Bluffworld Read online

  Victoria University of Wellington Press

  PO Box 600, Wellington

  New Zealand

  vup.wgtn.ac.nz

  Copyright © Patrick Evans 2021

  First published 2021

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  A catalogue record is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  ISBN 978-1-77656-311-1 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-77656-455-2 (EPUB)

  ISBN 978-1-77656-456-9 (Kindle)

  Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks

  Zum Bullshitter geht der Preis—

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

  Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

  I have the impression that there is an alarming amount

  of bluffing in the humanities——

  George Steiner,

  A Long Saturday: Conversations

  Time for another all-staff barbecue!

  Trad

  For Paul Millar

  Contents

  _______________

  Part One The Sorrows of Young Werther

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two Venusberg

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three Götterdämmerung

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Four The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Author’s note

  Obituary

  PART ONE

  The Sorrows of

  Young Werther

  Chapter 1

  _______________

  Have you ever noticed there’s a certain kind of fly that doesn’t make a sound? I’m watching one now as it moves around the light fitting above my head. They’re tiny, these buzzless flies,1 and if you watch for a while you’ll see they move not in a circle but in squares or rectangles and turn right at each corner, abruptly, for no particular reason. I could watch them for hours.

  I come in here each day with my laptop: sabbatical leave, Bevan calls it—he’s my boss, in the bookshop across the foyer from here. Just the two cubicles, and I sit in one or the other of them like this and think about the things that’ve brought me here. I try to make sense of them, I try to work out whether they were always going to happen or I’ve just stuffed up, made bad decisions the way counsellors try to get you to see when it’s far too late. But then I find I’m watching these flies instead—here’s another, come out of nothing and following the first around the light—watching them mindlessly, as if there’s not a brain cell left in my head. Three of them now, sawing their way silently around the fitting—always anticlockwise, as if they’re onto something about the universe that human beings don’t know.

  It was always like this, to tell the truth, back in my early days as an academic, that high old time it’s high time I told you about. Was that the reason my life became unstuck? Was it something to do with those long hours spent here staring up at these tiny noiseless flies drawing invisible squares around the light fitting on the ceiling of the English-department men’s room, while almost none of my academic work got done? The word gormless comes to mind.

  My name is Thomas Flannery and I am forty-two years old.2 Here’s how a typical working day starts for me, now I’ve run out of luck and bullshit.

  Just before eight each morning I take a bus to the terminus in town, from whichever house I happen to be babysitting for STEM3 academics on sabbatical leave.4 From there I walk a couple of blocks westward, across the Bridge of Remembrance and along the riverbank. There’s the gentlemen’s club on the left and the former public library on the right and then the central police station, a minatory presence quickly passed. After that, the dreaming spires5 begin to appear ahead of me above a froth of leaves, and then, gradually, as I approach, the neo-Gothic confection of the university buildings beneath. A few minutes more and I’m stepping through the arched entrance beneath the clock­tower and into the northern quadrangle and the campus itself, with its grey slate roofs, its gnarled gargoyles and the solemn, looped procession of its cloisters. Ivy, these days carefully trimmed and shaped, is dabbed about here and there. The former campus is a picture.

  Here, I spent my student life; here, after a few years, and somehow, I got a temporary job in the Department of English; here, in due course, bit by bit and to my great astonishment, I became a full-time and tenured academic and had what you might call something of a career. And, here, a year ago, it all came to an end: The Dissolution of the Monasteries, I call it, though I got that line from someone else. I get all my lines from someone else. It’s the nature of universe, I’ve found. Bluffworld, I call it, though I think I may have pinched that as well.

  You might say that the ontogeny of this daily trip recapitulates the phylogeny of my earlier life. In all truth I know nothing whatever about ontogeny, or phylogeny, either, and picked up the entire phrase from an overheard conversation in a common room.6 Excellent and pleasing it is, and the use of it here is an equally pleasing example of bluff. You could as easily say that I retrace my past each morning as I walk through that arched entrance and into the College of Arts.

