A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt
“I have letters, I am happy to say, from both Eichenbaum and Pinsky, accepting our invitation. Eichenbaum’s provisional title is ‘The Idea of the Innate and Its Part in a Theory of Learning.’ Pinsky says his will be something like ‘Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology. Order from Noise.’ ”
“Students have been known to object to both of them.”
“Indeed?”
“Eichenbaum was pelted with eggs and rotten fruit in America. And Pinsky was howled down with loudspeakers in Paris.”
“A university must uphold free speech. It is dangerous to prevent anyone from being heard, anyone. Which is why we must let this Anti-University have its say. Until and unless our own students are not following our own courses, and therefore failing.”
“I agree. We may turn out to be complacent.”
“Better than being provocative.”
“I agree. We agree. We might, most delicately and unobtrusively, sound out Nick Tewfell on both these issues.”
Wijnnobel poured more coffee.
“You will give a paper yourself, Vincent?”
“Would a paper on ‘Wittgenstein and the Dangerous Charm of Mathematics’ be acceptable? It would connect logic, language, Cantor’s ideas on infinity, Wittgenstein on Freud ...”
“I shall look forward to it. Now, let us look at what we should bring up with young Tewfell.”
Nick Tewfell was a neat, dark man, who wore a corduroy jacket, a checked shirt, and a red tie. His hair was cut short, clipped up the back of his narrow head. His preoccupations appeared to be more to do with canteen and bar improvements, than with the flamboyant slogans of the Anti-University. His father was an official in the Boilermakers’ Union; he came from Sunderland. He was studying History—he was not an outstanding student, it had simply been his best subject at school—and spent much of his spare time working for the Calverley Labour party, and addressing the Calverley Young Socialists. He was, for a student politician, a pragmatic and accommodating man.
He sat in Wijnnobel’s study and discussed forthcoming speakers, at the Union (Michael Foot, R. D. Laing), at the University (Anthony Crosland, Ernst Gombrich). The subject of the Body-Mind Conference arose. Wijnnobel, in a neutral voice, named the principal speakers. He said that the Conference would put the University firmly on the map, as an important centre of learning. Tewfell expressed polite enthusiasm for this idea, and volunteered that both Eichenbaum and Pinsky should attract a large audience. Hodgkiss smiled to himself. He asked Tewfell if he knew anything about the so-called Anti-University.
“I know where it is, I think. I know one or two of the people involved.”
“Students of the University?”
“Some. Not all. Some are graduate students.”
“Do you know anything about their proposed activities?”
“I don’t know that they do, really. I don’t think any of us have been approached—beyond the posters and things. I’ve not seen signs of any actual classes. Just notices.”
“I see no harm in notices. But I would naturally feel differently if classes were disrupted.”
“I’m sure you will be told of further developments. If there are any. We believe in free speech.”
“So does the University.”
Tewfell reported the concerns of the last Union Committee meeting.
“Students are asking for syllabus changes. They feel we have to do more work—spread ourselves wider—than students in other places.”
“You have one more year to do it. You chose to follow this syllabus. It is meant to be taxing.”
An edge of iron came into Gerard Wijnnobel’s clear voice.
“Students are specifically asking if the requirement to study another language could be made optional.”
“Indeed. Why?”
“Because—because it is very hard, for some of them. And they want time to study important new things. Theories. Literary theory, political theory.”
“I have always said, no man understands his own language who cannot follow the forms of another language.”
“I should answer that,” said Tewfell, “by saying that no student can do everything in a first degree.”
“And I should have to accept that. But I believe certain things are essential to understanding the mind, and others come subsequently. I would argue that literary theory is meaningless without knowledge of more than one grammar and more than one syntax.”
“Grammar is élitism; grammar is a control system.”
“Nonsense.”
“I was quoting one of those posters, Vice-Chancellor.”
“How can grammar be élitist? You are confusing it with Received Pronunciation.”
“Not me. The posters.”
Hodgkiss said “It may become necessary to explain the language requirement to the student body.”
