Home: A Novel (S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture)

HOME

HOME

A Novel

Hazard Adams

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2001 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adams, Hazard, 1926– Home : a novel / Hazard Adams. p. cm. — (The SUNY series in postmodern culture) ISBN 0-7914-5093-7 (alk. paper) 1. Universities and colleges—Fiction. 2. Washington (State)—Fiction. 3. History teachers—Fiction. 4. Anarchists—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series. PS3551.D37 H66 2001 813′.54—dc21 00-054792

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For Ching-hsien and Ying Ying Wang

Also by Hazard Adams fiction: The Academic Trilogy: The Horses of Instruction Many Pretty Toys Home The Truth About Dragons poetry: The Farm at Richwood and Other Poems nonfiction: The Academic Tribes criticism: Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems The Contexts of Poetry The Interests of Criticism Lady Gregory Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic Joyce Cary’s Trilogies: Pursuit of the Particular Real The Book of Yeats’s Poems Antithetical Essays in Literary Criticism and Liberal Education The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition Four Lectures on the History of Criticism and Theory in the West edited by Hazard Adams: Poems by Robert Simeon Adams Poetry: An Introductory Anthology Fiction as Process (with Carl Hartman) William Blake: Jerusalem, Selected Poetry and Prose Critical Theory Since Plato Critical Theory Since 1965 (with Leroy Searle) Critical Essays on William Blake

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

Show Me the Way to Go

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2

Where the Heart Is

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3 4

•

Glorious Blaze

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6

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7

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29 43

55

Of the Brave

69

No Place Like

83

Root for the Home Team 10 12

A House Is Not

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11

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15

When the Heavens Are Bright

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9

13

Old Folks At

1

Always Singing This Song

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5

8

xi

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•

From the Sea

Cloudy All Day

103 117

127 139 147

If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame

14

Thoughts From Abroad

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15 16

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•

Seen From Afar

177

A Discouraging Word

17

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Sing One Song

vii

169 187

201

157

Besides, my Muse by no means deals in fiction: She gathers a repertory of facts, Of course with some reserve and slight restriction, But mostly sings of human things and acts— And that’s one cause she meets with contradiction; For too much truth, at first sight, ne’er attracts; And were her object only what’s called Glory; With more ease, too, she’d tell a different story. —Byron, Don Juan

The land owned by the Mutual Home Association is located in Von Geldern Cove (known locally as Joe’s Bay), an arm of Carr’s Inlet, and is 13 miles west from Tacoma on an air line, but the steamer route is about 20 miles. The association is simply a land-holding institution, and can take no part in the starting of an industry. All industries are inaugurated by the members interested and those willing to help them. Streets are not opened yet and we have no sidewalks. Those thinking of coming here must expect to work, as it is not an easy task to clear this land and get it in condition for cultivation. —Discontent: Mother of Progress

This is the third novel in the Academic Trilogy, comprised of The Horses of Instruction, Many Pretty Toys, and Home.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the Edinburgh University Library for permission to transcribe a portion of Roland Eugene Muirhead’s diary, 1900, pp 58–76 (MS. Gen. 715/z), and the University of Washington Libraries for permission to transcribe a portion of Philip Van Buskirk’s diary. The author is in the debt of the Tacoma Public Library and its Northwest Collection for the opportunity to consult its materials on Home and its files of Tacoma newspapers. He thanks the University of Washington Libraries for permission to reproduce photographs MssSCUA Negs 894, 895, 2272, 13513, 11265, 11266, 11267, 11269, and 18628 and the use of files of Discontent: Mother of Progress. He also thanks the University of Washington Press for permission to reproduce the map from Utopias on Puget Sound 1885–1915 by Charles Pierce LeWarne, 1975. His special thanks go to Mrs. Sylvia Retherford of Home, who made available to him her collection of Home materials and photographs. Finally, he thanks Kathleen Holliday for helping to prepare the manuscript. For those who are curious, State University and the people contained herein are entirely fictitious.

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1

Show Me the Way to Go

The road past Key Center went through second-growth fir trees and

land cleared and domesticated. The occasional house was relatively recent, nondescript, sometimes with horses. No shopping centers, light industry, or even small businesses interrupted his progress, which, over country blacktop, was leisurely. As he drove, Professor Edward Williams, former academic administrator and now once again full-time historian, tried to imagine what it would have been like to come to the community of Home back in 1900. There were few roads in these parts then. When they existed they were little more than forest paths. The visitor from Scotland, Muirhead, reported in his diary that from Purdy he’d had to walk mostly along the shore, scrambling over or under fallen fir trees, negotiating huge stumps and gravelly sand. Six miles or more. Williams knew well what it was like on his own stretch of beach, which offered the added difficulty that you could sometimes sink almost to the knees in finer sand. It made for some good exercise, though nothing like what Muirhead got. Back in 1900 there was no practical access to Home except by water. Three times a week and once on Sundays except in the summer, when it was daily except Saturday, the steamer Typhoon left Commercial Dock in Tacoma for south Puget Sound. If you were going to Home you reminded Ed Lorenz, the skipper, to call and let you off. It was he who had refused

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HOME

to carry a party from the Loyal League of North America to Home to do something decisive about the anarchists there. He insisted they were good, peace-loving, harmless people. Others who had visited said the same. Still it was an anarchist who shot McKinley, and the Tacoma papers called all anarchists vicious beasts. The residents had planned to meet the raiding party on the dock with handshakes. No doubt, had it arrived, George Allen and the Penhallows would have invited them all to lunch or dinner. In those days, it had been all huge fir trees inland from the beach above the hillside. Below the trees each of the settlers had cleared his or her two acres. The anarchist colony of Home was strictly equalitarian about land and about the sexes. In her journal Clothed With the Sun, Lois Waisbrooker had made that clear—all too anatomically clear for the sheriff of Pierce County and the Tacoma Daily Ledger. Suddenly on his left he saw the sign directing visitors to the Home community and another advertising the Home Community Church. The latter surprised him. For a moment in his musing he had forgotten 1990, and now he thought of its oppressive nowness, a world of ectoplasmic cyberspace that seemed to obliterate the past. In the old days there hadn’t been any church. It wasn’t that they were opposed to churches, George Allen had told the interviewer Lizzie Wilcoxsen in 1901, but they were all there “to get away from Predatory Spirits.” If enough people wanted to start up a church, well, they were welcome to do so. As for him he’d rather lounge in a hammock reading Emerson and Whitman than listen to the average preacher: “But as for objecting to churches and preachers—not at all, so long as I am not obliged to go and hear them.” Williams thought of the faculty over in the English department at State, arguing hotly and, as far as he could tell, from every conceivable position over whom they would appoint to the Morgan Professorship of American Literature and Culture. He would rather be in his hammock than witness any more of that. He had begun to think that with some severe qualifications an anarchist model—but not communal, Home style—might fit to describe the group. At Home it had been live and let live—with argument. At State, members of an English department that had pretty much forgotten its long colorful history of dispute with the administration, the legislature, and maybe the world or the real now fought among themselves for power; and although history was his department, he was going to be involved—in all innocence, he put it to himself. No, not innocence, after all. For many years the academic songs that he heard were songs of experience.

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S h o w M e t h e Way t o G o

Edward Williams had held too many positions of power and responsibility at State to be able to hear anything else. That’s why the dean had appealed to him to chair the committee to review the English department this spring. No hammock for him! These reviews occurred every five years and involved visitors on the review committee and a detailed report. Under the present circumstances of strife the whole exercise would be at least lively. Since he had left the vice-presidency nearly fifteen years ago when his heart had acted up and Marta had left him, he had been committeed half to death. He’d gradually learned to say no some of the time, but not to Helen Grant, old cohort, first woman English professor at State, first woman dean. She was an admirably tough lady. For ten years after Jack Emory had left the chairmanship she’d ridden herd on those yahoos; and now, as dean, harassed by the various concerns of over twenty departments, she was still damned if she’d let her department collapse. Jack had said to Williams that he absolutely had to chair the committee, put up to it by Helen, no doubt. It was unfair of them both, they knew, but who else was there whom they could trust to do the job right? Ah, vanity. They had their man. They knew him well. He was ready. Why, he admitted to himself, he was anxious to get started. Of the rhetoric of reports he knew he was a master, of the interview an expert. An old horse, first of instruction and then of administration, who had cut some stylish furrows to get scientists to teach in the humanities core course and humanists to introduce philosophical thought to medical students, who had forced the dean of medicine and the biology chairs into the same room and prevented mayhem until they decided to speak somewhat civilly to each other, he needed to expend little effort to grasp the current politics of a department of English. But, if you want it from the horse’s mouth, as his favorite aunt used to say before delivering it right through the teeth, the historical past had been for him the real challenge. There was something of a game about administration, and he’d learned those moves. Too easily, maybe. To recover the past and think it out, that was it. Yet for some time now, things had been a little different. About a decade ago he’d stumbled on Vico’s New Science the way Gulley Jimson had encountered William Blake. Giovanni Battista, Giambattista! He was the man. Vico had struggled to imagine himself into the minds of those first human creatures he called giants, they who had walked the forests even before history, before the thundergod had driven them into caves to

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cohabit and create society. Who was it? Keats, who had tried to imagine himself into a billiard ball? And into the sparrows when they pecked around in the gravel outside his window? But those things were of the present for Keats. They were there. Easier maybe than historical resurrection. Vico and Keats: either way they had to free themselves from the quicksand of the abstract, maybe see certain things for the first time. You get older, it gets harder, they say, surrounded by acres of language, dead and dying. Recapture even a fairly recent past? This old horse, once tiger of the classroom, hurler of chairs, startler of sleeping sophomores? Not without some inner poetry. Vico recognized that: All history begins in fable. Proust nearly brought it off: All fable begins in history. How long do we take most historians’ histories seriously? As history, that is. How long Proust’s? Perhaps after all it’s a bum’s game, the former, and hard as hell, the latter. Yes, there is a certain pomposity in historians, as if they thought they commanded events. Better the stress in Proust, in Joyce, the shouts of selfencouragement in poor Will Blake. Williams recognized that Home was becoming a sort of historical poem in his mind, as yet unshaped, something he was collecting from old newspapers, diaries, and photographs. This was his first actual visit to the place. What would it do to the inchoate poem inside him? Erase it? Transform it into history? Liberate it? He had stopped to stare at the sign indicating Home and had nearly left the present moment. Then behind him he heard a single, discreet honk. His mirror revealed that the woman’s patience was wearing out. He turned left quickly onto McEwan and drove slowly downhill toward Joe’s Bay, as they called it back then. The story he liked best about the name was that it commemorated a drunken fisherman named Joe who fell into the bay there and drowned. Now, on maps that were detailed enough, it was Von Geldern’s Cove. He didn’t know why, but he’d find out. The woman who had honked no longer followed. Had she driven straight on to Lakebay, or perhaps to Longbranch down the peninsula where there were bigger houses of summer folk from Tacoma? At the cove his road curved right along the edge of the shore. The tide was out and the shoal at the cove’s mouth was visible. It was a narrow entrance at best. The Typhoon must have had to arrive near high tide. Along the shore nothing remained of the old dock he’d seen in pictures or of the buildings at its head. There was a simple concrete ramp for launching small boats, but it did not look much used. In the bay only one small sailboat lay at

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S h o w M e t h e Way t o G o

anchor. The only waterfront activity was that of a child with a bucket, digging on the beach. As he proceeded slowly up the north end of the cove, he observed neat homes, lawns, and gardens, all of a later period than Home’s notorious days. He saw nothing that could have dated to the old photographs in the library. That old Home had moved on or away. He was raising a ghost. Forget, remember. Remember me. The Mutual Home Association, which held the land from 1889 and parceled it out in two-acre lots, had been ordered dissolved in 1919. True to the anarchist spirit, George Allen and others were found in contempt of district court for going on acting as officers. It was two years before things were cleaned up, so to speak, and Home was never again the same. Actually, Williams thought, the end had been predicted when in 1911 some relative newcomers, in an anti-anarchist act looked on with contempt by the others, complained to the county authorities about the nude bathing that had gone on for years down the cove among some Russian immigrants. An elderly woman, among others, was jailed for this offense. The true spirit of Home had been sullied from within. Edward Williams was not a historian of the West or even of America. His subject had always been Ireland and England. But for years he’d had a summer home on Osprey Island in Long Bay. Around two corners called Roamer’s and Devil’s Head, about six miles away, he guessed, by boat, was Home. He’d known about it as part of Northwest lore, read Charles LeWarne’s history of Puget Sound utopias, and many briefer accounts, usually newspaper feature articles. Then he found himself in libraries reading microfilms of a succession of old Home weeklies: Discontent: Mother of Progress, The Demonstrator, The Agitator. He’d even found a copy of Lois Waisbrooker’s feminist journal Clothed With the Sun, but not the one with the article that landed her in court. He regretted this and wondered how feminism had been made to jibe with the Book of Revelation. But today was his first visit to Home, and it would be brief. Originally he hadn’t thought of any of this as a scholarly project, but now more than idle curiosity and the pleasure of it had brought him here. Beside his sense that he might write about Home or the more general topics of utopia and anarchism was relief from the academic discontents and agitations of a spring that had nevertheless failed to produce student demonstrations in the Quad. Since his appointment to chair the review committee, which hadn’t yet begun to function, he was not even safe on Osprey Island from campus politics. He knew he should have removed

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The shoreline of Home today, looking toward the mouth of Joe’s Bay. Photo by Hazard Adams.

S h o w M e t h e Way t o G o

the phone years ago when he got out of administration (it was a phrase academics used, as if such jobs were prison sentences). He’d been co-opted by the phone, just as years previously the hand pump had given way to an electric one and a hot-water heater was installed. The price paid was that young neighbors, who sentimentally insisted on maintaining the ways of the rustic life on their long weekends, now came sheepishly through the trees to mooch a shower or use his phone. In a crisis at State his old friends and some people he preferred to regard only as acquaintances would, after a weekend’s brooding, call with urgent reports, from the front, pleading for reinforcements. On Thursday the calls had come earlier than usual. His evening had been dominated by several long conversations almost from the moment he’d arrived and got the fire lit. The first was from a neighbor deploring the commercial geoduck fishermen and the proposed salmon pens in Case Inlet. The rest were from State faculty members. There was panic in the English department in anticipation of the meeting scheduled for Friday over who was to be appointed to the Morgan Professorship. For three years the department had sought and failed to make this appointment. It was becoming a joke around campus and at professional meetings. Either the person offered the position had declined, or the department could not come to a decision. The reasons had been various, but this year the disagreements had become political in the way that the whole profession had seemed to become politicized. Race, class, gender, the canon of great works, Western culture, multiculturalism, diversity—all these words buzzed around the simplest question of curriculum or faculty recruitment. These buzzwords, he thought, represented questions that over time would be thrashed out, settled, or simply passed over in meetings on curriculum, in changes of fashion, in the coming of a new generation. The real threat was elsewhere and from without: what the university, increasingly co-opted by technologically oriented businesses, would do (if anything) with or to the humanities. Would one day someone visit an English department as he was visiting Home only to find it gone? As he brought the car to a stop at the cove’s head, where he again met the main road to Longbranch, he thought of an account in Discontent sometime in 1900. It went, in part, like this: “‘What is the Object of Life?’ was the subject for discussion of our literary meeting. No small order to fill—upon my life. It goes without saying that we were not all agreed in opinion upon the matter, nor any other matter for that matter. What boots it, however? It is no case of ‘circles’ here; we are eccentrics and

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Looking down a street in Home toward Joe’s Bay today, dogs’ names unknown. Photo by Hazard Adams.

S h o w M e t h e Way t o G o

concentrics at one and the same time; individually we have our own interior center from which our circumference springs, then communally we have a common center—which is HOME.” Williams wasn’t so sure about the common center in the English department. There were plenty of individual ones though. Centers, he was told by the local postmodernists, had been out of fashion for years. He drove idly up and down a few quiet Home streets. Many of the houses were probably now owned by summer people, as they were surely called by the “true” inhabitants. On Osprey Island he was a summer person. Finally he headed out again for Key Center and beyond. On the way he continued to wonder if there was any longer hope of an intellectual center at which his colleagues could meet. And, indeed, would a center be but a stultification? To be followed by ricorso of course! The phone rang, and it was Jack Emory. He, old friend, was usually a sufficiently cool head, but after a few moments Williams knew that Jack, too, was, in his way, among the agitated. The department had met Friday, all right, and the candidate who would visit them was Cynthia Ragsdale. Even the decision to interview her had been damned close. There was trouble ahead, for a vote to appoint would be even closer, unless she succeeded in charming or otherwise favorably impressing a number of people now opposed or influencing the department’s flabby middle group to wander with the flow. Jack thought the college personnel council unlikely to approve if a favorable vote was close. He’d pleaded with the search committee and John McComber, the chair, not to bring her name forward yet, but pressure from the feminists and culture studies people had won out. He couldn’t convince enough colleagues that all the politicking and acrimony would be in vain at this point. There was work to be done. Who was she? Actually Williams already knew of her. She was wellknown in American literature circles. She professed, according to the best rumors, Feminism and New Historicism, all in capital letters. She was much in demand to speak. There was a network of women supporters of her candidacy on campus. Women were good networkers, he thought, far better than men had ever been, it turned out. Probably by necessity. Why was Jack calling about this matter? What role could Edward Williams play in English department affairs? Jack feared the department would be a shambles whether the appointment was voted up or down and in worse shape if the appointment were sent forward and the council recommended against it, or maybe even for it. At about that time the review

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committee would be convened to study the department and perhaps advise on a new chair to replace McComber, whose term was ending. What to do? If the appointment passed, did it mean the likelihood of accelerated change in the direction of what people were calling “political correctness”? If it were turned down, there’d be deep resentment against the “mossbacks,” and the department’s national reputation would be hurt. This was Jack, who when he was chair had taken chances with the department’s reputation, but most had worked out almost like magic. Now he was doing the on-this-hand, on-the-other-hand dance. Williams was tempted to say something about viewing with alarm, but he resisted. Jack was also worried about Helen Grant. She was a more or less old-style literary scholar, but she was also among the older generation of feminists. She’d be caught in the middle either way. Williams waited. Jack would eventually tell him, damn it, what his duty was. Certain people had gotten into the habit of doing this years ago when he was vice-president. But before Jack told him that it was his duty to head somebody off at the pass, Williams would be a little bit obtuse, for irritation’s and old times’ sake. He would ask, well, my goodness (putting on the folksy mask that irritated Jack), what’s the quality of her scholarship? How about her teaching? That’s really all that counts, isn’t it? (This last by implication.) A deliberate unpleasantness. Jack heard the unspoken words and didn’t play, took a step ahead: “It’s a question these days of whom you ask. If you do race, class, and gender, say everything is political, and can’t get through the hour without reference to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, Ragsdale’s a great appointment.” But Jack didn’t proceed further in his exercise of putting her down as Williams expected. It was as if he’d regretted saying what he did. Jack had few doubts, if any, about her competence. The question was what an appointment of this type meant, whether in the end it could even be made, and whether, even if it could or should be, now was the time. Williams wondered silently whether he himself had gotten through a class recently without one of that secular trinity lurking at least in (as everyone was saying) the subtext. He thought of an advertisement in Discontent: Mother of Progress for August 14, 1901. It was for a book (price 15¢) by one Edwin C. Walker, Our Worship of Primitive Social Guesses. Two of its chapters were “When Men and Women Are and When They Are Not Varietists” and “The New Woman? What Is She? What Will She Be?” The notice shared part of a page with Professor Wilson’s Magnetic-Conservative Appliances: “Blindness Prevented and Cured. The Blind See. The Deaf Hear.”