  Except that it isn’t the College of Arts anymore, and it hasn’t been the College of Arts since They closed us down a year ago, and, as effectively as a guillotine or a gun, ended my career and those of several hundred colleagues as well. Oh, yes, they’ve left it looking like a university College of Arts—nearly the way it looks in the postcards: pretty as a picture. And with the work being done now by builders and plumbers and electricians and ivy-trimmers, it looks even more so, on its irreversible path to the hyperreal (another word overheard and adopted, another second-hand idea with a meaning that somewhat eludes me).7 After all, that was the point of the buildings from the very first, when they were built a century ago and more—wasn’t it? To play a part, to pretend, to look much older than they were? To seem real. To seem real.

  To seem.

  More of that later, though; more of that later. Here I am now, on this very particular morning as it’s turning out to be, walking through the outer archway of that discreetly ivied clocktower. I cross the original College coat of arms, set out in coloured floor-tiles inside, along with the university’s motto—Faecem in Caenum Mutare8—and pass through the inner archway to the north quadrangle and its tranquil mood. The medium-grey of the stone walls and their buttresses, those touches of dark ivy, the high, patterned slate roofs with their crocketed ridges, the cloisters running away to my left in pointed loops, atmospherically, evocatively—poetically, almost—to the men’s lavatory at the far end.

  Since the Dissolution of the Monasteries9 I’ve kept to my old routines, and I always call in at this public loo just before reporting for my morning hours at my new job. I always leak at the same end of the urinal (the farther). As I wash my long thin pale academic hands I always look into the same rust-foxed mirror above the sink (the nearer). I always dry them at the same roller towel (the one in the middle). And, always, the man whose identikit face looks back in the glass is not Everyman but Anyone, a leftover, a pawn: boring old Me. Some of the changes in my appearance over the last few years have been brought about by misfortune and the passage of time. But some
I’ve brought about myself, by abandoning the precious little scarves and retro floral waistcoats I used to affect when a junior academic; the louche little kepi, the cowboy boots, the stonewashed jeans as tight as paint, the—

  But—oh, God—here’s Neary,10 popped up behind me in the mirror and stopping short when he sees me. I turn away to the roller towel, which gives a reassuring old creak as I pull at it.

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Just the man I want to see.’

  As meaningless as the roller towel, this Neary: former head of Classics, a tall, dreary Englishman, PhD Leeds, author of The Tongue-Scraper in Classical Verse (London: Routledge 1979). His inexplicable seventies mutton-chop whiskers have survived the closedown of the university.

  I know what’s up. He’s wearing his academic regalia. The St Andrews bonnet is a fungoid growth upon his head.11

  ‘No,’ I tell him.

  In fact, I know I’m going to do what he wants. For the money, little as it is.

  ‘I need one more,’ he says, briskly.

  ‘Bundy.’

  ‘I’ve already got Bundy.’

  ‘Well, try Biddle, then—’

  ‘Biddle’s setting up his food stall, you know that.’

  By now we’re standing together outside the loo and staring into a patch of early sunlight that’s almost reached the middle of the quadrangle. A small group is gathering there: obsolete humanities academics, their tired academic gowns swirling in a fair old wind from the south.

  Now, abruptly, near the Great Hall, from a little doorway in the corner of the quadrangle, tourists begin to stream out, excited in a dozen different languages. Inside, the university’s greatest son, its most famous graduate, inventor of the most effective hangover cure of its time, CRAPU-LESS, is impersonated by a stiff, whiskery mannequin in Victorian clothing. It stands, tilting slightly, in a mock-up of the great man’s tiny first laboratory.

  The tourists gather, cameras up, as a couple of former socio­logists shoulder their way into academic gowns—they’ve had the worst of it since the closedown, the sociologists: unem­ployable, all of them, except for a raucous, insecure woman rumoured to have started a brothel in Brisbane.