“It should—to the student mind, or any mind—be self-evident, beautiful, and clear,” said Wijnnobel.
“You are a perfectionist,” said Hodgkiss.
“A practical perfectionist,” said the Vice-Chancellor.
“It might be practical to put the case. With which I agree, entirely.”
“English Lit. students, particularly,” said Tewfell, “resent the time spent on languages. They say it’s like going back to school.”
“As we all should, all our lives.”
“And,” said Hodgkiss pacifically, “they cannot say languages—living ones at least—have no use in the real world.”
“I didn’t say I agreed with them,” said Tewfell. “I see what you mean. I report what they say. A significant body of opinion. I was mandated to say so.”
“I am disappointed,” said the Vice-Chancellor.
What had begun well had dampened down.
The Anti-University did in fact have a base. This was two caravans and a dormobile, parked at a place oddly known as Griffin Street. Griffin Street was an almost derelict row of labourers’ cottages at the edge of the original Long Royston Estate, where parkland met open moors. The University proposed, when funds became available, to make the renovated cottages into graduate accommodation. One was already inhabited by two graduate students, Greg Tod and Waltraut Ross, a political historian and an anthropologist.
The dormobile belonged to Avram Snitkin, an itinerant ethnomethodologist. Snitkin had told Tod and Ross that he was writing up an in-depth study of law-court procedures in Britain, which he was. Tod and Ross suspected him of studying themselves at the same time. This didn’t bother them. Ethno-methodology meant studying the world of the studied from inside that world, as it comported itself. They thought he had a right.
One of the caravans was horsedrawn, a real Romany caravan with shafts and high steps and curtained windows. This was inhabited by Deborah Ritter, who was not a student of UNY, or indeed of anywhere, though she had from time to time and place to place studied comparative religion, anthropology, folklore and psychology. The other caravan had once been white, and was oval-shaped like an egg, balanced on an axle and a strut. It was pulled by a landrover. The landrover belonged to Jonty Surtees, who was older than the others, and had been on Haight-Ashbery, and with the Nanterre students, and had visited the communes in Copenhagen, and liaised with Kommune I in Berlin. The caravans were just beyond the old park fence. They were not technically on University land. Deborah’s horse, Vivasvat, fat, placid, dapple-grey with hairy fetlocks and an unkempt mane, grazed on a long tether. Deborah and Jonty Surtees were a kind of couple, both large and smiling, both with flowing red-gold hair over their shoulders. Surtees also had a fine red-gold moustache. He wore dark shirts, embroidered with flames and roses, open to the navel. Deborah wore Indian silky tunics over long skirts and bare feet; her brow was bound with a multi-coloured woven ribbon. Tod and Ross wore jeans and tee shirts, with varying slogans and faces. The Anti-University was taking shape in the five unused cottages in Griffin Street. Desks had been made from bricks and breeze-board. Typewriters clacked. In the kitchen Deborah cooked gr
In curious synchrony with the Vice-Chancellor’s invitations to Body and Mind, and at this stage unaware of the synchrony, the nuclear Anti-University despatched invitations to potential teachers and students. Greg Tod wrote to disaffected idealists from the LSE and Essex, Waltraut Ross wrote to student leaders in Europe, and Deborah Ritter wrote to various communes, hospitals, art schools and groups. Bring your own food and bedding, they said. We shall make a free space for self-expression, for the breakdown of artificial limits. Whilst they waited, they painted the caravans. The walls of the Romany caravan became a forest of silver and pine-green trees, overlapping, hung with gold and silver fruits and crimson pomegranates. The egg-shaped caravan was bedizened with coiling streamers and funnels and snakes and ladders and vines and creepers, inch by inch, in orange and shocking pink and pretty blues and many different greens. They argued for a whole evening about whether it was right to suggest topics of possible courses to potential instructors, and decided it was not. If by any chance everyone chose to give the same course, that only proved it was truly needed, and truly inspired. Leaflets were printed, saying, come and share your knowledge, however profound, however elementary. All can be studied, from cosmology to marmalade, from so-called madness to vegetarian cookery, from mantras to armed resistance to the death of capitalism to growing sweet-peas. The world is multifarious, so is the Anti-University. We can elucidate Karl Marx, set you on the way to Mao-thought, read your palm or open the secrets of the Tarot. All human life is here, or if it is not, it will be. Bring yourself (& food & bedding & music & art).