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S h o w M e t h e Way t o G o

As for himself, he’d heard Jack almost too well, even if he discounted Jack’s tendency toward ironic hyperbole for dramatic, usually comic effect. Jack had never been one to resist new intellectual turns. He’d usually mediated arguments over curriculum and theoretical movements. He’d always “kept up.” But this was a different Jack. He was now, it seemed, into the familiar faculty routine known as viewing with alarm: It was a question of what this meeting had really meant. It meant, Jack went on rapidly, no consensus, the absolute diffusion of interests, and the worship of power for power’s sake: mere anarchy loosed upon their professional lives. Williams thought it would be better to get the details face to face, so he managed to put off further discussion until the next day back on campus. The phone conversation ended. The world was changing, the world was rolling along. In that same issue of Discontent was the account of what turned out to be an important event for the people of Home, a Sunday picnic:

Our Sunday Gathering Ho! for Anderson Island! It took the entire capacity of both launches, together with two rowboats, which were tugged behind, to carry the fiftythree picnickers, who set out on Sunday morning for a visit to our friends and neighbors. The day was beautiful, the company congenial, the launches (save for a slight delay at the start) in good running order. How could we fail to have a good time? And have it we did, to the very full, without a single marring incident. The trips both ways were pleasant in the extreme. Once there, our welcome was a hearty one. The basket lunch in Mrs. Lindstrom’s splendid apple orchard was a treat to be long remembered. The afternoon was socially spent, under the trees, and about the place. The musicians found their way to the house,

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where they enjoyed their favorite practice. A little later, all gathered again in the orchard to listen to Comrade Morton’s address on Liberty. A number of the Anderson Island people were present, and listened attentively to an uncompromising presentation of the principles of Anarchism. The uselessness of government, the evils which it engenders and the fallacy of the arguments by which it is upheld, were clearly demonstrated. After the lecture, more time was spent in sociability, until the start home had to be made. Next Sunday we shall meet in our own Home Park. Bring your lunch and come prepared for a good time. Comrade Morton will lecture at 1:30 p.m., on The Normal Life. All friends and neighbors are invited.

From all he could surmise, struggle was the Normal Life of any English department. Otherwise some of those people would have ossified or turned to dust in the library stacks. Clark Marshall’s red face of anger, which he imagined at the meeting, was a sign, at least, that Clark Marshall yet lived. But Jack had told him that this struggle was not going to be normal.

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Entre-Acte The advantages at Home are of a social and propaganda nature. Economic difficulties and sometimes hardships must be faced. Mutual helpfulness prevails to quite a large extent; but the main burden must be borne by the individual himself. It is a pity to be obliged to dwell so much on this least attractive side of the situation; but experience has demonstrated the necessity of so doing. People are apt to expect too much from a colony, forgetting that no small group can possibly so abstract themselves from surrounding conditions as to arrive at a full and satisfactory solution of the social problem. While the present inequitable system continues, labor must be a sore drudgery for the great mass of mankind; and local colonies and cooperative plans, valuable as their educational influence may be, can by no means be conducted on a sufficiently large scale to relieve materially the economic pressure. All we can do is to find means of working under somewhat more congenial conditions, with the companionship of congenial comrades, and of forming a center for active propaganda. Home is preeminently a place for hard and patient workers, who can endure the difficulties and who would go through fire and water for the anarchist cause. Others will be cordially welcomed as visitors, but would not be permanently contented under the conditions here. —Discontent: Mother of Progress, August 14, 1901

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Where the Heart Is

D

ean Helen Grant gazed critically at the newly framed poster she and Elvery Briggs had just hung above a low bookcase in her office. It advertised a Hopper exhibition at the Newport Harbor Museum, which she had visited last summer. She had bought it because it reminded her of home. She still called London, Ohio, home, though she had not really lived there since she was eighteen and won the scholarship to Wellesley. Why? Her parents were dead and buried in West Jefferson, the old house was long ago sold and divided into flats, her father’s clothing store long closed, her brothers in California. Still, somehow this wasn’t, even after how many years, thirty-five, quite home. Inside her mind, home was a big old Victorian house with a screened porch on a shady street. There was an ice cream store two blocks up toward town that gave triple-dipped cones: vanilla, chocolate, and orange ice. The back yard, with its converted coach house and weathervane, stretched to a field with a little brook, and in hot summer evenings the crickets . . . Helen Grant’s poster depicted a prairie railroad tower in a vivid sunset. She thought of driving through the flat rich Ohio farmland at twilight on a humid evening. There would be cantaloupes in the fields, and corn. On North Main Street her father would have taken his place on the porch rocker. The fire flies would have begun to flicker. Beyond that tower in

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the distance was the prison farm. Her friend Jenny had been the warden’s daughter. They played in the garden, and she could see the convicts in the fields beyond. Once they were locked out and had to climb the lattice to the upstairs porch, frightened that some guard would spy them. If she was just quiet enough maybe she could hear the Madison County court house bell ring eight, if she was just quiet . . . “Helen . . . Helen?” She hadn’t noticed that Elvery Briggs had left her side or even that she had returned. Elvery always came and went silently, the soul of discretion in every way. They had spent some time considering how to place the picture. Having entered six years ago a dreadful office that looked as if it belonged to the IRS, she had vowed to make it look respectable, even homelike, as Elvery had called it. Elvery had come away with her from the English department in 1985 when Helen was appointed dean. She shepherded people in and out of Helen’s office and mediated quarrels among the staff. She watched over Helen, whom she greatly admired. It had meant a lot to her when a woman had been made dean. She hadn’t expected to see it happen in her time. Sixty-four, never married (“no one ever asked me”), she found the dean’s office a sort of home now. Displaying determination combined with a natural efficiency sharpened over the years, Elvery had cheerfully set out with Helen to make the office a decent place to live. They had succeeded. Jack Emory had strongly approved of the Turkoman rug. Well, he should have, considering the time they spent hunting it and the price Helen had paid. The posters of Renaissance exhibits had taken time to accumulate. Elvery insisted that the posters reflect Helen’s scholarly interests. And one weekend Helen and Elvery had painted their rooms in defiant and quite flagrant disregard of university regulations and the color code approved by the vice-president for business and finance. This conspiracy they had both deeply enjoyed. Helen was even a little sorry no one had complained. It was something she would have liked to have had a fight over. When she thought of it, a stirring oration on aesthetics took shape in her mind. She would quote Kant, Oscar Wilde, and finally Virginia Woolf on a room of one’s own. “Helen?” Elvery was announcing the arrival of her ten-thirty appointment, Francine Wright, associate professor of English, once a specialist on English romantic prose, but now a scholar of nineteenth-century women writers and feminist theory. When Francine entered, Helen was still holding a hammer, staring. Francine was amused.

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“Dean indicted in hammer slaying. Says she’d had enough.” “Well, I was tempted by an economics professor recently.” They both laughed as Francine, an old friend, once a sort of protégée, plopped her now formidable body on the leather sofa. Francine was growing larger daily. Eighteen years ago when Helen had hired her in English she’d been a tall, slim young thing direct from Berkeley with long black hair parted in the middle and a Madras dress. But after two terminated marriages she’d thought what the hell and let it rip. Her hair streaked gray and in a bun now, she jangled bracelets as she walked. Helen had remained politely quiet and read a little Kristeva when three years ago Francine announced she was a Kristevan feminist. She had said nothing when two years ago Francine made it clear she now was a lesbian feminist. A very solemn young associate professor of psychology had moved in with her, someone Helen knew professionally but never saw socially, and hadn’t actually had occasion to speak to since this had happened. Recently she learned that they had parted. If you want to know the truth, Helen said to Elvery, who already knew the truth, Francine was hard to live with for either sex. Francine and Helen used to meet without fail every week for lunch. Now it was only occasionally. Well, Helen would say to herself, we all change, and I am administration now. Yes, for heaven’s sake, she’d changed. In the process of movement from chair of the department (she hated that term “chair,” but she used it scrupulously) to dean she’d found her relations with most of her colleagues change. Well, oh dear me, as her mother would have said, you didn’t trust deans. Rather you buttered them at tea, or you otherwise tried to manipulate them. They were objects to exploit, if you had the nerve, and Francine had plenty, as her pursuit of the two students she’d successively married years before had demonstrated. Put one eligible man in a crowded party, and, in those days, she’d find him. Lately, since coming out, Francine (“sex is a political statement”) had indeed become very political. Helen wondered from the way she now talked whether Francine’s lesbianism was more than a verbal construct, but then Francine was one of those who regarded everything as a text. There were rumors that as graduate adviser she proselytized the new women students to get exclusively into feminist studies and turned them away even from Jack Emory. Helen had noticed that when she herself taught she didn’t have any of Francine’s followers in her class. After all, Donne, Herrick, Marvell, and Milton: goodness gracious, what did you expect these days?

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Francine, she predicted to herself, was here principally to report on Friday’s meeting about Cynthia Ragsdale. She would be trying to get in the door with her account before Helen heard Jack Emory’s. For some reason, Francine had come to resent Jack, who had been a strong supporter of her promotion back in 1978; she was careful not to let this show, except around the edges, where Helen had noticed it. She always treated Jack with respect, but . . . Helen guessed it was because Jack wasn’t easy to label, and Francine suspected he was ahead of her in understanding something or other in theory. He probably was, because he usually was. “It was a dreadful circus. I just hated every minute of it.” It had been characteristic of Francine to declare hyperbolically either loves or hates, but now Helen imagined that nothing between seemed to interest her much. The hyperbole, certainly once amusing, had become a way of getting people to commit themselves to her. And so there followed Francine’s version: This time in hiring it was our turn, meaning the women’s, and by implication Helen’s. After all, they’d endured the other candidates, all male. Some the department had rejected after debate; some (thankfully) had withdrawn. They’d even endured that awful chauvinist from somewhere in Wisconsin. He was a beast, why, he never taught women’s texts, except Dickinson, of course, and his language was insensitive, really sexist. All the same old garbage. Jack didn’t like his lecture (Helen imagined an “even” preceding that sentence). “So when we get a woman, finally, and a smart one, too, they start to put up all the roadblocks they can think of. Elaine Brinnon is really excited about her coming.” Francine had been trying to make Elaine her protégée. “But you all did finally come together and vote to invite her for a lecture and interview, didn’t you?” Francine scowled. It was almost as if she had hoped they wouldn’t. When she scowled or concentrated, the corners of her mouth turned down and she looked older than forty-four. “Yes, but the vote wasn’t very strong, and you wait, they’ll oppose her after her visit. It’s hopeless. You’ll see.” Hyperbole again. Helen knew that this was an admonition. She was being told, by way of advance chastisement, that she must be loyal to her sex when the whole matter of Cynthia Ragsdale’s appointment to the Morgan Professorship was dumped in her lap, because the vote would be so close. Would she side with the chauvinists, who were also undoubtedly racists and elitists? Was their friendship on the line? Was she no better than one of them?

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It would come to that, probably, and she would be torn. Part of it was her age, she realized every day, and there wasn’t a lot to be done about the way she looked to the younger feminists. She didn’t talk the same jargon in the same rhythms. She hadn’t the same experience as the young women whose appointments she’d sought or approved and whose careers she’d encouraged and supported. She suspected that if she weren’t dean, she’d be patronized, a relic of interest only to a scholar of the history of institutions. Her case had been different, all right. When she’d made it to tenure, during Jack Emory’s regime, it had been a real struggle. Jack had pushed hard and had miraculously brought around some people who a few years before had said “No dames!” Her book on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy had been finished, but as yet was without a publisher. The senior Renaissance scholar had disliked her or at least disliked having her around. Her opponents’ fallback position was to recommend delay. There was no question, no question at all, that it had been harder for her, much harder. Jack kept saying, “We’ll make it, we’ll make it.” She had appreciated the “we,” and together over later years they’d remade the department. But she’d been deeply hurt by the council’s having given her tenure with one hand and with the other admonishing her to do better. A year later she’d learned of Jack’s anger at the letter she’d been sent and his going before the council to tell them what he thought of it. It had made him some enemies, because Jack spoke his mind in no uncertain terms, and they got back at him during the famous Norman Silver case and the student sit-in of 1970. She owed Jack a debt of gratitude, but he’d never— scrupulously never—asked for payment. She was just (and it was all she needed and all he wanted) a colleague to be valued. Well, anyway, she was proud of being the first woman full professor of English at State and then the first woman dean on campus, but she knew it was not just an own-bootstraps operation. Nevertheless, she herself had overcome the moments of condescension, rudeness, silence, and deafness. But TLS had listened, and when her Anatomy finally came out, it gave her what she liked to call a boffo review. After that, one or two antagonists had come around, and others gave grudging respect. She’d made some good friends among the men before she became chair of English. After that, who knows who your friends are? Recently she’d taught some courses on modern women writers. There weren’t very many women in her period, the seventeenth century, at least hardly any she wanted to teach about.

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Yes, it was partly her age, she thought, as she heard Francine’s blowby-blow account of the meeting come to a boffo conclusion. She hadn’t really listened to most of it, and that wasn’t fair. She always tried scrupulously, as dean, to be a careful listener, even when, as she thought, provoked. That was a word her mother used: “Now don’t provoke me, Helen.” A useful word. “. . . and you can’t imagine the fatuousness, the deviousness. It’s because she does feminist stuff now, pure and simple. They don’t want any more of us questioning their male assumptions. Do you realize, Helen, I wouldn’t be appointed to this department today?” Helen watched her, that ample body commanding the sofa. There had been something of a vague threat in Francine’s voice, as if Francine were judging her. Helen was tempted to think that no, Francine wouldn’t be appointed, not today when she could or would no longer charm the Marshalls, the Walshes, the Browns, or the younger people like Harley Wales. Helen laughed inwardly, imagining what Francine would say to that. Provocation. Today it would be a matter for discussion that she hadn’t ever finished her study of Mary Shelley, and now everyone knew that she wouldn’t. The subject had passed her by. Those critical of her now said she was a follower, a disciple of whatever French feminist was in style; she ran as fast as she could to stay in the same place. But that wasn’t fair; Francine taught French feminist theory and had to keep up like any scholar. Looking at Francine, Helen recognized that she herself wouldn’t be appointed today, either. What she did, in the way of scholarship, when she had time, was theoretically passé, and the metaphysical poets were out of style. At least Mary Shelley was in. But Francine probably couldn’t imagine any of this, for Helen was Authority, a manipulator in a set of power relations, a “power object.” This term, which was Helen’s invention so far as she knew, bitterly amused her. Dean’s liberation! Revolt against being treated as a power object. It was an aspect of the job that she did not like: the sudden distance from others. The truth was that she was still surprised at being a dean. At times she even hated to think that others had seen her as what in the trade was called dean material. She just didn’t think of herself that way. It was thinking abstractly or, these days, stereotyping. Bad stuff! But what would satire be without stereotyping? Or Shakespearean comedy? Someone complimented her once by saying she was a good dean because she didn’t seem to be one.