  ‘No,’ I tell Neary.

  ‘Five dollars—’

  ‘Ten. No, fifteen—’

  ‘Blow you. Seven-fifty.’ He holds out a gown. ‘You were just the MA, weren’t you?’

  Always that question, even after everything that’s happened.

  ‘Does it matter what gown I wear?’

  ‘Well, yes, I rather think it does—no, no, come on, put it on properly—’

  And so, as always, the event unfolds. I join the posing group, pulling my Master’s gown around me, yearning for invisibility, for extinction its very self. Together, the eight or ten of us stand squinting into wind that squeezes tears from the corners of our eyes and flutters and flaps at our gowns, while around us the tourists rush and babble: their phones blink above their heads as they click and change places, click and change places again. I count backwards from fifty; I try to ignore the shouts from workmen on a scaffold high up the side of the Great Hall and the puerile academic jokes of my former colleagues; I count back up to fifty again. I’m doing this for perhaps the tenth time when suddenly it’s all over and I can pull off the gown and the hood and the mortarboard, and grab money from Neary’s cold, bony fist. It comes entirely in coins.

  Back in the men’s lavatory I try to pick up my former routine: half a minute at the urinal again, half a minute at the sink washing my hands and gazing up at my reflection, waiting for my sense of self to reassemble. Vanity, they must have thought, those blokes who used to pass behind me, unzipping or zipping up again, but in fact it was never that: no more, back then, than a form of incredulity, an astonishment at having found the life I’d been given as a junior academic—lifestyle, I mean, since style was, generally speaking, the only thing I had. I was all appearance, and it seemed that was all one required to pass oneself off as whatever it was one was pretending to be. Whoever that might have been. And none of it of any use at all now I’m out in the world at last, which is where, for better or for worse, I seem to have been for an entire year.

  In the mirror, I see a face now like a pear or a balloon on a stick. Its slow collapse into the collar has thickened and widened its jawline while the daily evacuation of the scalp lifts the forehead towards a sudden, nude peak—in the middle of which a silly, single tuft of forelock, the last of my widow’s peak, sits like an island abandoned to climate change. Well, then, shave it off, I can hear you say. Go with the flow—go all the way.

  Ah, but that lonely forelock is the last thing left to define the face I used to have. As long as it’s there I can just remember what I once looked like, I can just carry a ghostly, faded snapshot of the sharp, hungry, leonine fellow I used to be, a sense of the person I once was or thought I was. A single comma, a single semicolon on my brow—all I’ve got left of Me.

  But, oh, how the girlies12 liked that sharp, hungry fellow back then!—and how I strutted my stuff before them in my lectures, wearing my Groppi mocker, as one of my older colleagues used to call it:13 Charles II hairdo, sickle moustache, self-involved Paisley shirt with high, open collar and a throat medallion amidst the wisps of feeble academic chest hair; flared trousers in Karitane Yellow,14 bright golden shoes built high on cork soles a good three inches deep.

  There are photos in the family album no one must ever see. Me in a jerkin, a sort of buttonless waistcoat atrocity now lost to time, or, downmarket, in those tight jeans and that insouciant Rolling Stones kepi I mentioned just a moment ago. Me, under the influence of this woman or that, in an entire jeans-suit with shoulders padded like the back of a sofa. Me, leaning into the flare of a match as I light up, à la Alber’ K-moo, or Albert Came-us as I used to call him before an embarrassing common room correction; I also came to grief over Laforgue, which I’d been pronouncing La-for-gew.

  At student parties I found my female students had total recall of my entire wardrobe, kept lists of all young male lecturers’ clothing, checked them off from day to day and noted each visit to the hairdresser. Some of them found where I lived and there was the occasional drunken drive-by on a Saturday night: parp-parp hullo Tom! Each morning, at this very mirror, I tried to comprehend the fact of the tiny rock-star life that had fallen upon me so much by chance.