Late one afternoon, Ross, Tod and Deborah Ritter were sitting in the kitchen, smoking, burning incense, chopping onions, and discussing the withering of the bourgeois state and the transfiguration of the proletariat. Deborah was humming, which annoyed Greg Tod, who was talking. A figure appeared between the trees in the parkland, coming from the direction of the university. It was a black figure, female, heavy, tall; its progress was urgent and ungainly. Waltraut Ross watched out of the kitchen window, as the woman approached. Ross herself was small and skinny, and dressed usually in tight black sweaters and leggings like a resting ballerina. She had the very thin woman’s contempt for the buxom or the heavy.
“It’s a fat woman,” she said.
“Do we know her?” said Greg Tod.
“She looks sort of familiar. But I can’t place her. She’s got dogs with her. Fat collie dogs, with a fat woman.”
“Fat white woman,” said Deborah Ritter, unable to resist the quotation, “whom nobody loves.”
“Not necessarily,” said Greg.
“Certainly very bourgeois,” said Waltraut.
The woman knocked. Heavily, several times.
“Shall I?”
“May as well.”
They were working by candlelight. When Waltraut opened the door, the black figure for a moment filled it, and the flames danced in the cold draught that came with her.
“Shut the door,” said Greg Tod. “We like our fug.” There she stood, resolutely not part of their lolling, smiling, companionable world. She wore a large black coat that was a semi-cloak, with slits not sleeves, well-cut, with braided button-holes, suggesting both academic dress and witchcraft. Beneath it, she was a bundle of tunics and robe-like cardigans. Her black hair was heavy, and glossy, her brow lost under the fringe.
Her lips were dark crimson.
“What can we do for you?” said Greg.
“I saw your messages. I have come to offer my services to your—your community.”
No one invited her to take off her cloak.
“My name is Eva Selkett. I propose to offer instruction under that name. I have other names, but I shall teach here under the name of Eva Selkett.”
“And what will you teach? Not that we’re sure we want anyone to teach anyone anything.”
“I shall demonstrate and show. Ancient Egyptian wisdom, the reading of the Tarot, astrological arcana, and the cosmology of the Kabbalists.”
Deborah Ritter heaped several branches on to the open fire, which flared and blazed.
“I think we’ve got quite a lot of that already. I can read Tarot, I can read palms, I can cast horoscopes, myself.”
Eva Selkett was sweating. Her face shone. She put up a hand—covered with large rings, amethyst and opal—and wiped it.
“I should like to take off my coat.”
“I know who you are,” said Greg Tod. “It comes back to me. You’re his wife. You’re Lady Wijnnobel.”
“Well?” said Eva, formidable and melting.
“We don’t want you,” said Waltraut Ross. “You’re the enemy.”
“I thought you were—open to all comers. I have certain skills, certain knowledge. Not desired where I find myself.”
“Nor here, I’m afraid,” said Greg Tod. “No Ladies here.”
Odin and Frigg, who had been shut out, could be heard scratching at the door. Eva Wijnnobel appeared not to know what to do. She seemed to suppose that if she stood, resolutely enough, the company would see things her way. It was clear that she had not foreseen any outcome except acceptance.
“You make us uncomfortable,” said Deborah Ritter. “There’s something not right about you coming here. We—we feel you shouldn’t stay.”
The dogs scratched.
“Please,” said Waltraut Ross, “go now. Nothing has started. We’ll be in touch when we’re up and running. But as you can see, we—there isn’t anything happening.”
“I understood there was.”
Greg opened the door. “You understood wrongly. We’ll be in touch, that’s what they say, don’t they? We will, probably. Please, go home now.”
“I shall come back,” she said. Her hot face crumpled a little. They knew they should have been sorry for her, and were not. They very badly wanted her to go.