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Francine wasn’t finished. As Helen had learned to speed-read the many dull and verbose documents that came across her desk from the federal government and the central administration, so had she inadvertently become a speed-listener, which meant you often knew what was coming next. Edward Williams once told her she’d soon know everyone’s moves and, worse, expect them. Frankly, Francine was becoming tiresome. There were some pressing issues to deal with that day—plumbing in the new chemistry building, an appointment in political science, a meeting of deans later on. Given what she daily had to deal with—today would feature the mathematics faculty again and later their beleaguered chair—she had to remind herself that the Morgan Professorship was important to many people. She’d well learned that literature wasn’t the center of any universe known to universities, if it ever had been. Through her window nearby she could see the new building dedicated to cooperation between university research and business. But all the more reason to pay attention these days. Her eye strayed to observe two students and a huge dog playing frisbee on the Quad. A prodigious leap. A catch. A wagging tail. Francine hadn’t really indicated what her business was, and Helen was going to be busy. She thought about what she’d say tomorrow to the vice-president about the capital outlay budget. Francine’s language was familiar, the speeches she had recounted characteristic. It often turned out these days that the apparent center of dispute was ideological but the real one personal, with a history—old resentments, habitual prejudices. These things did make the higher-ups pay some attention to the humanities, even if it only took the form of puzzling about why they were in disarray (a pastime of the vice-president at dinners these days). Well, they were always in what seemed disarray if they were doing anything right. The humanities were where dialectic should begin. She’d remember that for a speech. “Prejudice, sexist.” These words filtered through a shaft of sunlight between them. Francine’s subject was no longer Cynthia Ragsdale. She had gone on to say that next year when Elaine Brinnon came up for tenure, the same people would torpedo her: “We can’t allow them to get away with that.” So this had been Francine’s intent all along: to fire the first shot in behalf of Elaine, to make clear that the department would not be fair, to remind Helen of her impending duty in not one but two battles in behalf of women.

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“. . . or anything else. No harassment!” The frisbee game had receded into shadows beyond the founder’s statue. After Francine had left, the word lingered in Helen’s mind. Just what did she mean by “harassment”? Had something happened? Or was this merely more of Francine’s hyperbole? But now it was time to see the mathematicians, angry that one of their assistant professors had been refused promotion. The mathematicians had a case of the swells about themselves. Well, they could command big salaries outside. They surely didn’t know that their chair was coming later to complain about them. After a busy day culminating in instruction for the morrow by Elvery, the word harassment came back into her mind. It was at dinner with Frank. Helen Grant had lived with Frank McCrea for so many years that most people assumed they were married. They weren’t but might as well have been. They scrupulously owned everything together. They pooled their resources. But Helen wouldn’t legalize their relationship, and Frank had long ago given up suggesting that they do. The fact was that by now they had both effectively forgotten that they were not married, except perhaps at tax time when Frank, strictly on a cash basis, as he put it, would point out laconically how much money they were keeping from the government by not filing jointly. This was Monday, April fifteenth. They’d each put their returns in the mail two weeks ago. Frank’s remark, made then, flitted through her mind along with Edward Williams telling her about the principle of free love at Home. He was quoting some Home newspaper writer: “. . . we are free to love all; but each defines the mode of doing this according to personal idiosyncrasies.” She was amused by that last part. She liked eccentricity and was beginning to think with regret that she had not risen to it sufficiently, as she thought Frank, for the most part, had. She was given to hats of all types, old and new, but she always wore them with a certain shyness. She played the recorder in groups that had achieved almost universal eccentricity, if such a thing were possible in groups, but she remained a little outside them all. She had become a baseball fan, if that was eccentric for a woman professor, following Frank at first out of good nature. They drove up to Seattle every so often to watch the Mariners. Frank seemed to hate the Mariners, but she knew he really loved them, with the sort of pity he showed a dying animal. Years of mediocrity and worse had wrung from him a furious irony about the team, as was proper, he told her, for someone brought up in Philadelphia. As for herself, she had become a fanatical follower and now understood the subtleties of the

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game to the extent that as she looked around the stands, she thought herself surrounded by idiots, yobbos, and bozos incapable of understanding what they were watching. America had suddenly spawned a spontaneous generation of idiots. It was uncharitable, she knew, but that was the way she felt. Perhaps she had achieved an appropriate degree of eccentricity after all. On the other hand, maybe it was just middle-aged crochetiness. She realized that “on the other hand” was a phrase she used a lot since she had become dean. Sitting across from her, a bit fatigued by a late commute from the city, tasting critically the evening’s wine, Frank observed of the Mariners’ sixth straight loss, opening the season, “There’s a new record in sight! Did you see that Vizquel and Reynolds collided at second and Omar is out with a concussion? Think of it, braining your own shortstop! Send them all to St. Petersburg.” The thought of it wounded her. She didn’t want A.D. and Junior and Harold and Little O to move away. She was mad about Omar Vizquel: prosody in action, she thought. But Frank, whose eccentricity she regarded with great respect, didn’t want them to go any more than she did. He lived and died with Alvin Davis’s batting average (so far it didn’t look like a good year). This was a man who talked to snakes, and sometimes, she thought, with elephants and giraffes, remonstrated with zebras, and meditated with gorillas. At this moment, she thought, Frank was not just disappointed by the Mariners, he was fed up with the teachers’ union because they couldn’t decide whether to strike or not, and he was outraged at Texas A & M for talking about making General Schwarzkopf its president. Moreover, he was fed up with George Bush, and had read before dinner that Nixon was back in the news advocating the assassination of Saddam Hussein. An oil tanker was ablaze in the Mediterranean. He was shouting inside, but outside he was pronouncing on the tannins in the wine. This display of careful judgment, however, meant that there had been something else bothering him, probably at work. (As if six straight losses were not enough.) If she waited, the subject would be broached. And by dessert it was: A nice little case of harassment at the zoo had been dumped in his lap. A young woman elephant handler had brought him a discrimination complaint against her supervisor. Among other things it meant that Frank was probably going to be entangled in the city’s bureaucracy and maybe its politics if somebody ran with it. That was the worst of it, the way it would be drawn out.

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“Do you think it really happened?” Helen asked. “Oh, God yes, I’m sure of it. Of course, it’s hard to separate it from the habit of hierarchy they have, male or female. A head handler is like a dominant silverback. But Ted’s in trouble a silverback never has. It’s too bad, and he’s a damned good trainer.” Frank stroked his goatee when he was agitated. This again proved to him that the real zoo was the people who worked there. There’d be an occasional cranky elephant. Sometimes the cougars clawed and fought. But on the whole the animals were a dignified lot. His problems were the human personnel and the city council. Animal fights were short. A zoo was easier to run than a ball club or a teachers’ union. She doubted it, but got the point. At State, the usual harassment was a male faculty member making a pass at a female student or trouble in the office among the women. At the zoo, Frank observed, it was purely a question of domination, pecking order. The human beings seemed to be trying to copy the animals. At the university, life copied books. “And articles,” Helen added. “And reports.” That word “harassment” had come to dominate the day, Helen thought, much in the way a word would sometimes repeatedly turn up. You’d be reading it in the paper and the radio would utter it. It would turn up in the vice-president’s directive. Last week it had been “enrollment”— everybody was worrying about next year’s enrollment. And on Sunday three times someone had mentioned goats to her, and now the news told about the Olympic Park goats being a threat to the flora. Why goats everywhere all of a sudden? And then nothing at all about goats. But she felt “harassment” was going to stick around for a while.

Though Francine Wright suspected that some people thought her fanatical on the subject of Cynthia Ragsdale, she knew that at least part of her was not. That part worried about her own enthusiasms. The reticence to commit herself she would overcome with hyperbole, only to regret the effort. Sometimes her boldness frightened her. Sometimes it was her indecision about commitment. But she would go ahead. You had to these days. Shortly after leaving Helen Grant’s office she knew what she would like to do, but not quite how to do it. First, though, she had to make sure John McComber had done what he should have and invited Cynthia Ragsdale to visit campus. She was certain others would try to bring about some formal reconsideration of the vote to invite. Already

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that morning she had heard worried conversations, second thoughts. She couldn’t let any of that go further; otherwise the old goats—yes, old goats—would think they were well in control and could sack Elaine Brinnon next fall. And with Harley Wales maybe the next chair (she had to do something about that, too), well, he would be ruled by the goats, she thought. Forge ahead, yes, damn it: harassment, harassment, harassment. Suddenly there was Jack Emory in front of her in the hall; it almost seemed he was going to block her way. Damn it, he’d been to see John McComber already. “Hello, Francine. What was that you were saying?” Had she spoken aloud? Had she, really? No. “I was just muttering. We’re all muttering these days. Haven’t you noticed?” “It has been more like shouting, hasn’t it?” Jack Emory laughed. He was right; the meeting when they had voted hadn’t exactly been quiet. She had been made to stop and talk. There was no avoiding it, even though he wasn’t really blocking the way. Actually, he was amiable, damn him, his eyes sharp and blue as ever. It had always got to her. When she’d come to State it was a sort of hero-worship. She’d love then to stop and talk, to go to lunch, and all that, which Jack was careful to do with the young newcomers. But now when he looked at her she didn’t any longer melt; it made her uncomfortable, even angry. It was as if he knew more about her than she knew. Some things had changed. Had he? Or was it that he hadn’t changed? “Well,” he said, “there’s even a difference between types of muttering, when one is coming out of the dean’s office. Serious muttering, solemn muttering, muttering like the White Rabbit. I’ve even observed shouting. It’s rare, though.” He knew what she’d been doing. She disliked his influence over Helen. He’d undo in a minute everything she’d tried to get across. He hadn’t said much at the meeting, but she was sure he’d try to torpedo the Ragsdale appointment. Well, maybe not sure. You couldn’t be sure about him. “John’s in his office, if that’s where you’re headed.” He’d gotten to McComber first. He was letting her know that he knew. She turned on down toward the English office. Harassment, harassment, harassment.

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Entre-Acte Editor Evening News—Sir: Recently there appeared in the columns of the News an article which, to say the least, showed an unfriendly spirit toward the people who have come together in this quiet spot, from out the turmoil of the world at large, to make their homes and live the “Golden Rule.” The watchword of this place is “Mind Your Own Business,” which is equivalent to saying: “Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you.” We have neither church spires that point to an imaginary heaven, nor dispensaries of that which enflames the passions of men. We hold that the kingdom of heaven is within; and that in the individual must begin all the growth toward a nobler manhood and womanhood. I am not a man to thrust myself before the public; but I do feel called upon in the present instance to express my feelings in regard to the people with whom I am associated, and to their efforts to practicalize the teaching of him who, it is supposed, died a savior nineteen hundred years ago. I have resided here nearly four years, and have done, and am doing, all in my power to help, not only in making a success in home building in a quiet way, but also in weaving a social fabric that shall be of a higher order (more moral, if you please) than that which is seen in the generality of human life, and that shall be absolved before an enlightened and impartial humanity.

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It is no light task to take this land in its rough state—land which is man’s natural heritage—and hew out of it homes and convert the wilderness into a garden: And it is unkind in the extreme for any to misrepresent the motives and actions of a people whose moral tone is superior to that of the cities and towns of this and other (enlightened and Christian?) lands. Here is manifested the spirit of mutual helpfulness; and it is spontaneous. Here is a collection of busy workers who have no time or disposition to exploit their fellows; and most of them are of that noble mold and mental caliber that what leisure time they do have is devoted either to the cause of the higher education, or in aiding those to whom the experiences of making their homes from the rough are new and arduous. —Charles Penhallow, Discontent: Mother of Progress, September 11, 1901

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“It was Morton’s apple orchard speech that set things off, and then,

of course, there was the McKinley assassination. The Tacoma press had a great time over the speech—the red flags they flew on the boats, and some of them getting government pensions. The attacks got worse later, though.” Edward Williams wanted to talk about his new scholarly interest, Home colony. It was an interesting story that Ed could tell well, but Emory was impatient, and soon Ed gave it up. “This one is different,” Jack said. “What do you mean? Outside appointments are always difficult. Good Lord, everything is difficult. You have to get consensus. In your department it took three years at least to appoint someone in eighteenth century when Corman retired. And there have always been ideological differences. Pretty severe ones, as I remember. Besides that, think of the turmoil when they had the communist witch hunt back in the forties. “Ed, I could say that was ancient history. There’s no consensus now on anything. People came together on that, except for a stool pigeon or two.” Jack laughed, but with unusual bitterness. Edward refrained from reminding him that history was, after all, important, even if the actors had passed on, even ancient actors, for they had become part of the myth of the tribe. Anyway, it was irritating to refer to ancient history that way.

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He often urged students to read Thucydides and learn something about the present. In heroic restraint he gave up the opportunity to spin out the implications of the metaphor of acting. Under circumstances of disinterest, Jack knew, he could have taken that, run with it, and enjoyed it thoroughly, invoking the theories of Diderot, Wilde, Yeats, and Casey Stengel. But now was not the time. “If you possess history, you possess power,” Edward remarked, fond of such statements when he talked to Jack. “You have precedents, usually bad ones.” “Maybe it just renders you incapable of acting. Look. This time it’s different. Some of these people don’t care about anything but power.” “I thought you were going to say they don’t care about anything except race, class, and gender.” “Same thing. They like what they call theory. It’s those things that make the profession go round these days. That’s what Francine Wright tells all the new grad students. That’s what literary study is becoming, if you want to call it that.” “You mean that you aesthetes are declared obsolete?” “Absolutely irrelevant.” Jack disregarded the labeling of himself as an aesthete. One got used to being identified with one’s research interests. Anyway Ed was just having a little fun. Jack didn’t want to play. Williams immediately saw this. This was not the Jack whom he’d known all the way back into high school—the cool, efficient, disinterested Jack, who when he dealt with a problem always saw irony through his own passionate commitments. There was no doubt that Jack had passionate commitments. Williams had seem him suppress some of them when he was chair of the English department. “And you, Ed, really should be concerned. These people are trying to dominate history, for one thing. They think they are historians, a lot of them. I don’t know which it’s going to be: literary study swallows history and politics, or vice versa. In the end it won’t matter a lot which.” “Isn’t a third position possible? I mean, maybe they can blend together.” “I think not. There are those who say all historical writing is literary and fictive. But they are going to come around to saying everything is history, everything is material. They will have forgotten, if they ever knew, what Auden wrote: ‘Thou shalt not commit a social science.’ They seem to read only theory. It’s going to be the triumph of social science. We have students now who read only theory.”

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“Pretty soft social science, I’d say. Anyway, we’ve had these kinds of arguments in history departments for years. We have some of those people who say history is prose fiction, and I suppose some history has even been written in verse. Some ancient science was.” “Soft to Liquid. Look, I know you are going to advocate taking the long view, that this too shall pass. But every return is with a difference.” “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” “And this is really different. These people are out to change literary scholarship entirely and, my guess is, historical scholarship too.” “Didn’t the old Germanic philologists do that? And then the New Humanists? And then the New Criticism, and then Structuralism and so on?” “This is a blanket repudiation of all those movements, of history itself!” “Didn’t you say they thought themselves historians?” “Yes, but the idea is to use history, to use literature for specific political purposes, without—wait, let me finish—without attention to what makes literature different, and they read everything through that same trinity of focuses—race, class, and gender. But mainly the whole movement is to achieve power in the name of a new moralism. That’s it, the New Moralists, the New Moralism, Political Moralism. They want power. They didn’t capture it in the sixties. They are going to take it now. I’ll tell you one thing. I wouldn’t want my career in their hands if I disagreed with them. That’s the difference. Oh sure, academic life was racist, sexist, and all that. It’s easy to make those accusations against us. But we tried to mediate ideological differences and to tolerate them. Why, even back in the forties, old Crowder stood up and defended the jobs of the leftists on his faculty, and he was as conservative as they came. We hired the present group. They wouldn’t have gotten tenure if it hadn’t been for us. You held your nose and voted yes, on principle. You tried to build difference into the system. I suppose if they’ve thought about it they’ve decided it was moral flabbiness on our part.” “Hey, for heaven’s sake, wait a minute. People aren’t going to like it much if you hold your nose around them!” Edward Williams was a little bit surprised at Jack’s vehemence. He tried to steer the conversation toward what he thought of as disinterested analysis of the situation. “It’s the building-in that they object to, isn’t it? If I understand correctly. It institutionalizes their dissent and robs it of effect.” “At this rate there won’t be dissent. I hope they’ll arrange golden handshakes for all us old liberals. But you’re right. It is the institutional-

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ization. They talk about that. The call was ‘Change the Institution.’ Well, no, it was ‘Burn It Down.’ Now it’s study it, historicize it, debunk—sorry, deconstruct—it.” Williams laughed. Maybe this new historicism wasn’t such a bad thing for literary critics. “I’ve had days when I myself felt that way.” “Who hasn’t? But really to believe it? I mean, to have it as a belief? What comes in its place, another institution run by them? That’s why I say the whole thing is over power. Here’s the sort of attitude I mean: Jake Thompson is sitting in his office reading the Aeneid, and Carl Warren sticks his head in the door. Jake casually remarks that Virgil really is a good poet. Carl is actually offended! He says, ‘I can’t possibly accept that,’ as if Jake were a criminal personality for defending the father of all imperialists. Rome is out, you see, and that’s it. It’s like those bumper stickers: The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s that.” “I never liked Virgil much.” “Yes, but that’s because of old Mr. Callow at Shoreham. Remember how he’d open the side drawer in his desk and spit into the crayon tin he kept filled with sawdust? You must admit we didn’t have the best introduction to Latin verse.” “It was imperialistic, if I remember. And all that recitation we had to do. Reign of terror.” “Well, Virgil was a great poet. It’s just that being a great poet is irrelevant, no, not possible if you’ve lived in imperial Rome, entangled in that set of power relations.” “Foucault.” “Oh yes, Foucault, by all means.” “An ingenious fellow. Too bad he went so early.” There was a long pause. Emory had realized that he hadn’t even begun to eat the Cobb salad before him. Finally, Williams went on: “It’s funny how an activist position sometimes claims a virtually complete determinism, so that activism seems a contradiction.” “Not that simple. It’s not the old determinism. It’s the presumption of the powerlessness of the individual, a resistance to the idea of the autonomous human subject, the absolute necessity of the group.” Williams sighed. “You know,” he said, “Home was an anarchist commune. You’d call that an oxymoron. Mind your own business, but help out when need be. At least that was the idea. It was outsiders who couldn’t stand it. The Tacoma papers said they should be exterminated. The sheriff and postal inspector harassed them. Their newspaper was

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declared obscene, for publishing some lines of Walt Whitman, among other things.” “But they were propagandists for their cause, weren’t they? They had a newspaper sent out, and it took political positions.” “Yes, but their cause wasn’t in any way coercive. It was live and let live.” “But there must have been some pressures toward conformity.” “No doubt. The idea was that if you didn’t like to mind your own business you wouldn’t like it there. I presume there was pressure to adhere to that principle. It was a perilous balance. Every issue of Discontent had a statement in it about the colony, and part of it read: ‘We are not living communistic, but there is not anything in our articles of incorporation, and agreement to prohibit any number of persons from doing so.’ And they meant it, having it both ways, mutual good will.” Emory looked for the analogy. “In a way, that’s been the practice of the department, an unspoken principle we’ve followed over the years. But it’s not going to hold this time. The difference is the repudiation of scholarly disinterest or any habit of mind remotely like it. It’s as if disinterest were not just morally corrupt for standing aside but actively evil, complicit with whatever happens. And blind about itself, of course. If you attempt disinterest, you’re attacked for being either stupid or callow and uncaring.” “Uninterested.” “Exactly. You’ll note that for them there’s no difference between the two words when the situation is as politically charged as it is.” “Same thing Matthew Arnold complained about. But the principle can be corrupted, too. Look how many colleagues view themselves as individual entrepreneurs. They aren’t exactly congenial.” “They do mind their business. Well, anyway,” Emory said, “they’ve convinced me that power is what matters. Actually they’re Romans, and you know, when in Rome . . . They don’t trust me. If you try to practice disinterest, you’re a political and intellectual reactionary. To play it the way they see me, I should vote against every appointment they favor. Only a few more of them and we’ll be a department of cultural politics.” “Are you really going to do that?” Emory toyed with his fork, took a sip of iced tea, stared across the room where some colleagues were sitting. They looked up, stared back, spoke to each other. “They’re saying I’m plotting with you.”