  It’s a teaser, isn’t it, the notion that History has a Beginning a Middle and an End, that and the implicit thought that we—I mean my own generation, late Baby Boomers, the last of the really privileged—were the ones you could see on the right-hand side of those evolutionary charts and diagrams you used to come across: chins tucked in, shoulders pushed back, eyes full of purpose, erect in the public sense and all of us ready for anything, while our lesser evolutionary predecessors trailed off to the left, forlorn, slouched, increasingly chinless, increasingly hirsute, their task as our forerunners over and done.

  In the Great Chain of Being, it seemed, we were the inheritors of the earth, the very purpose of history, its end-point and its aim: the vanguard in the March of Progress. That’s what we were told, though to tell the truth I can’t remember anyone actually saying it. Always there, though: normal, natural, the way things were always meant to be.15 The great conceit of the Baby Boomers: that of all generations, we alone would never grow old. Never give up the dream!

  Trouble was, I could never believe in myself as part of this evolutionary triumph. I’d never been part of any kind of triumph, never really been first-class and I never thought I could be. I’d come from one of those many butch working-class co-eds the School and College boys cycled past each day in their blazers and their straw boaters, against a languid shoulder sometimes a racquet or a bat. I crept into university—this university, this very College of Arts now extinct: what was I doing here? I felt like an intruder, I felt I ought to be taking out the garbage. Up the back of lecture theatres I’d gaze down on the pretty coiffures and occasional pert little hats of the
private school girls at the front and listen to their impossible elocution drifting up to me like a foreign language: each of them (I knew) holding out for a doctor or a lawyer or, for those of a fuller figure, a dentist or a vet. I’d look down at them and keep my mouth shut, lest they heard my fallen accent—the voice of the less fortunate amongst us, as I heard one of them say in class. The pua—

  Some knew my secret anyway. ‘Oh, you’re here!’ one of these spoiled brats called out to me after three undergraduate years as the survivors assembled, postgraduates now, for a fourth. ‘How did you get into the MA Honours class?’16 This was Sophonisba Curry, ex–St Margaret’s College, a straight-A-plus student like all the girls (English being generally acknowledged as a woman’s subject) who crowded out all the boys, year (it seemed) after year. ‘I must have a word with mon oncle about falling standards,’ she said. A couple of her toadies, I remember, tittered slavishly at this.

  Yes, she had an entourage. ‘But have you seen Sviatoslav Richter’s hands?’ I remember one of them asking another, a pill who’d told me he’d learned Russian as a hobby during the Christmas break because he’d thought it’d be rather fun. Spanish had disappointed him, he said, since he’d found it so bloody obvious—another predictable Latinate language, all too straightforward and far less interesting than (for example) its neighbour, Catalan, born (originally) in the street language of the Centurions: did I know that? ‘The distaff side of history, so to speak,’ this little prick told me, ‘though, strictly speaking, of course, distaff meant simply’—‘Mm, yes, mm,’ I muttered. ‘Of course, of course.’ But did I realise (this young god went on) that the Catalans were originally Goths, and that the Goths had played a significant part in17—

  Well, by this stage I was in full panic, I can tell you, well out of my depth with my snout filling up with water: what would he ask next, this little tit?18 I looked at his thin blue wrists as he talked, I remember, at the hair on them, his animal hair, and something stirred in my mind, a thought that would go no further at that moment, something about minds and bodies and that chart of human progress I’ve just mentioned. ‘Goth?’ he asked me. ‘Cath? You can hear the connection in the words?’ ‘Yes yes,’ I told him. ‘Of course, of course.’ He pronounced Goth almost as Gorth and you really could hear it, that connection, I mean. I could feel the brilliance of the idea—the sexiness of it, the quality that appealed to me most about academic life, the sheer erotic quality of intellection, all the more so when half-comprehensible, as so much of the world seemed to me at that time, and especially when lightly flecked with bullshit as this so clearly was.