After an awkwardly prolonged silence, she went.
Jonty Surtees came in later, when it was dark. Deborah ladled bean stew into faience dishes. They told him of their weird visitor and her proposal. “I saw who she was,” said Greg Tod. “She was Lady Wijnnobel. Just marched in and said she was going to give courses on tarot and astrology. A mad old bat. Just stood there.”
Deborah hummed.
Waltraut said sharply “It would be nice to have something that wasn’t beans. They explode your gut.”
“Farty,” said Greg Tod. “Farty and tasty,” he added, pacifically.
Jonty Surtees chewed thoughtfully.
“Pythagoras said they were soul-food,” said Deborah. “And they’re cheap. And tasty.”
“Meat would be nice, meat would be tasty,” said Waltraut, who believed human beings were carnivores and that was that.
“Meat is murder,” said Deborah, placidly.
“What did you say to her?” said Jonty Surtees.
“We got rid of her. We made it quite clear she was unwanted.”
“I’m surprised.”
“There was something—not nice—about her,” said Waltraut.
“I’m surprised. You missed a trick there. There is nothing more useful if you’re trying to disrupt—to overthrow—an oppressive structure, a self-constituted power-centre, than a sympathiser—a convert, an ally—inside that structure. Oh, yes, you missed a trick.”
“She wasn’t a convert or an ally,” said Deborah. “She was doing her own thing.”
“It doesn’t matter—politically—what she’s like at all,” said Surtees. “She’s the Vice-Chancellor’s wife . She could have all sorts of uses.”
“So is the Anti-University a deliberate revolutionary act?” said Greg Tod. “Part of a grand strategy?”
“Oh, I thought that went without saying. Part of the sniping, the attrition, the destabilisation that will bring the whole thing down. When the time comes. You have to be opportunist. You have to be vigilant. That woman was a weapon and a loophole. You sh
“You didn’t see her,” said Waltraut. “Or you wouldn’t be so keen.”
“War is not a question of personalities,” said Jonty Surtees, and farted, long and loud.
“I told you,” said Waltraut. “Beans explode your gut.”
The next morning, the Wijnnobels’ housekeeper came to the breakfast table, and said
“There’s a young man outside wants to see you, my lady.”
Eva Wijnnobel was in her dressing-gown, crimson velvet.
“He may come back later.”
“He’s got a bunch of flowers. A big bunch.”
Eva followed the housekeeper to the dining-room door. Jonty Surtees was standing in the hall, with a huge bouquet of wild flowers—foxgloves, arum lilies, cow parsley, late buttercups, marguerites, festoons of bryony and nightshade—gathered in the park.
He smiled. He had a huge and friendly smile. He said “These are for you. You came to visit us yesterday, and some of us were discourteous. We are very sorry. We were unprepared and disconcerted. We hope you will accept an apology, and some wild flowers, and come back when things begin to happen. We want you to know you will be welcome and valued.”
Eva reached for the flowers. Gerard Wijnnobel came out after his wife.
Jonty Surtees smiled at him, too.
“I was just bringing a peace-offering. One or two of my friends were—well—a little impolite. I hope there are no hard feelings?”
“No hard feelings,” said Eva, slowly.
“Who was that, Eva?”
“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before.”
“What was he talking about? Who was rude to you?”
“Only students. It wasn’t important. It was exaggerated to bring flowers. Kind, of course, as well as exaggerated. They are all right, really. Just young.”
Chapter 7
From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell
My dear Kieran,
Do you have a Jungian interest in coincidence? Here is a rather elegant sample. I received two letters, this week, in the same post, from the same place, both inviting me to give a paper. One was from the Vice-Chancellor of your new University, asking me to be part of a multi-disciplinary conference in June on the multifarious relations of Body and Mind. There are to be chemists, philosophers, linguists, neurologists, literary men, sociologists, psychologists etc. etc. I am asked to speak—in any way I choose—for psychoanalysis. “An essential strand of our discussion” the V-C says. (I believe he himself is a Grammarian.)