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“Well, it hasn’t exactly been a disinterested conversation.” Under other circumstances Jack would have met this remark with a quip or a smile. But this time his eyes were hard. He resettled his napkin on his lap. “I’ve thought of doing it. The whole thing is deeply offensive to me, my own thoughts included.”

Edward Williams walked slowly toward his office with no particular desire to arrive there quickly. It was a pleasant spring afternoon, and he proceeded through patches of shade beneath large chestnut trees. He decided idly to stop and sit down on the Class of 1914 bench, which faced Crown Gate and the avenue beyond. There people were going about their town business. In this climate a sunny spring day brought out sundresses and shorts in profusion. He had not liked the conversation with Jack, but he was not yet prepared to think Jack had overreacted. That would be out of character. Still, he supposed, it was possible. As people got older they sometimes resisted change, everything began to look wrong-headed. He and Jack were sixtyfive now. At any rate the review committee had an interesting job ahead, especially the interviews. Obviously Jack had, with some exaggeration, put his finger on the issue. But it was simplistic to divide everyone into two camps. That was probably to make a parody. Jack’s parodies in the past were amusing. This one had not been intended as a parody. In such situations one hoped that the institution, by a sort of inertia, would act as a mediating or accommodating force. These days it seemed de rigueur on all sides to oppose the institution as the mother of all resistance to good things. But the institution did tend to prevent excess and sometimes even to channel it into effective action. At least so he had always thought. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten into administration. But he suspected he had gained respect when he got out. There was a built-in antipathy in the faculty toward administration. Blake said—a young Blake—that the road of excess led to the palace of wisdom. Well, maybe. But there was an alternative reading. In the palace waits the judge. Unless it’s a people’s palace, and then how do they (we?) decide? Edward Williams had always been a skeptical optimist. He had a weakness for theories of cyclicity that would not have endeared him to many of his history colleagues if he had revealed it at a critical moment or seriously

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in print. He had very carefully read Vico, less carefully (when young) Spengler, and briefly and in the condensed version Toynbee. Spengler was gloomy, and Toynbee was pious. But Vico, for all his oddity, was the man. Except for some backing and filling when he came up against church doctrine, Vico was, he considered, still readable as a secular historian, a theorist, yes, a theorist, of history and culture. The hell with Vico’s Autobiography. The New Science was the book. For these reasons he took a long view, believed that struggle produced a lot of cyclicity but some progress or something that looked like it, maybe two steps around and one forward. So he encompassed irony with optimism and admitted that the formula probably required that he end up in Epictetus’s camp, an old horse of a stoic. Well, so be it. It seemed to him that it was appropriate for his years. But something tempted him, yes, an old horse, to get out on that track again. He hadn’t liked what his oldest friend Jack might be turning into— what in the old days Jack would have been the first to call an old goat. Things were cyclical; the trick was to get outside the circle, get a little done here and a little there, usually by stealth. But disinterest was outside the circle, or at least tried to be. What Jack disliked was the spectacle of its being declared inevitably inside. Well, you could try to be outside. That should make some difference. Williams realized that for all the cool efficiency Jack had exhibited on the ball field from those first days at Shoreham School, he had little patience with certain kinds of people: those who measured everything, and those who proclaimed a morality to which others should measure up. Had he convinced himself that the supporters of Cynthia Ragsdale, whose name had not come up in their conversation, fell into both categories? Did they? Williams thought these matters more confused than any simple categorization. Was it, on the other hand, mainly, even simply, generational? Did the new always look like egoistic power-grabbers to the old? Did the old always appear to be old goats to the young? Or was Jack right, and it was different this time, different enough to adopt what one thought were the tactics of the opponent? In the old days, Jack would have thought that was to lose. “Hello, Edward. Are you meditating?” It was Helen Grant, on the way to Old Main. “No, just trying to plan strategically for the afternoon.” Helen found this amusing. She’d heard Edward before on the folly of time wasted in strategic planning. “May I join you for a moment? Every

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time I go to the vice-president’s office, I think of you still. I wish it were you I was going to see there. Well, this is second best.” “And better for me,” he said. She smiled. She liked Edward Williams, and her remark about wishing he were vice-president again was sincere, though she had nothing, or at least not very much, against the present one. Of course, Edward’s prose style was a trifle pompous—Francine would call it authoritarian—but, then, he was a historian after all. She knew that Edward supposed with good reason that no dean ever sat down without a purpose on a stone bench under a campus tree to talk to anyone, even if the meeting had not been anticipated. In fact, she did not have anything in mind when she sat down, but then, well, it was an opportunity. “I want you to know face-to-face how grateful I am that you’ll head the review committee for English. It won’t be easy. By now you’ve already had a sample of the tensions over the Morgan Professorship. I only hope it won’t dominate everyone’s thinking, and we can reach consensus about who’s to assume the chair of English.” “Well, what about that?” Edward asked. He had heard that Harley Wales was the likely choice. He knew Wales slightly. They’d been in a lunch foursome a couple of times. He was by all accounts a lively teacher and deeply involved in college activities. At lunch he advocated expanding the humanities core program to admit science students. He wanted to begin film studies under auspices of the English department. He wanted to revise the freshman-sophomore sequences. He predicted that in ten to twenty years the present humanities departments would disappear, absorbed in a new organization of some kind. Otherwise all literary study would go the way of classics. He was lively all right, and Williams thought that with the right mixture of diplomacy and abrasiveness, he’d flourish. “I don’t know yet, but there’s support for him. He has a substantial reputation now as a scholar, and he’s energetic and always engaged. He’s enthusiastic, too. Some people want that energy in the chair.” After the sleep of McComber, she thought. But perhaps she’d thought and said too much already. There was the other side. Some colleagues thought Harley was too self-serving, too much the careerist. He did tend to talk too much about himself, and he was always referring you to his previous writings. Conversation with him was strenuous. Though short and slight, he was a bit overbearing. He got too close to you when he was making a point, bouncing toe to heel, toe to heel. Too close. But he had a wonderful intel-

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lectual intensity. Was he too attached to his own position to treat others fairly? Could he integrate new intellectual approaches? He probably wasn’t a perfect candidate, but who was of those available? And then there was Harley as a social being. Could he mediate between factions. She wasn’t sure. Some people thought him an enigma, there being something “other” about him. “Other,” that was the fashionable word, wasn’t it? Well, he was detached. After the failed marriage she wondered whether his children kept in touch. It would have been hard. She thought him . . . , well, he was what he was, or had become. When it came right down to it, not very many people were capable of chairing a large complex department. Maybe detachment, if that is what it was, would be an advantage. Jack had a certain amount of it, but Harley’s was, of course, different. In any case, she uttered none of this, changing the subject. “There are many other questions, too. The department needs to rethink its curriculum. It’s had a big influx of students. And then there’s the issue of whether it’s trying to do too many different things. Gracious, it’s getting so students can’t get into the courses required for graduation!” All of this seemed, well, academic to Williams. He assumed she had something more to say, something not so official, not for publication. She knew Edward would not spread what she would tell him, and she cleared her throat. She had a tendency to do that in important moments. “Frankly, Edward, I think we’re in for some difficulty.” She had not really wanted to say this. She had not wanted to anticipate trouble on the basis of a hunch she had about Francine Wright. Things link up with each other: the Morgan professorship, next year’s promotion reviews, appointment of the new chair. “Your committee is going to have to sort out truth from much rumor, even accusation, for goodness’ sake. It won’t be easy.” Williams had expected “rumor” but not “accusation.” The way she pronounced it caught his attention. Helen went on. “This isn’t an easy time.” “No time ever is.” Historian, she thought. “Right, of course.” She was well aware that she was talking with a veteran administrator, who had seen a lot. But time had passed since Edward had administered, and things had changed. She began again. “The problem is that there’s a new range of selfinterests out there, and a new mix of attitudes. There are more different people struggling for power, and different methods of trying to get it.”

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She didn’t want to sound lectury. Well, no more than a professor normally was. He seemed receptive. “Some not very nice methods?” “I’m afraid so.” “Not,” he said, “murder, pillage, and rape,” and laughed. “Principally innuendo, I suspect.” She said nothing. Both knew that campus life was full of rumors, but it wasn’t often that they were the product of method. Williams thought of them capriciously as more like dirty jokes. Jack Emory had once told him that his old friend the poet Will Person claimed all dirty jokes emerged from a Sibyl who spoke from deep in a tavern in Toledo, Ohio. They were, of course, purely aesthetic, disinterested verbal folk objects, he claimed, having no external purposiveness except delight and owned by no one. Will Person was coming to State soon to read his poems. Williams’s mind had wandered. Helen, he realized, was talking about something different from this, something perhaps dark and unpleasant. He waited. She knew he waited, but she could say no more. It might be unfair to someone. All she had to go on was a word, a tone of voice, and the fear that an old friendship she had valued might be coming to an end. She could not even say the word. She had to trust Edward and his committee. Would they pick up what it was that was about to happen, was happening, did happen? Of course, that wasn’t precisely their job, but one did need to know about these things. She deliberately changed the subject again. “What’s new with your Home study? And did the county commissioners accept the salmon pens near Case Inlet?” It was an effective deflection, for these were currently two of Edward’s favorite subjects. He chose to pursue the first. “I’m reading about the attempt to suppress the Home newspaper. It was supposedly over obscenity, but it was really an attack on them as anarchists. Of course, the Tacoma papers’ idea of an anarchist was nothing like what the people at Home considered themselves to be. A man named Adams, who’d been married fifty years, wrote an article defending free love, and there were some lines from Walt Whitman in the paper. Sending obscene matter through the mails was the charge, but the judge ordered a verdict of innocent. Later, though, two women had to stand trial. And the post office was closed. Say, why don’t you and Frank come down to Osprey for the weekend? I’ll tell you about

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salmon pens then. More than you will want to know. Even show you where they want to put them. Only one pet to a person, though.” This was a joke about Frank’s work. Helen had heard versions of it before. But she liked Edward, and as she tentatively accepted she thought, well, you have to make allowances for historians and their jokes.

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Entre-Acte At last, after an absence of nearly five months, I again took the boat for Home. The day was beautiful, as only a Northern Pacific Coast day can be. The waters on Puget Sound were as smooth as glass; and as the boat made its landings at the various places, one could see how everybody ashore enjoyed the fine weather. At last, the whistle blew for Home landing. Comrade J. W. Adams was making for the float in a rowboat; and after a hearty greeting we went ashore. What a change from what I saw here last! Everything green, the gardens all in good, yes, most of them in excellent condition; trees loaded with fruit, vines full of berries; and as we walked along, we saw the cows lying in the shady places, chewing their cuds, and giving us a lazy sort of a careless look, such as only a cow can give. The ducks were making off for the water at our approach. But where are all the folks? I don’t see anybody around. “Why, they are all at the park, at their usual Sunday picnic,” says Mr. Adams. Oh yes, I nearly forgot. After going up to my brother’s place, to wash and take a bite of his own raised products, we, Annie, my companion, and I also, went to the park. What a happy crowd we found! How their faces express nothing but joy, at least for the present! How glad they were to see us! Everybody has a kind word; and some of them have two. We arrived too late to see them lunch, but there was quite a program to be gotten through, before a day’s pleasure was over. Com-

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rade Morton delivered one of his characteristic lectures. Himself being one of the most sensitive individuals to offense, he always tries to offend nobody, yet always establishes a common working ground, on which all schools can stand firmly. Music by the Home Band. —Louis Haiman, Discontent: Mother of Progress, August 14, 1901

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Always Singing This Song

Well, I’m back, as you can see In the sunset of a long day I’m back indubitably After two wives Three kids Kidney stone, prostatitis Arthritis. Why, hell, I’ve Been turned inside Out and back. Yes, back For whoever is the author Of this Must have been surprised That the order of events Required my presence Inside my skin Before denouement Could be reached.

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He’d jotted down this draft for a poem on the plane out of Santa

Fe after a really lousy plastic-wrapped lunch in a box only a child could open. He’d work it over and over in his head before the reading and maybe have another secret to vomit forth if the voice wasn’t wanting. It looked like it might make a good beginning, or an ending. Old Byron was wrong. Middles were the hardest. Back when he and Jack and Jason Talbot had been the burrs under the saddle of that stable of instructional horses named Walton University, it was as if they were in some goddamned novel. It had been more than nature could dish up alone, as Oscar said. The old sodomite got a few things right. Anyway he could imagine Jack liking the poem, if he could ever firm it up. That was a phrase the dean at Walton used to utter, damn his soul. Yes, old Will Person with a smidgin of trepidation coming back into Jack Emory’s life, after years of silence, then less than occasional correspondence. And, yes again, Jack had to get over fuming about that dalliance called marriage that he, Wayward Will, consummated with Jack’s sister some thirty years back and the wayward son they’d made. He didn’t expect there’d be much talk about those things. Much best left unsaid. And now here he was, dropping out of the sky. But no Icarus he. No wax wings on his Pegasus. A perfect four-point landing was what he had in mind. Deliberate careful behavior. Four on the floor, foursquare, and he in the saddle, ready to ride and rope another audience. The Sweet Singer of Santa Fe. He had to admit he enjoyed the reading caper. There was a big aviary of singing birds that perched around State, and people would come from round about—all of them poets in the darkness of their psyches, fluttering out of the forests. He was good at it, with the parodies he did of Thomas, Roethke, Ginsberg, and Ashbery, his ode to the Ritz Brothers, and the Essay on Theory. That last one always got to the academic crickets: ’Tis great offense ’gainst theory’s law To have no footnote on Derrida And if Foucault’s not full in view Some reviewer will crap on you. Freud and Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, But better jettison Paul de Man. Jack would like that. Ease the tension. Wrote a whole book and never once mentioned Nietzsche or hermeneutics. He’d noticed this right away,

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in fact always looked first, and often last, in the index to find out who wasn’t there. After all, there was some shit he wouldn’t eat. For that omission Jack was condemned to the ozone hole, he bet. The valley girl’s daughter on the intercom told them to put their tables upright, get it up, old cock, before the hatchet comes, and we do ask you to remain in your seats until you see the Lord in the air, which translated means, Back, back, you animals. Will gazed out the window as they came down through a layer of overcast. The enormous woman next to him was praying. Off the plane, through the chute with the other cattle went he, Will Person, Nihilistic Nabob of New Mexico. And by God, there was old Jack, old bright eyes, now a silver fox. So, given the situation, they did the appropriate dance. As prophesied by the poet, no mention of wives and children, only silent wonderings why some things had gone as they did. They discussed the plane trip and were philosophical about food. They considered, as they drove to campus, freeway traffic and took note of the sharp increase in hell-bent young women in red cars. They reported on old friends, wished old Jason Talbot were here. They resurrected for raillery old enemies and in general reflected on time. While this went on they caught glimpses of one another. Old Jack was making a fair imitation of a retired colonial officer. All he needed was the pith helmet, swagger stick, and khaki shorts. The small mustache was definitely a help. My god, he was beginning to look like old Colonel Calderwood. Will waited for those first words on the natives hereabouts—what drums they played, their chants when restless, and rituals of the hunt. It took a while. Well, so what? Jack did have to navigate through the past and he had to stay in the right lane, or they’d end up where? Seattle, he supposed, though he hadn’t any idea what direction they were going. He just figured Jack’s Saab knew the way. Jack said, “We’re recruiting a professor of American lit. She’s due here today, too. You’ll probably meet her. Cynthia Ragsdale. Teaches at Middleton.” Oh hell, yes. Of course it would be Cindy. All the way up here to meet Raggedy Cindy. That winter night at Middleton when they parted after his reading, the dinner with Cindy and her girl boyfriend or boy girlfriend, who talked about nothing but boy actors in Shakespeare. He’d said, so that’s what happened? Hamlet found out. Not funny. Whole committee to prevent cruelty to poets, also at dinner, looked grave that night. Cindy choked on her espresso. Not a good move.

