ‘But if I’ve read your papers correctly
Sweat flushed my face and armpits. I took out a handkerchief.
Knowd spoke. ‘For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot … “in their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messi-ness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc., etc.” This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the “faked inhumanity” of the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land – a point you owe to W. W. Clarke – which, it seems, is just a bit too messy all of a sudden. Again, in the Criticism paper you jeer at Lawrence’s “unreal sexual grandiosity”, using Middleton Murry on Women in Love, also without acknowledgment. In the very next line you scold his “over-facile equation of art and life”.’
He sighed. ‘On Blake you seem quite happy to paraphrase the “Fearful Symmetry” stuff about “autonomous verbal constructs, necessarily unconnected with life”, but in your Essay paper you come on all excited about the “urgency … with which Blake educates and refines our emotions, side-stepping the props and splints of artifice’. Ever tried side-stepping a splint, by the way ? Or educating someone urgently, for that matter ?