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Oh well. A real loss, a genuine beautiful woman, who could charm your fly open even when she was angry, which he bet she was a lot of the time. Could be a ferocious Dragon Lady, young wicked-witch type. Yes, a genuine loss. It was a purely Platonic affair they’d had that twenty-four hours. He’d got the roundabout impression that Cindy actually liked him as relief from all that high seriousness she must have been putting up with from girlboy. Well, for him it had been decorum all the way, despite his deep appreciation of Cindy’s dales and hills. No seduction of the visiting poet that night. Violation of academic convention. He told Jack little about it, only the ice storm. The real one, he meant, the real one outside in the Middleton winter. Frost would have appeared on Jack’s colonial officer mustache, stiff as a brigadier in autumn. Cindy would destabilize the present power relations here, he thought. And so he decided then and there to add his “Satyr Against Sylvia Plath” to the program and disrupt the current disruptions. He liked Cindy, who wasn’t so old, or young, about forty-five, he guessed. And she’d think the poem a gas, not a gaffe. That night, when the time came, he peered out over an audience of jeans, tartan shirts, and serapes that looked like Sitting Bull’s encampment, thought better of it, and read his “Rhapsody for Adelaide Crapsey” instead, sneaking it in behind “A Rose for Fay Vincent” and the serious sequence on Ohio main streets that he usually ended with these days—the I’m tired and I wanna go stuff. He left out the obscene acrostic, which was a tribute to Franklin Mortimer, lost in a fog on Puget Sound fifteen years before. He’d always liked Mortimer’s acrostic poem since that time at Walton when the idiot visiting lecturer hadn’t noticed the up and down. The questions afterwards were the usual fun. Silly stuff about how you revised, what poets influenced you (McGonagall, Julia A. Moore). Until the last. He couldn’t see clearly who it was out of the smoke of the Indian camp, but he recognized a feminist cricket when he heard one: the voice that berates you before it really berates you, and then goes meticulously on. This one started with a preface about women poets of Adelaide Crapsey’s generation, proceeded to describe their plights as writers, and came to the point, which was that Person’s poem was sexist and an insult. Will Person sympathized with those lady poets, trying to write in those stiff dresses, with a mewling and puking infant under one arm, and the old wash tubs, and bad lighting for their acts. This he said in general as he peered into the audience. From his vantage he decided that one

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third was embarrassed, one third hostile, and one third nodding agreement to something or other. Estimates only. It was dark out there. Seven young women got up and left as he spoke. As far as he was concerned, he went on, A.C. was a poet, and her poems took care of themselves, or didn’t, always had, or hadn’t, depending on the times, and he expected his would do the same, as best they could. If she didn’t like his poem, so be it. If it didn’t deal fairly with A.C., in time it would. After all, insult among poets, if that is what this had been, was the greatest form of flattery and always raises sales. He had imagined a Crapsey revival with that poem. And, besides, all of you out there, how may rimes can you find for Crapsey, or Adelaide, for that matter. Well, there was parade, marmalade, retrograde. Quite a few, come to think of it—for Adelaide. But for Crapsey only off rimes—topsy, dropsy, catalepsy, you can appreciate the problem. A real job of work. This, he saw, pleased exactly one third of the audience, one third was hostile, and one third embarrassed. Raspberries and severe clucking broke out here and there. He had roused the faculties to act. His antagonist, clearly president of the Crapsey Society, sought the floor once again, but he sensed there was drink across the hall, pleaded thirst, and, adopting a stride General Custer would have admired, had he survived, exited to war whoops. In the other room, he’d hardly touched the wine carafe when a large painted brave who introduced herself as Francine Wright stood with two arm-folded, seraped sisters between him and a dozen MFA candidates waiting there, eager on the half shell. All ready to find out whether rime was rime or rhyme. No exit after all. Nothing for it but to go ahead, load and shoot, outnumbered, his back to the sideboard of carrot sticks and cauliflower. He couldn’t last out the early spring on that. He’d have to fight his way out or make a heroic end trying, reduced finally to that old dirk, the tongue in his mouth. But suddenly, against all odds and true epic decorum there came from out a sea of students a dea ex machina, the beautiful black-headed Cindy Ragsdale, fair as the rosy-fingered dawn, who had gained only a few small bird tracks at the eyes since last he had wanted to seduce her. She looked as innocent as age forty-five (or so) allowed. From epic to romance, just like that. She smiled sweetly at the three sisters, observed to Francine that, yes, it had been tough on women poets then by a long shot and, after some

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reminiscences of that chaste Middleton night, turned the subject all the way to Arizona and the Arcosanti project. Had he been there? Yes. Well? Frankly, he couldn’t decide whether it was sham, scam, or spam, whether they were building it or tearing it down. But it was, at least at one time, far out, cool, and all right, and it was in the American tradition, like the Black Mountain boys, and all the other Utopianists. But for his money it wasn’t sufficiently anarchic. They were staying in the same hotel. She wanted to meet for breakfast, which was free time for her on this visit, about the only free time. Too bad, he thought, philosophically and sixty-eight, too bad not sooner. But, ah well, she had saved him. He’d ride again. The correct, or rather the woman, named Wright had lumbered away. He spent the rest of the evening with young singing birds. Sang baseball with the boys and Plath with the girls. A Miss Marple in Scots tweeds named Grant finally took him across the room toward a megalith introduced as Edward Williams. He acted the proprietor of the place and would, he declared to all around, take the distinguished (or something like that) poet to his hotel. Old Will, his high horse riderless, spotted Cindy across the room, soaring above the crowd of youngsters, a bird of grace. He, good gray poet, acquiesced. Till breakfast then, alas. Williams was a straight-backed, noble-browed, Harding-headed, solidly built, oratorical type in the tradition of Lloyd George, and maybe as Welsh. He was not merely a bit player in his day, that was plain. But now a venerable walk-on. Applause and special award for past performances. In his car, he filled in on the presence of Cynthia Ragsdale, the rhetorical style of Francine Wright, the upcoming departmental review, and “Oh, yes, ahem, I believe you know Jason Talbot, who’ll be an outside member of the review committee.” Ah, then plop, it fell into place. He wasn’t telling, he was asking. Oh, he’d been up front in a roundabout way regarding Francine Wright. About the recruiting of Cindy he stayed within the bounds of oratory: We’re facing problems ahem of dissension ahem, and there are the feminist pressures, ah yes, ahem, ethnic studies, the canon, postcolonialism, but all the time what he really wanted to know was how old Jason would disport himself in these latitudes. Well, between them, they’d make it a world-class, ahem, meet. Jason’s turnip face. Why, neither’d land a glove in the first round. And so Will Person, old Willy III, man and poet, shook out his beard, stroked it, and assured all hands that Jason Talbot was just the man, indu-

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bitably the man for the job, who kept his counsel, would know what’s what two minutes on the ground, remember everything said and most of the gestures, and (he omitted this) have a great story for Will after he’d made his report. There was always a goddamned report. As for advice, as if asked, Will Person declared that reports on English departments should be like the satires of Menippus, referred to learnedly but not extant. At this point, Edward Williams, with gestures reminiscent of the statues of Burke and Grattan near College Green, declared that his greatest—perhaps only— significant act as vice-president had been to abolish the five-year plan, the principle being that even short-range plans were predictions of things that never happened and of no use to anyone. And the bureaucratic process of putting one together was a pain to all. He’d put one together his first year without bothering any deans, simply by borrowing the most abstract forward-looking paragraphs from those of the previous few years and weaving them together in an interactive, ongoing, far-sighted, generally encouraging expression of vanguardism. He’d slipped it easily by the president, when that gentleman visited campus between trips. No one seemed to have noticed up the line in the Council for Higher Education or the governor’s office. He’d always suspected no one read those things, or they read only those things. He’d revised it annually. Will Person recognized this fellow as only apparently a colonial officer. Yes indeed, he was a closet native, in fact a commedia dell’arte specialist. Who knows what havoc he might have wrought if he’d stayed in the game? But he’d gone to pasture. Interview not complete. Old Cinders was the second topic. And so again. Oh yes, she seemed a splendid possibility. Of course he, Willy III, didn’t know the lady’s, what do you call it, scholarship? Not his ballgame, but he could say she was a good old gal, he knew that much (and had wished he knew more). No chuckle, no elbow in the rib. Decorum. Agenbite of Inwit. Williams was for the moment inscrutable.

Cynthia Ragsdale stared into the bathroom mirror at 7 a.m. and thought, “In this story, which looks a little crazy to me already, I now do the ‘she observed herself in the mirror scene’”: She thought well of what she saw, the curve of her lips, the high cheekbones, the raven hair, and all of that. She was, she thought, a heroine being wooed indifferently by an indecisive ambivalent lover, in whom the real drama, clearly a psychodrama, was

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taking place. It wouldn’t make it on the romance shelves of the supermarkets. She had a strange feeling that her strongest supporter was potentially trouble for her, and her enemies might turn out to . . . She tried at once to convince herself that these thoughts were premature. Things would sort themselves out. She had always been, after all, lucky. But it would be nice to be free of the tension for a short time. So she fluffed out her hair, added a little perfume, and prepared to meet Will Person at the coffee shop. She always used to be late; now her habit was to arrive everywhere a little early. It was penance for the past, when she’d wanted to be a novelist. So she sat in the lobby and read the paper. Congress was trying to end the rail strike. The state’s teachers were resolute about walking out. A cross was burned somewhere north of Seattle. Gorbachev was in Tokyo. Ann Landers had printed a letter from a woman whose husband wanted a sex change. The Mets were second, the Yankees last. Women basketball coaches were getting better salaries, but . . . At that moment there was a tap on her shoulder, and there was Will Person looming up on her left. “We shouldn’t be meeting like this,” he growled. “We’re surrounded, you know.” She appreciated the tone. “Well, I do detect that I’m a bone of contention. Your reputation is in jeopardy with someone if you breakfast with me. Last night at dinner your friend Emory studied me as if I were on a slide, and the others competed for feminist of the month.” “No, no, old dear, Jack just hasn’t seen anyone in the academic game as pretty as you. It’s agin nature and he’s puzzled and trying to figure it out. He was studying you like Rossetti studied Lizzie, or Robert studied Lizzie, or Burton studied Lizzie, or . . . “You are truly a chauvinist pig.” “Ah, yes, very much so when I see nature copying art and getting away with it. You look good for morning.” “Thanks. You look as American poet as ever. A little belated perhaps, late nineteenth century, I’d say.” “Do you want me to introduce you to Ella Wheeler Wilcox? I can arrange it, though not before you lecture about her. Ah, Ella, she was an optimist.” They were proceeding to the coffee shop. As they arrived, waiting for the hostess, he took her a little by surprise: “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this? Do you want this job?” “That was a serious question, wasn’t it?” “Damn right. They’ve probably got people here who eat pretty girls like you for lunch.”

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“Emory?” “Oh, he only used to be a tiger of wrath. Now, well, he’s what? A gifted horse. Don’t look a gifted horse in the mouth, my tailor used to say; you’re supposed to know his worth.” “I don’t know. Maybe I’d like to see that tiger back. I’d always heard he was pretty open. He’s one of the local people you hear about. But he sat on his hands last night.” “Well, it was a first date! That’s where you folks want men’s hands, isn’t it?” Cynthia reached back and gave him her best old-style liberated glare, then laughed. “Okay, what’s going on?” “Hell, Cindy, how should I know? I’m just a visitor here. Everywhere, actually, when you think about it. First antinomy of pure Person: You are the issue. You are not the issue.” “You’re right. There’s something else. Everyone’s so tense. This man named Wales. He’s probably going to be the new chair, I don’t know about him. Francine Wright picked at him all evening, and Elaine— what?—well, she was sort of nodding agreement.” “Like a diligent, devoted student? Ah, they’re a bad lot.” “Yes, and Emory so opaque.” “Oh yeah. Francine. She was the one who woman-handled me at the reception, until you rode up. I was about to blow my last wailing note. If I had any manners, I’d thank you.” “I’d accept. I don’t really like the tone here very much. It’s a little scary in this place.” “You said it. I didn’t.” “I think it will be difficult for me to be appointed here.” “You know what old Oscar said. You destroy the thing you love. It could happen, but the dean, she’s a good old lady. I found out last night she was from good old London, Ahia. My place. Can’t be all bad. No sir. She bleeds scarlet and gray, I bet.” Cynthia was silent. She had not yet met with Helen Grant, who on the phone did seem all right. She had wanted this job, not strictly for professional reasons. She had wanted it mostly for the change of scenery and, yes, to get away from Deborah. It had begun simply enough in academic friendship. They had been thrown together by professional circumstances. And then one day she had realized Deborah was in love with her, and she didn’t know what

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to do about it. So she let things drift into a relationship she was ambivalent and then increasingly unhappy about. After a while, she’d decided that, yes, she really liked men better, at least better that way, and for her it had been part of the feminist experience. Then, what to do about Debby, who was still calling at every excuse and either sad or angry when they were, by necessity, in the same room? Maybe she should move, maybe she had to move. That made her tense. She would smoke now, if she smoked. “Seriously, do you think Jack Emory is really opposed to me?” She watched Will take a deep breath, emit a lugubrious sigh, and contemplate the grapefruit half now placed before him. Suddenly he was a sad old face. “Cindy, I don’t know. Old Jack, hell, he always hated any unfairness and any damned wheeling and dealing. He stood up for what he thought was right. As you get older you trust to your hunches, which may be prejudices. I don’t know what he thinks is right these days. We haven’t been in touch a lot.” He neglected to mention Jack’s sister. “Well, he might think it right to oppose Francine, and I’d be the what? The displaced symbol according to Person’s antinomy?” “Maybe Jack’s no longer a tiger, but he’s at least one smart horse. He’d know he was doing that. Anyway, you’ll find out soon enough.” Will marveled at how statesmanlike he had become. “The thing that worries me is that there are things about this I won’t know in time.” “One never does, Cindy, one never does.”

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Entre-Acte Our visit to Anderson Island had a rather unexpected aftermath, in the shape of the following article, which appeared under glaring headlines in the Tacoma Evening News: A citizen of Tacoma, who visited Anderson’s Island yesterday, tells a story of goings on there last evening, that is mildly sensational, to say the least. According to this gentleman, it was about eight o’clock in the evening, when two naphtha launches, carrying about forty-five people, arrived at the island. The launches carried red flags, and no United States flags were visible. The passengers landed at a little farmhouse owned by Mrs. Lindstrom and after talking for some time, adjourned to the orchard, where speeches were delivered. The principal speaker of the evening was a man named James F. Morton; and at first his remarks were of a temperate nature; but as he became warmed up, he denounced the administration and American institutions in general, his closing remarks being of a most sensational nature. The people who visited the island on the launches belong to the Home colony, which was established about a year and a half ago, at Home, Pierce County, Washington. At the present time, there are 34 men, 36 women, and 16 children in this colony; and the teachings of the leaders are said to be of a vicious character. Free love is among the doctrines said to be taught; and visits are frequently made to settlers in the vicinity

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with the object of inducing them to join the colony. Among the members of the colony are said to be two men who draw pensions from the United States government; and on this money the colony is in a measure supported. The Home colony publishes a paper, which is entered at the post office at Home as second class matter. The name of the paper is Discontent; and a perusal of its columns is enough to convince the reader that the writers are certainly discontented with the present order of things. —Discontent: Mother of Progress, August 28, 1901, quoting from the Tacoma Evening News

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Glorious Blaze

Helen Grant looked down from her last-row seat on the packed

audience gathered in Ryerson Auditorium for Cynthia Ragsdale’s lecture. She was relieved to be there. The situation in mathematics was no better and had occupied most of her morning. The department’s chair argued that the ruckus was mostly about salaries. They couldn’t keep their people, given the opportunities on the outside. From the math faculty it was about the chair and and his allegedly autocratic ways. She had concluded that math professors were unconscious anarchists. No chair she could remember had ever pleased them. Anyway she would have liked to take and shake them all and ask why, oh why, were the math instructional assistants such terrible teachers, and why didn’t they do something about that? Then in the afternoon, she was asked to find, what was it, half a million dollars or more to set up a laboratory for a new biologist, a major catch. Where would that come from, on top of the six-figure salary? It meant a discussion with the vice-president, who would stall, and that would require doses of placation all around. There would be anguished visits from the biology chair urging speedy action. Some of the people in English were probably complaining about the salary that went along with the Morgan Professorship. She’d heard that one person called it obscene. That person—and she guessed it was the

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department’s last old-style Marxist—must not have a clue about what was going on with science salaries. Helen Grant noted that the audience was composed mostly of women—women of all ages. The men attending she recognized for the most part as her colleagues in English. They were there not so much for the subject as to observe the candidate’s performance. But it was a good turnout. She was always gratified, and a little surprised, at the level of attendance at these events. It made her feel good about the university, and the town as well. In her job, it was easy to be distracted from the intellectual life that did, after all, go on around her. Irregardless, she thought, like a flower growing. She noticed also that this was a crowd quite different from last night’s at Person’s reading. No poet, she supposed, would deign to attend a lecture on Ella Wheeler Wilcox, represented in The Stuffed Owl and shunned even in those days by Louis Untermeyer. But this lecture would not be about poetry, really. It was to be a lecture about American social and cultural history: “Ella Wheeler Wilcox and the Progress of the Bourgeoisie.” And there was the rub. No doubt, it was going to be feminist, vaguely Marxist and new historicist, with a dash of Foucault, perhaps. The absence of last night’s crowd that attended the Person reading reflected one of the schisms in academe that worried her. The creative writers had gone to cover as the younger scholars became more politically engaged and committed to bringing the issues of the day into the classroom. She mused for a moment or two on how the cry for “relevance” had been heard in the late sixties, the word positively worn out in the seventies, and now the return of what it had stood for (or something like that) in the debate over “political correctness.” The creative writers weren’t exactly the departmental conservatives. That wasn’t it. When she had been a student, it seemed that the poets were the avant-garde. They were leagued with the younger scholars, who tended to see literature from what she liked to call the writerly perspective. In those days, the political people were a distinct minority, regarded as throwbacks to the thirties or forties, when some had been in fear of losing their jobs because of attacks from the right. She recalled the local stories about witch hunts, turnouts, legislative hearings, and violent newspaper rhetoric. If those old leftists were around now, they’d be happier, she thought. Then she checked herself. Would they really? The fellow who she assumed thought the Morgan salary obscene wasn’t happy. Of course, he was really a throwback and thought of himself as a worker of the world and all that. As for herself, she wished there

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could be some middle ground. But could the center hold? Could Jack Emory hold? Was there a new chair who could hold? But mostly, amid her concerns about labs, the latest law suit, and providing computers without ravaging the equipment budget, she had begun to fear (when there was time) for literature itself, and even poetry. What Cynthia Ragsdale was saying interested her, but was it about literature? On the other hand, did that matter if it was interesting history? For Cynthia Ragsdale was a good, clear, excellently organized, and witty lecturer; and she told a good story. Nothing went over anyone’s head. She had none of the jargon of some literary theorists who had visited recently: sublation, chiasmus, aporia, mise en abyme, trace, and misprision. When would another term pop up? In recent years whole new languages had been formed. She wondered often how many really presented a new idea, how many merely recast earlier thoughts. And where, where indeed, was poetry in all this? Frank would say dryly that it didn’t pay (and she wasn’t paid, or at least no longer paid) to think such thoughts. In a little while, the shape of the lecture became apparent. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was being made a symbol of American bourgeois optimism and the faith in progress that went along with it. Yet this faith would be her failing. A woman of some poetic talent (hard to believe, Helen thought, as she listened to the occasional quotation), she got caught up in America’s upwardly mobile society, never developed her craft, remained intellectually provincial, and was finally bereft, after serious commitment to the Ouija board, of the optimism that she had leaned on for support. Cynthia Ragsdale was showing that all of her isms were half-baked, not for lack of zeal, but for failure to put intellectual pressure on her enthusiasms. Particularly was this true of her feminism and her attitude toward the subduing of Native Americans. She embodied the national refusal to face facts, material and moral. She drifted with her age and with America’s adolescence through the assassination of McKinley and the rest of it. She had a penchant for approving of eccentric movements, like the Oneida community’s practice of free love, but she had no will to pursue any social movement very far. Cynthia Ragsdale’s anecdotes were apt, sometimes funny, sometimes sad. She wove a picture of someone naive and self-deceitful and, like turnof-the-century America, webbed in delusions. The lecture itself stood somewhere between satire and solemnity. Though it ended with discussion of two poems, at best mediocre, at worst quite awful, the lecturer was not really interested in Ella Wheeler Wilcox as a poet. And just as well, too!

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As Cynthia Ragsdale completed her critique of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s feminism with reference to her “Battle Hymn of Women,” once called a Marseillaise by a prominent French feminist of the time, Helen considered that this was indeed a very effective performance, a home run with all the bases touched, as Frank would say if he had been present. And he most certainly had elected not to be. When Cynthia Ragsdale went on to point out the attitudes displayed in Wilcox’s epic poem on General Custer, the audience was appreciative. She had pressed the colonialist button, as Frank would have said. Yes, he would have said that, too. He was wise to stay away, story of the sick tapir having been convenient. He didn’t often come to these affairs anyway. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was raised up as an example of her time, then the time was de- de- what? Demythologized. Helen thought, as the lecture ended, that if there had been no real poetry in Ella Wheeler Wilcox, neither had there been any particular interest shown by Cynthia Ragsdale in whether there was. Did that make a difference? Apparently not to the audience nor to the young faculty and students who crowded around her at the reception. But Helen had been impressed by Cynthia Ragsdale. She was still moved whenever she found herself in the audience of a successful woman scholar. Yet she worried. When Helen Grant moved out of her seat toward the hall door, she caught Jack Emory’s eye. He gave an Irish nod of greeting, which was, of course, hard to distinguish from a straight shake of the head. There one minute, gone the next. Yes/No.

Clark Marshall was thought by some and sometimes thought himself to be the conscience of the English department. Every department needed one, Harry Corman once said, to keep them on the straight and narrow, to invoke Robert’s Rules of Order at the moment of crisis, to stand for what is time-tested, and to oppose the general shallowness of things. He took to the role by nature and, at least in his professional life, never abandoned it, though it was a torment to him. He didn’t know how to have it any other way. But he was by no means a prude, had played big-time college football back in the forties, and could swear like a Navy Chief, which he had been in what he now called our war. On his left shoulder he wore a tattoo, and when asked what it was like to be tattooed would reply, “Nothing to it. You wake up and you’re tattooed.” He was, in the eyes of others, a man’s man, which meant in his case that he was unfailingly charming to women though uncomfortable with them professionally. About his private life he

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was as secretive as his sense of decorum permitted. This was not because he was deliberately hiding something he was ashamed of, but rather because, as most of his colleagues knew, he had a crazy wife, and he considered that it should be no one else’s problem. Helga Marshall was without question schizophrenic. Clark Marshall had thought to himself once that if Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had Helga for a wife they’d think schizophrenia not so hot. Helga Marshall from time to time tormented Clark’s colleagues with long phone calls of indeterminate logic and subject matter, though in recent times the themes had been feminism and animal rights woven indiscriminately together. She had more than once berated local biologists by phone and informed the mayor of her neighborhood’s savagery toward dogs and cats. She had been trained in Germany as a textual scholar and imbued with strongly elitist professional ideas. She was puzzled that her husband was a careful scholar yet not sympathetic to her hierarchical notions. She was reminded of this nightly when she contemplated Clark’s tattoo, which said “E Pluribus Unum.” Colleagues had come to realize that the worse Helga’s mental state, the more forbidding was Clark Marshall’s classroom and collegial performance. He, more keenly than they, was aware of this, and though he tried, he was able to do little about it. This was because he was indeed a moralist and, though his morality was secular, he was possessed of a deep sense of human limitation, even sinfulness. Clark Marshall didn’t like the idea of appointing Cynthia Ragsdale the least bit, though in the end he might well, probably would, vote for her in defiance of what he regarded as his prejudice. Indeed, he hadn’t been happy with very many recent appointments. In this case it wasn’t the candidate herself; it was his suspicion of those who supported her. Clark Marshall had been taught at Harvard the close reading of poems by Reuben Brower and attention to the history of criticism by W. Jackson Bate. He had forgotten none of his education and believed in its values. Some readings were better than others; some were just wrong; and there were ways to tell which was which. Even so, when he read Jacques Derrida he acknowledged silently to himself that Derrida had a point and gradually found himself less opposed to deconstruction than he had thought. He hated what he called ideologies, and though he would have nothing to do with the National Association of Scholars, he was very unhappy with the politicization of literary study that he thought Cynthia Ragsdale’s supporters in his department, some of them anyway, represented. He took the view that faculty were paid by the people of the state

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not to put in motion in the classroom a political agenda. He became angry and couldn’t stay seated at meetings when someone said that was a political agenda. He himself supported the principal feminist positions: strict equality in the workplace, freedom from harassment, right to abortion (though with regret, in part, he realized, because he thoroughly disliked the groups opposing the last). But on the whole, he distrusted feminism, as he distrusted most movements. He could not often tolerate his feminist colleagues’ rhetoric, mostly because he was offended by a righteousness that he felt did not allow for error. There were moments at meetings when Clark Marshall’s ire was such that his forehead reddened and his hands clenched air, he tore his tie loose and relieved himself of an oath or, in an enormous effort at self-control, a deep and anguished sigh. He knew and regretted after one of these moments that people like Francine Wright, and perhaps everyone, were unfairly silenced. As Cynthia Ragsdale approached her discussion of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “Custer,” Clark Marshall knew that his forehead was hot and that his tie was too tight around his neck. The poem, she had gone to some lengths to explain, expressed all the contradictions since the landing of the pilgrims in the American desire to master the land. Wilcox’s argument was that the Indian had been a noble savage before the white man taught him evil ways. When he fought back by evil means, the white man was obligated to subdue or even obliterate him to ensure the march of progress. This argument, Ragsdale explained, was set forth in a poem of three books, one hundred seven stanzas, of which the following was representative: And for the sport of idle kings and knaves Of Nature’s greater noblemen, made slaves. Alas, the hour, when the wronged Indian knows His seeming benefactors are but foes. His kinsmen kidnapped and his lands possessed, The demon woke in that untutored breast. Four hundred years have rolled upon their way— The ruthless demon rules the red man to this day. Ending in an alexandrine, Marshall thought, a cross between Childe Harold and Don Juan. Nothing of interest. Why did she bother with this wretched poem? It was all bathos:

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Mourned Hamilton, the faithful and the brave, Nine hundred comrades follow to the grave; And close behind the banner-hidden corse All draped in black walks mournfully his horse. She didn’t care that it was bad, silly to the point that the attitudes expressed were not worth all the talk. This wasn’t literary study. It was social history. The text might as well be the telephone book. Clark Marshall loosened his tie as Cynthia Ragsdale approached her conclusion with lines on Custer himself: The craftiest plot he checks with counterplot, Till tribe by tribe the tricky foe is brought To fear his vengeance and to know his power As man’s fixed gaze will make a wild beast cower. So these crude souls feel that unflinching will Which draws them by its force, yet does not kill. “Not kill?” She asked, and the lecture ended. Well, she was in on the kill, though not the chief predator, of all that his teachers and he, following them, stood for. That this was trivial, bad poetry made no difference to her purpose. It was document or it was “writing,” and its content was its politics. Anything he would have to say about it was irrelevant. Clark Marshall had lately felt himself irrelevant. He wondered how Jack Emory felt. Jack had rebuilt a faltering department years ago. He didn’t often agree with Jack on specifics. He had worried often about Jack’s taking chances with appointments and curriculum. But he respected him, too, because Jack had caused different, very different people, to work together. Jack was almost a genius at that. He had always thought that Jack had appreciated his position and, indeed, overvalued him. Right now he felt he had only two choices—to retire from the scene or fight. But he was drawn, at that moment when Cynthia Ragsdale finished, to talk to Jack. He had never considered the matter carefully, but he didn’t just respect Jack. He depended on his presence. He knew that there were others who felt this way.

Harley Wales had listened as attentively as he could to the lecture, even as his mind kept returning to the question of what Cynthia Rags-

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dale’s appointment would do to the power relations in the department. Of course, by the time she came he would be chair or not chair, so the vote wasn’t a matter for concern. The issue was the politics of his appointment this spring and what his stand on her would mean to it. He very much wanted to be chair. He was a doer. He could act. He thought he could move the department along. That meant keeping abreast of academic fashion even though one needed to placate the traditionalists and to imagine what was on the horizon. Harley Wales had been trained in deconstruction and what he liked to call both its contents and discontents, but lately it had begun to bore him. Still, he was ready to argue that it was politically radical and had led scholars into involvement with the great issues of the day. But he also recognized some sense in the complaints that deconstruction was not activist enough. He was even ready to argue that this was so. Harley Wales enjoyed a good argument and was himself a good arguer. He did not, perhaps, realize that his tenacity was sometimes taken as offensive and uncollegial. But debate had helped to make him wellknown in the profession and sought-out to enliven conferences. It had also made some of his colleagues afraid of speaking out at meetings. He knew this but didn’t really understand it. For him debate was what the profession should be all about. Harley Wales recognized Cynthia Ragsdale’s style and assumed she would be an effective debater at department meetings. He liked the idea of that. He told himself that she would bring prestige to the department. At the same time (and he did not know why) he could not overcome a vague anxiety. When he was anxious he became more animated, he spoke more rapidly, and he sought an audience with whom he could confirm what he wanted to think. At the reception he deliberately chose Elaine Brinnon as his auditor, but even as he did so he feared that he would say to her only what she wanted to hear. On the other hand, perhaps he had decided she would like what he thought. With Elaine before him he offered the remark that it had been a classy lecture. She smiled. Harley was inclined to use that adjective to describe what impressed him intellectually. “She argues a good case,” he said. It was another recognizable Walesism. Enthused, he described the shape of the lecture. He was like a lawyer summing up, though at the same time he was treating Cynthia as a lawyer summing up. Elaine realized that she sometimes thought of Harley as a lawyer; Francine once described him as a prosecutor. That was, she remembered, after a

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long speech at a department meeting and at about the time Francine decided he was a threat. Harley’s description was nothing if not concise and thorough at the same time. He was giving Cynthia’s lecture the attention he’d give Plato or Aristotle in the classroom. He was inside the subject. She had been told by others that Harley was a natural teacher. She observed someone she thought a bit driven. By more than the subject at hand? For his part, Harley Wales was feeling about his sudden (and unexpected) engagement with the lecture the way he felt after a successful class. There was at such moments a sort of transport and sense of accomplishment. He did not know he had actually been on his toes making his point about colonialism. Elaine had given him her full attention. He was at peace. He would support Cynthia Ragsdale’s appointment.

Francine Wright saw how the lecture was going and was excited by it. She had been worried even as she had known how good Cynthia was. It was impressive the way Cynthia wove the threads of gender, class, and politics together, and the way the ambiguities of Ella’s feminism were characteristic of her (and her time). Then there was Ella’s co-option by the Hearst papers. Even colonialist extermination was brought in. If Cynthia were a man, men would have said the presentation was masterful. And more, Francine was moved. This natively talented poet was the victim of place and time, of her upbringing in Minnesota, of the class structure she entered on marriage, of all those American myths that needed to be deconstructed, of attitudes toward uppity women. Ella was living on the verge of liberation. She could see that in Ella’s attitude toward the Oneida community and free love. It was a fascinating story, a strong polemic, and a contribution to the history of American popular culture. What a break that Cynthia was so articulate and well-organized, so committed, and so personally attractive and pleasant. She’d fit right in. They’d solved their problem. Finally, they’d have their Morgan Professor, a woman. If she’d accept! Francine saw it as her duty to convince her she should. This had been Francine’s first response. Her second was to seek out Elaine. She was doing that more and more. She told herself that Elaine was simpatico, that she was Elaine’s mentor. Someone Elaine could trust. She thought a lot about Elaine—Elaine working, she and Elaine at lunch almost every Wednesday, Elaine buried in a book in the stacks. Elaine was

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a real worker. But as Francine left the lecture hall she was brought back to earth. Earth was inhabited not just by Elaine but by chauvinistic liberals like Clark Marshall, old New Critics, uncommitted literary historians, deconstructionists like Harley Wales, and, of course, Jack Emory. She was suddenly very nervous and on the edge of anger. As she stood now alone at the reception she felt for a moment as if she were being deliberately ignored. No one had joined her. Graduate students surrounded Cynthia, who was doing well; but the department was dividing up before her eyes. The old guard, in clusters, the younger faculty somehow excluded and watching the room as if either suspicious or guilty. She hated that behavior. She genuinely wanted collegiality. With an effort she steeled herself and headed for the wine table. En route she brushed by John McComber. She did not stop, said nothing. John smiled at her. Then nearby was Harley Wales. He was bouncing from heel to toe, making a point to Elaine, too damned close to her as he always was to people when he talked. He was a lech, she thought, a damned lech goggling at Elaine like an obscene clown. How could she tolerate him up close like that? He violated your space! She wanted to intervene, take Elaine away from that, save her from it. She heard somebody say something about culture studies. Not far away Clark Marshall was talking vigorously at Jack Emory. His tie was loose and his hair tousled. He looked sweaty. There was a beast in him, barely suppressed, she thought. At that moment Jack caught her eye, knew that she was watching them, and smiled. It took her by surprise and she knew that she erred in the faint, distracted smile she returned. It seemed she was always being caught off guard, especially by Jack. She thought it was because he seemed so aloof, and then suddenly he did something like that. She never knew how to take it. Was it some hidden Emory showing itself for a moment? Did the smile mean, hah, we’ve got one on you now? Or was it conciliatory? She could bet that Marshall didn’t like the lecture. He rarely liked anything. And it had been a wonderful lecture, even moving. But then she saw Nancy Thacker approaching. Nancy, who could be teacher’s pet if she only knew, wanted to talk about Millay and how something like Cynthia Ragsdale’s lecture could be done on her. Of course, there were many differences, but the approach could be the same. Suddenly Francine was engrossed and happy, for what had gone on in class and on this night had connected for Nancy. For these moments it was all worth it. Yet there was still a distraction. Over the shoulder of John

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McComber, Harley Wales was watching them as they talked. Watching a little furtively, she thought. Her eyes didn’t quite meet his, but he was somehow aware of her and looked quickly away. From Nancy, of course. From very pretty Nancy. Suddenly she could not bear to remain in the room. Even Elaine stood at a distance. How could Elaine live and work in this department? How had she herself? How could she now? She had barely spoken to any colleague that night, and even with Elaine at that moment she would have been alone.

Clark Marshall had said something that made Jack Emory smile. He was a little bit scary at times because of that cauldron inside, but at others he expressed a gruff comic outrage, and sometimes at his own expense. Jack liked Clark even when Clark was fulminating against obliquity and disorder, maybe even mostly then. Jack was amused at Clark’s quoting lines of Ella Wheeler Wilcox that Cynthia Ragsdale had used in her lecture. Clark quoted them verbatim, declaring that they were so bad that they had by acid etched themselves in his brain. It was when he was smiling at this that Francine Wright caught his eye and abruptly turned away. She looked as if everyone was the enemy. That was the trouble; it was you are either for me (and mine) or against me. Jack disliked this attitude even more now when he felt it creeping up on him. Years ago he had fought for what he called eclecticism in the department. He was too smart to think that if he were to fight for that now the rules would not have changed. In those days there had been some modicum of basic understanding. Differences were transcended, much of the time, because of a general agreement over what was appropriate in the classroom. You didn’t directly offer political opinion, you assumed that literature was an art, and that art’s values were unique. In the tradition of Sidney and Shelley you defended poetry. All that had changed. Jack sympathized with Clark Marshall, but he empathized with Cynthia Ragsdale, too. The lecture had been a good performance; it was inevitable that the profession would change; it always had. But he was holding back. This change was different. At that moment, Will Person and Cynthia Ragsdale joined them. Unlikely couple, Jack thought. “Here’s Cindy Ragsdale, champion of bad poets,” growled Will, and she and Clark Marshall were introduced, Clark enormously gracious, and laughing just enough at Will’s joke.

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Cynthia responded with “Next time I’ll revive Julia A. Moore.” “Ah yes,” Clark said, “‘Perhaps you’ve read the papers containing my interview; I hope you kind good people will not believe it true.’ Her most deeply felt lines.” “Alas, I’m afraid they were.” “A genius,” Will said, “author of ‘The Ashtabula Disaster.’ Her best work, I think.” “And don’t forget ‘Lord Byron’s Life,’” Cynthia added. “Oh yes, there’s something about the American newspaper that brings out the best of the worst, particularly in Michigan,” Clark added. Jack marveled at the good will all around. Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, had been the catalyst for it, and Clark’s never failing courtesy and probably Cynthia’s. Could a good or great poet have brought them there together? And there was Will, a middling good poet anyway, with his eye for the pretty woman. Jack thought of his sister, free of Will, free of what philandering he had left, if any. He wandered off to rescue his wife. Ellen had been cornered by two elderly faculty dowagers from romance languages and had signaled with her eyes for help. The extraction was not difficult. Ellen was by now used to these moments, these getaways. Always was. “Well, what do you think?” he asked her once they were in the car. “I think it is wise to go on a principle we’ve learned from Reagan and Bush.” “What’s that?” “Accept their first nominee. The next one will be worse.” He laughed. “That simplifies things a lot. We may need simplicity right now. Look, Ellie, what do you think the result of this appointment will be?” “Oh, nothing much. It’s all up for you bozos already.”

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Entre-Acte The Coming Nation reprints, with evident approval, one of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s reactionary and time-serving bids for the applause of ignorant and unthinking conservatism. Having sold her pen to the Hearst syndicate, she must, of course, purvey the kind of slush demanded by her owners, to meet the requirements of the not overly intelligent devourers of yellow journalism. The Coming Nation, however, has less excuse for making itself a eulogist of sex slavery. In the article in question, Ella Wilcox reiterates her assertion that a man will necessarily seek to own a woman whom he truly loves. And this affirmation of sex slavery she denominates “love’s language.” Love in chains, cringing to Madam Grundy for permission to express itself, a narrowing of interests and sympathies, a subordination of intellectuality, an enforced uniformity of tastes and consequent destruction of individuality, a ceaseless wearing out of the finer forces of life in the vulgar effort to keep up appearances, a constant submission of all that is sweetest and most sacred to the approval or disapproval of an ignorant, low-toned, undiscriminating and unsympathetic public, the hell of jealousy, with all its hideous results, — these are some of the characteristics of her love ideal, or rather of the conventional copy-book ideal which she is suborned to extol, by publishers who would never allow her to write from any other standpoint. It is that of the unthinking mass today; and those who

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flatter it may always be sure of a certain ephemeral popularity. But it is by no means a high ideal; and it cannot meet the test of a searching criticism. If other evidence were lacking, the incessant appeal of the marriage advocates to force sufficiently demonstrates the untenability of their position. Persecutors are always wrong. The man who has another imprisoned for the expression of opinion openly proclaims himself an arrant knave and a contemptible coward. The marriage system dares not abide the test of a fair and open comparison, but sneaks behind the aegis of force, in self-confessed impotence to maintain itself before the tribunal of reason. Its own acts thus brand it as a miserable sham; and its apologists thunder in vain from their dogmatic pulpits. —Discontent: Mother of Progress, August 14, 1901

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6

Of the Brave

Edward Williams had attended Cynthia Ragsdale’s lecture only after

thinking carefully about the advisability of doing so. As chair of the review committee he had originally thought he might better absent himself, since he was certain the question of the Ragsdale appointment would be divisive. He wished to keep himself at a distance from it. But at the last minute a compromise occurred to him. He would attend the lecture, but not the reception, where he might be asked questions. It would be better to express no opinion publicly. Something else was involved. Even though it was now almost twenty years since he had left administration, he had never quite cured himself of the desire to know what was going on. But he had to admit some disappointment in the lecture as an intellectual going-on, even as he knew he had enjoyed it. For him it had been unexceptionable and unexceptional, a phrase he had occasionally found himself using about young colleagues’ work. He did not hear anything to become excited about in the materials brought forth, the methodology, or the attitudes, all of which were entirely familiar to him as an academic historian. On the other hand, Professor Ragsdale made a good impression and seemed in full command of her subject. He had made a successful hasty exit.

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As he puttered about the cabin at Osprey Island preparing for the visit of Helen and Frank, he admitted to himself, as he had many times in the nineteen years since the divorce, that he didn’t very much like to be alone there. The cabin was where he and Marta had spent much of their two children’s youth. There were memories of those times everywhere, and they were coming back stronger now. The two of them had built virtually everything together, even most of the furniture, fashioned out of alder felled on their property. Now the children, forty and thirty-nine, were elsewhere with their families. Though he was on good terms with them, their visits were comparatively short and far between, usually only once a year. Nineteen years ago Marta had left him. She had walked out one day for what he had thought were passing reasons after he had recovered from his heart trouble, but she had never been willing to return or even to discuss the possibility. Shortly thereafter, her hair dyed a light silvery blonde, her clothing no longer that of a club woman but rather a careerist, her make-up still applied with the greatest care like Chinese lacquer, she sat calmly as the lawyer discussed the community property. She showed no emotion when Edward said he’d like the Osprey Island property and his books, nothing more. Shortly thereafter she sold the house in town and most of its contents and moved to Los Angeles, where his children told him that she had done very well as a real estate broker, had a house in Palos Verde, and drove a BMW. Daughter and son had been in college and adjusted, he thought, pretty well, though there had been some difficult times with both. On the whole he’d admired how they had responded. Gradually he had recovered from his irritation at Marta for their difficulties and tried to understand his complicity. It had been the most difficult thing he had ever attempted. Edward Williams had never remarried, though he had almost thought about it a couple of times. He had carried on some friendships that never quite made it to relationships, one for a while with an heiress in another state, but even it was of the off-and-on variety, and at some point he had lost enthusiasm for pressing on with it. He had at the same time resumed his scholarly career with success, and though he didn’t think about it much, if he had he would have admitted he wanted mobility for the sake of his research and freedom to write when the spirit moved him. His life had changed. He had changed. It was probably his own life and career, he thought, that caused him to develop an interest in what had gone on at Home ninety years ago and

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subsequently to do historical research on American versions of anarchism. But in the process something strange had happened. As he came to know more about those events and the people at Home, he found himself impatient with the historian’s approach. He was thinking himself into the people as he imagined them. The images he was concocting, the fictions they seemed to generate were becoming more important than his scruples about admissible evidence. Indeed, he recognized that there was not historical evidence sufficient to the sort of interest that now at times possessed him. He found himself making what he called a fantasy of lives that had left only traces. He found himself staring at a large group photograph, the identifications of those in it lost, trying by force of imaginative will to determine who was who. There in the back, he thought, was James Adams, the old man with the white beard. He had first planned to write one chapter on Home colony. Then he imagined a whole book. But now he suspected that he might write no history at all. He had even come to think that he no longer, maybe never had, understood what history was. Yet as he had studied the newspapers of the time, the diaries, and the accounts of others, he had come to feel deeply the desire, and oddly even a sort of moral imperative, to recover those lives in some way even if only as fictions. He thought of the picture albums passed on to his children, of what might happen to those old faces as the family either faded out or spread far and wide: his grandfather standing beside a horse and plow, a portrait of a serious young lady seated on a Victorian porch, his own children on a swing set, he himself in college baseball uniform with catcher’s glove. Often, as he worked idly or before he went to sleep, he imagined the lives of the people of Home circa 1900–1902. He ventured to make conversations, descriptive passages. He mentioned none of this to anyone. Jack Emory would have said that he was a closet novelist, a historical novelist, the very worst kind.

Matilda Burns Penhallow, postmistress at Home and assistant to publisher Charles L. Govan in typesetting, had not known that Postal Inspector C. L. Wayland would be accompanying the federal officers sent to arrest Mr. Govan, James Adams, and James Larkin. They had been charged with mailing obscene writings that had appeared the January before in Discontent: Mother of Progress. She had no idea that she would be an object of interrogation. Ever since that quite splendid outing to

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Probably Mattie and Charles Penhallow at Home, 1902, though it may be Mr. and Mrs. Hubert. Photo by R. E. Muirhead. Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.

Of the Brave

Anderson Island and then, early this month, the shooting of poor Mr. McKinley, it seemed there had been just one thing after another. Not that she had been a supporter of McKinley. Certainly not. Or of his opponent, Bryan, cross of gold or no cross of gold. It would have been unprincipled to support either, and Mattie Penhallow tried above everything else to be a woman of principle. Then recently there had been those awful statements in the Tacoma papers about anarchists, saying freedom of speech had “run mad.” Anarchists were “wild beasts, mad dogs.” Anarchists were “types of perverts.” These words and others troubled her: “unspeakably brutal,” “sullen and vicious,” “foul and cruel.” Mattie Penhallow tried to be a fair-minded person. She wondered who could write such things except someone who had never met an anarchist, who had failed at any rate to get to know someone with true anarchist views. This explained why the attacks by the papers were unfair. The writers simply did not know. James Morton’s responses were rational attempts to refute them. She believed with Mr. Morton that the world had come to a level of intelligence wherein society would be better off without formal laws than with them. She thought Mr. Morton was right when he said that today Jefferson would be an anarchist and the Declaration of Independence was an anarchist document. As Jefferson said, “Errors of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it.” She believed this, and she believed with all her heart that kindness could combat it, too. There was nothing violent in these ideas. No one was going to shoot anyone on these principles. If poor Leon Czolgosz thought that he was an anarchist, he was a mistaken one, and it didn’t make sense to punish every anarchist because he shot Mr. McKinley. Comrade Morton was right when he said it would be like punishing all Methodists because one of them had committed a murder. Even the Reverend Doescher, when he came from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tacoma and lectured on Christianity, received a hospitable reception and was favorably impressed by the community. He’d disagreed with the residents on several matters that seemed awfully important to him, but they had heard him out, and he’d heard them. He’d stayed for two nights. The Reverend Doescher was a fair man. He had even said he’d come back. It had been a stimulating experience for all. But few others from Tacoma had accepted an open invitation to see for themselves. That was disappointing. Still she was optimistic and was pleased that the Allens, the

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Dadismons, and others intended to invite the arresting officers to lunch when they landed. It would certainly be unprincipled for anyone to pretend not to be an anarchist, if one was, merely because of the McKinley business or the terrible things being printed. And so when Postal Inspector C. L. Wayland appeared at Mattie Penhallow’s door, which was also the door of the Home post office, she met him as if he were any neighbor or some welcome visitor just off the Typhoon. What C. L. Wayland saw that pleasant morning of September 24, 1901, at the door of Home post office was a pale, tallish woman of about forty in a white dress and brown bonnet preparing to harvest some tomatoes from her garden. After he had made known his position and business, her face, which until this moment had borne an expression of sadness, suddenly lit up. She identified herself as indeed the postmistress and added cheerfully that she, too, was an anarchist. This assertion took Mr. Wayland by surprise. In the first place, for a moment he thought she assumed that he was an anarchist. In the second, he had not thought to imagine the women in this place would be anarchists, too, let alone women in bonnets carrying baskets in which to gather tomatoes. He had come to question her about Discontent and her knowledge of its contents. He had imagined that although she had accepted Discontent for mailing, she had not been entirely aware of what was in it. Certainly he didn’t expect her to admit to knowing. But here she was, freely confessing to being an anarchist. Not only did she read Discontent, it turned out she read parts aloud to others. What Mattie Penhallow saw at her door was a dignified, perhaps somewhat pompous little man with a pince nez and a rather cross or contrary expression on his lean face. He was dressed for the city with stiff collar and tie. He was, she thought, a little self-conscious about his presence on her porch. It had not occurred to her to be unpleasant or to hide anything from him. Quite the opposite. To say she was an anarchist was not just to speak openly but to identify herself as a part of the community. It was not meant aggressively or with any hostility at all. It was meant to put him at ease. But for goodness’ sake, he was becoming agitated as she spoke. She elected to offer him some tea and biscuits right away. Taken by surprise, C. L. Wayland accepted, knowing and regretting as he did that she had gained some mysterious advantage over him. He gathered his forces while Mrs. Penhallow was in her kitchen. Agitated certainly, but also saddened by her bold revelation, he surmised that she had

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come under malevolent influences. A closer watch would have to be mounted over all the mail coming from Home. It had been his intention to reason with her about her duties, but now this seemed futile. She would have to be removed. But was there anyone in this community to be trusted? Perhaps the post office itself would have to be closed. But that wouldn’t solve the problem of the inhabitants mailing obscenities from somewhere. At least there would be inconvenience, though this was hardly an adequate solution to the threat of social unrest posed by anarchism. Mattie Penhallow thought their conversation was going fairly well, considering. Mr. Wayland was a strange little man. He certainly wouldn’t last long doing the work men did at Home. Of course, those wiry little men sometimes surprised you, even when it seemed they would explode if you spoke the least bit harshly. She was by nature a quiet person who did not offer much but responded cordially when addressed. Here, she felt compelled to put this visitor at ease, just as the Allens and Dadismons would be doing with the others. She was making an effort to be voluble. In the course of their interview, C. L. Wayland was astonished to learn that Mrs. Penhallow did not just read Discontent, she assisted in setting the type for it! That had been, she said, a matter of being a help. After all, gracious me, Mr. Govan couldn’t handle all the work. And anyway it was the habit of people at Home to help out when need be. He found himself shaking his head, thinking how misguided these admirable intentions were. The road to hell was paved with good intentions, of course. Mrs. Penhallow was saying that she received no salary. Discontent barely broke even, if that. But it was for a good purpose. That was the reason so many in the community contributed to it. Mr. Morton made nothing editing it either. She was, Mr. Wayland thought, digging herself a deeper and deeper hole. She was not an employee under orders. Oh my no, she said. She was a volunteer. She said this with some pride. At this point Mrs. Penhallow, well aware that federal agents were probably at this moment arresting Mr. Govan, Mr. Adams, and Mr. Larkin, allowed quietly, eyes downward, face sad and sallow, that in her opinion there had been no obscenity and the arrests were really because of their anarchist beliefs. None of this would be happening if it were not for the unfortunate murder of poor Mr. McKinley. If anarchy was really the charge, well then, land’s sake, she and all here should be arrested. They all believed in the right to love freely and to act on conscience unencumbered by law. Mr. C. L. Wayland felt himself coloring. He was genuinely shocked at these remarks, uttered in a ladylike, calm fashion. He found

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no way to respond. It had not occurred to him that things here could have gone so far as to corrupt the minds of the women and, surely, the children. He had been put in retreat, expressing abruptly his thanks for the tea and excusing himself. Mrs. Penhallow, basket on arm, accompanied him to the edge of her property, and he set out for the nearby house of George Allen, where, to his surprise when he had landed, he had been invited for lunch. It had been an astonishment. From the Allens’ doorstep he looked back, as if to query the reality of what had just happened. He saw a bonneted country woman waving. The party of officials, C. L. Wayland included, had been greeted cordially at the landing. Only the skipper of the Typhoon, not a community member, had seemed the least bit hostile, making during the voyage sarcastic remarks, meant to be overheard, about people not minding their own business, acting holier than thou, and holding inquisitions. Lorenz, his name. He was not hospitable aboard and was indeed insulting to people doing their duty and upholding the law. At the end of the voyage he inquired bluntly of one of the agents why he persisted in working at such a dishonorable job as putting harmless people in jail. C. L. Wayland himself had tried to calm the agent, who was not taking these mutterings well. When they disembarked on the floating dock, Mr. Wayland could see Captain Lorenz wave to George Allen at the landing and shout that he was sorry to bring this baggage, but they were the law. Mr. Allen, apparently acknowledged as the leader of the party at the landing, seemed in good humor, greeted the visitors, and even pointed out the three criminals, each of whom stepped forward to shake hands all around and introduce his wife. C. L. Wayland was not comfortable with this hearty welcome. He felt that his own serious demeanor properly fit the occasion, but it had been made to seem out of place. He had expected to make an inspection, conduct interviews, and, in a businesslike way befitting his duties, offer recommendations to his superiors. Now he found himself hurrying toward what his adversaries had turned into a social event, the noon meal at the Allens’. He made a pact with himself to be cordial, but with an appropriate reserve. He would not be bamboozled by these potentially dangerous people. At the door he was cordially received. Seated before a plate of geoduck fritters, he was already listening to remarks he recognized as potentially dangerous. Allen was explaining why a previous venture called Glennis near Puyallup had failed. The reason he was giving was certainly

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The steamer Typhoon, Ed Lorenz captain, 1900. Courtesy Sylvia Retherford.

HOME

anarchistic in spirit. Glennis had failed because of too many restrictions on the individual. There was always someone telling you what to do and how to do it (usually wrong), and there were others who didn’t pull their weight. Here no one told you what to do, and if you didn’t pull your weight, well, eventually you were more comfortable leaving. Up to a considerable point it worked. C. L. Wayland recognized that the Glennis Mr. Allen talked about was communistic. It appeared to him that frying pan to fire had been Allen’s trajectory. C. L. Wayland offered few words between bites of Mrs. Allen’s passable fritters. He was, however, eventually able to raise some questions about Discontent and Mr. Adams’s article on free love. He began inauspiciously. “You know, of course, Mr. James W. Adams.” “Why, yes, we all know each other here, men and women.” C. L. Wayland felt himself coloring. “He is the elderly gentleman with the white beard. You met him at the landing, I’m sure.” C. L. Wayland had not realized that this had been the author. “The tall old man with the wife?” he asked in astonishment. “Why yes, married about fifty years.” “Yet he’s a free lover?” “Yes, and also a spiritualist. He is a true mystic. The point is that he advocates freedom, not that he chooses to practice varietism.” C. L. Wayland had not heard this term before, but did not feel it required clarification. “And you, sir?” “Oh, I’m not a spiritualist,” Allen said with a twinkle in his eye that smothered a cryptic meaning and made C. L. Wayland uncomfortable, as if he were being mocked. “Here we advocate that everyone do something constructive rather than suck the blood of workers. If they don’t want to work, that’s their business. They are free to go—or stay, though they are likely to go. And our school is like that. I teach singing. There is no point in trying to teach a child to sing who doesn’t want to. Children shouldn’t be made to go . . .” C. L. Wayland had heard enough. The lunch over, he would find his colleagues and prepare for the return voyage with the prisoners. Once outside he saw the old bearded man approaching with the arresting agent. He was talking vigorously, pointing in this direction and that, as if he were showing off the sights. Lagging behind came the sullen men he sup-

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posed to be the printer Govan and his accomplice Larkin. These people claimed that Discontent did not speak officially for the colony. Well, they certainly spoke unofficially. He was not at all happy to see that James W. Adams had all the appearance of a dignified gentleman dressed for the city, a patriarchal-looking man in a Prince Albert suit. The agents were cordially saying as they met that they’d never had a more pleasant time doing their work. At the landing the jovial spirit that had developed was even more unsettling. C. L. Wayland was actually angered that the prisoners were acting as if they were about to go on an outing, and the agents were conspiring with them. He would nevertheless maintain his dignity through the rest of this ridiculous expedition. Just before preparing to board the launch, two women presented themselves to him. For a moment he didn’t recognize Mrs. Penhallow, who was offering him something—a bag of what? Tomatoes. “Some of our best produce, Mr. Wayland. I hope you and your family enjoy them.” Silent, he could only nod agreement to something he knew not what. “May I present Mrs. Lois Waisbrooker, the esteemed author?” He was taken aback. This was a woman known to him, a notorious woman who had been prosecuted for violating the mails in Kansas with Foundation Principles. And who knows what other filth. James W. Adams’s language in print paled before hers. She was an avowed free lover, feminist, and opponent of marriage. A troublemaker, certainly. But was this really she? Before him stood a frail, gray-haired woman in her seventies with a lined countenance that seemed to reflect years of hardship and pain. She leaned hunched on a cane. Yet for all her feebleness, her eyes were bright and searching. He would have expected, if he had expected her to be there at all, a firebrand, an Emma Goldman, not this tired old woman who had just wiped her brow, as if she had been interrupted hoeing her garden. After recovering his aplomb, he asked himself what illegalities she was up to at Home. Was Mrs. Penhallow deliberately irritating him by presenting this notorious woman? He concluded that these were very deceptive people. Yes, he had been deliberately challenged, and Mrs. Waisbrooker’s eyes, which he now avoided, showed it. He gathered himself into distant formality and nodded curtly to the Waisbrooker woman, knowing that he would investigate what she was up to. He turned

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abruptly, bag of tomatoes in his hand, toward the launch. Mattie Penhallow watched the launch depart, waving cordially to all aboard. Mrs. Waisbrooker, for whom she had the greatest respect, stood impassively next to her, as if enduring some mild torment that she did not expect soon to end. When the launch reached the Typhoon and floating dock, Mrs. Waisbrooker sighed and said, almost to herself, “That man will be back for me some day.” Mattie Penhallow was shocked. She saw at once that if Mr. Adams’s article was the cause of his arrest, then, dear me, Mrs. Waisbrooker’s Clothed With the Sun was certainly going to upset Mr. C. L. Wayland. But it seemed by her tone of voice that Mrs. Waisbrooker was giving up. Was this the woman who had taught in colored schools in the South before the War Between the States? Was this the feminist and atheist orator who always spoke her mind? She knew that Mrs. Waisbrooker complained frequently of ill health and weariness. She was, after all, an old woman. It was a question for everyone whether to continue speaking out to the world or live apart and build a truly anarchistic society in this place. Perhaps it would make no difference to people like Mr. C. L. Wayland, who seemed so ill at ease and may even, as she thought about it, have seen some threat in her efforts to be cordial and make him feel at home.

While Edward Williams thought of Mattie Penhallow, he thought also of what Lois Waisbrooker would have been thinking had she been sitting in the audience listening to Cynthia Ragsdale’s lecture. Disappointment, perhaps, at the slow rate of change. Respect, he would guess, for Ragsdale’s performance. Gratification at the occasion. Would she have appreciated Ragsdale’s wit, her academic ironies, and self-dramatization? Maybe not. Lois Waisbrooker, as he imagined her, had little time or patience for such things. Spades were spades. Vaginas, vaginas. If she had been characterized as naive in her lifetime, she was also straightforward and to the point. So when she looked back on a long life of radical activity, she did not pretend she had not been weak and ill at times, was not weary. One thing was certain, Lois Waisbrooker would have been lionized at the reception. She would have been the Grand Old Warrior, and no doubt her exploits would have been revived for retelling.

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Entre-Acte It means a state of society in which all that tends to the welfare of gestating mothers shall be considered of more value than cathedrals, palaces, bank accounts or any other form of wealth calculated to build up individual or corporate power, or to perpetuate a sect or sects. In a word this general unrest of women means a state of society which shall give us Perfect Motherhood, a motherhood from which submission to masculinity, be it man or a so-called God, will be eliminated, and when this is done more than the millennium will be the result. —Lois Waisbrooker, “The Curse of Godism,” Foundation Principles, September 15, 1894.

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7

No Place Like

Edward Williams had gleaned his first knowledge of events at Home

from newspapers, books, old photographs, and diaries. Of the last, the most informative was Roland Eugene Muirhead’s. In the University of Washington Library in Seattle, he’d found a photocopy of the parts about Muirhead’s visit to Home in April of 1900. Muirhead, he learned, later became a leading Scottish nationalist, and it was for that reason that his diary was kept at Edinburgh University. Williams felt his thoughts about the people take shape as he read. A copy of the Home parts lay before him on his desk at Osprey Island. Some of the words were nearly, maybe finally illegible, and Muirhead’s spelling, punctuation, and capitalization were at best erratic. If he were to publish the Home parts he’d have to make some decisions about those things. It would be a good idea to test some of his readings on Helen Grant, who’d be along with Frank in an hour or so. Meanwhile, he’d go over parts of it. Some words looked different every time you went through it. ROLAND EUGENE MUIRHEAD’S DIARY [58] 12.4, 00 . . . left Colony of Burley, being asked by many to stay with them & return soon again. was sorry to leave about 9 A.M. walked

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to Purdy 3 miles through forest by road passed 2 ranches Purdy to Springfield Harbour 1/2 mile across 2 bridges & sand spit loose sand from Springfield to Balch’s Cove. Some 6–7 miles, missed my way fully a mile road little used and through forest. blossoms of apple & cherry out. [illegible] Huckleberry out. flowering Currant redrasp. (wild) & roads very hilly switch back. some hollows muddy 3 miles from Balches. passed cove largish Ranch, on the way Several Ranches larger than in B.C. more land cleared. larger usually 2 storey houses & usually apple trees in blossom. At Balches about 10 houses one large villa. logging place & old sawmill. stopped more next 6 miles to Joe’s Bay, had to walk along beach, fine gravel most way, but many logs roots and trees of huge dimensions often blocked the way as tide was high, had to hop, crawl and scramble along on all four sometimes. dined on a Banana, [illegible] Rye bread, week old, 2 figs, 5 pecan nuts & 3 sweets. [59] Rain came on a little later in afternoon some blue clay or shaley clay outcropped on shore. gravel sand fair sloping beach all way to Joes Bay timber so dense could not make good headway on land so walked by shore all time had trouble crossing creeks. Dandelions in bloom Flowering currant in bloom, fine ferns growing in shade of banks at shore. Sand & blue dry shale out cropping out bluff varies from 3 feet to 50 feet high and seems to be wearing away by wash of tide arrived at “Home,” anarchist colony on Joe’s Bay about 4 PM. land wooded all round unless about 50 acres along waterfront more or less cleared houses are mostly new and built of sawn timbers mostly unplaned Joes Bay about 1/2 mile long and 1/4 mile wide at mouth Sandy beaches sloping & shallow mostly 10 to 15 feet banks which water is eating away & floating quay where Tacoma steamer calls 3 times a week fare 50cts if flag signal put up. creek runs in at head of Bay. lodging at head of Bay ducks & divers about dozen in bay Seals are Common I saw 2 perched on log like large birds, about 20 feet from shore, one dark & one light. The[y] gracefully slid into water when I came within 50 yards of them. My first view of Joe’s Bay was under a cloudy sky blinks of sun & silvery water with just ripples on it. flat bottomed boat with 3 children rowing on Bay. several men at work sawing & chopping trees and several piles of roots & wood burning. smell of cut wood, was cheerfully received by Mrs Burton and had tea, was introduced to Mrs Dadismond and Mrs Hubert. and was invited to sleep at Mrs Dadismond’s House which I did G. H. Allen} O. A. Verity} O’Dell}

were founders of the colony 4 1/2 years ago

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A map showing the location of the principal communitarian settlements in the Puget Sound region of the State of Washington, from Charles Pierce LeWarne’s Utopias on Puget Sound 1885–1915. Courtesy University of Washington Press.

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Mr & Mrs Kennan} Mr & Mrs Thompson} Mr & Mrs Hubert} Mr & Mrs Burton}

not believe in free love theory others are said to at least believe in theory of it, if not to practice it.

All the Colonists are not agreeable at Home as an instance Mr Thompson was getting help from several to build house & while Verity and others worked hard, he was making toy chair for a child, again when they were putting in windows, Thompson was very hard to please & wanted them put in his way though he had little knowledge & persisted. So others just left him & said you can put them in to suit yourself, not in yet. [60] Dadismon Family (Dadismon is free lover) Mr D. strongly built man of 40 or so, prominent nose, fairish hair brown, deep set eyes big head probably of Dutch descent—free thinker very mild outside but deep thinker native of West Virginia. says had fine home there but could not get peace to live, as his opinions were different from those around him & gradually became so uncomfortable that he came west and first went to Equality Colony, but found that for instance he was set to do farm work & overseer gave unpractical orders which he as practical man knew would not result in good crop. so came here, and bought some acres & sold to Colony— is handy man with tools, mends watches organs, builds houses, etc. is farmer by training, says his parents were very strict with him when young and he did as told for long time, has not read much says, but gradually found from observance of natures laws that father was wrong so became free thinker & anarchist. Think he is more respected than any other man in Colony. Dadismon Mr D married twice, had 4 sons by “first marriage.” all except one grown up & away. one a farmer in Wash. he visited here but did not care to stay. by present Mrs D. are 2 children son about 10 and daughter about 7. David & Eva. very well mannered and comely children. Harry about 16 years helps his father and lives in small house made by himself but eats at home Mrs. D. is stout woman of say 40 or 50. fair stout and rather distant manner, abrupt and tends to be contrary, seems jealous of her husband

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Harry Dadismon, his father Martin, and his mother in front of their house at Home, 1902. Photo by R. E. Muirhead. Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.

HOME

who believes in variety & is free thinker while Mrs is down on variety and free thought. Mrs is an a one housewife but when work is done seems to take little or no interest in reading or discussion but yawns & goes to bed soon. [61] Burton Family Mrs. says, costs $1 1/2 to $2 per week for total household expenses & say $1 per week for each person. Hens has 5 hens and gets 4 or 5 eggs daily. feeds, wheat & corn also clams chopped up Hubert Family Mr. H. is a free thinker, is mid height broad built prominent nose 40 or 50 years of age fair hair mustache tinge of red small mustache, some freckles. is from Pennsylvania of German descent. Stout slow nature but looks downright honest man hopes to build new house soon. Dances (not free lover I think) Mrs. H. is very cheerful by nature and full of fun. looks the happiest woman in the Colony. Mrs H. from Indiana, tall dark clear cut grecian nose pale face and teeth a little prominent. Thin and agile a “Christian Scientist.” has studied medsin, and also went to study Christian Science at headquarters in Florida 2 years with her husband. does not believe in medsin. very open countenance and pleasant to speak to boy Dale. age 9 or 10. carrot red hair, face covered with freckles strong made boy. slow of speech like father. [62] 13.4.00. Friday. “Home” Joe’s Bay cloudy dry till afternoon several very heavy showers Rain, blinks of sun. mildish slight breeze Rose at 6 AM. calm water in front nice smell of salt weeds etc had breakfast with Mrs Burton bread Butter 2 eggs boiled. Got loan of Dadismond saw & cut some fire wood for Mrs B. at 12 noon went to Mr Hubert’s as had been asked to dinner, found him grubbing at small roots from Dadismond’s acres. went with him to house at 12 noon (hill about 50 feet high here.) Mrs Hubert had dinner ready Consisted of, mashed potatoes, fried clam fritters bread (whole wheat but ground fine new dried salmon, stewed dried apples brown (says dry now for most dried ones are bleached with sulphur) prunes, berry jelly corn flour shape, oat groats boiled & milk, celery (last of it) oranges, butter. “barley tea” barley is browned first. Pea nuts etc. very tastily set out and clean

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after dinner sat talked 1 hour with Mr H. & 1 hour with Mrs H then went to split wood for Mrs Burton but as rain fell only did so 1/2 an hour. read some of “Discontent” aloud to Mrs Burton. then at 4 PM called on Mr Hubert who took me round & introduced me to many of the Colonists. first went to the store (open 2 days in week) where we found Mrs Wording Mrs Adams, and a small girl. Then we went with Mrs Adams to her house just being built. The whole family working at it. Met the father or grand father old man tall, burning a huge root out. The Adams family at present some live in one room of a 2 storey house family consists of Mr & Mrs Adams & one son 2 widdowed daughters Mrs Minor & 3 children Mrs Thornton and 4 children, house has 10 rooms and is to be plastered inside. pretty drafty meantime. all sleeping in one room. from there we went to Post office, house of 3 or 4 rooms Mr Miles old man of 70 is postmaster. he lodges with owner of house Mr & Mrs Penhallow, no children. Talked some 1/2 hour. “listened mostly.” Then we went on to the Printing office and met Mr Govan, who edits & prints paper of the Colony called “Discontent.” We returned and had tea bread butter and stewed prunes with Mrs. Burton. talked with her and at 8:30 PM. went to Dadismon’s found all in bed but Mrs who was cutting toe nails. I went to bed in my bedroom also store of eggs, cake and odds & ends. fine soft bed windows from which see log fires. [63]

Mr & Mrs Penhallow

Mr P. uncommonly prominent features chin & nose brow not large dark complection, clean shaved had 480 acres in Montana farming but did not pay & tried to work Coop but could not. is spiritualist, but has not seen manifestations Man of great force of character. Mrs. Penhallow. about 40 or so very quiet but pleasant spoken person, pale sad face, but lights up with cheerful smile when spoken to. assists in setting type of newspaper with Mr Govan. Larkin Teacher House rough sawn boards bookcase table chair or two and bench like sofa near window Kitchen stove, table etc. Mrs. Larkin. midheight ordinary looking face. darkish complection paleface. has 3 or 4 young children, one at breast. house 2 storeys, built

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for communal home of 2 families [illegible]. the Allens & Larkins lived together ate together but slept separate flat Women & children could not agree but men agreed. Separated. Children seem average Allen [64] Mr Allan. Mid height rather short dark hair, clean shaven, rather square face not prominent features kind of chubby face but boney. was teacher till was in Communistic Colony in this state called “Glenis,” but found it failed. as soon as 50 or 60 came it fell into cliques, and broke up Says have been 65 Colonies in U.SA. which failed This is first he knows of based on Anarchism Individualism Thinks should try to start industries here (Mr Allan teaches singing in school) Mrs Allan. short squarish, but just med stout, fair complection colour in cheeks, looks to have strong mind of own, & rather touchy children healthy looking one lead singing in School. Took Photo of Mrs A. & family beside blooming prune here. has 4 children little girls (oldest 13 years) & a sister of Mr Allan stays with them. Miss Allan, middle age Odell Mr. O’Dell. Tall big dark complection man, moustache. brother of Mrs. Kelly. believes in A. and Variety. “blacksmith to trade.” seems hard working man had musical evening There on Monday Evening. Mrs. O’Dell. dark about 40 years. very stout, pleasant face. still at School. George O’Dell Their Son, only 13 years of age but looks 18. shaves, fine trustful open countenance, face very slightly pimples, strongly built but soft looking plays violin dances. fine mellow voice a small ODell about 3 or 4 years girl, pretty face & strong mind [65]

Verity (House carpenter)

Mr. O. Verity is ordinary height prominent nose & chin, shaved clean, dark complection small mouth Thin lips slight mark on upper lip. big roman or inclined to be hooked nose, deep set eyes. Strong skinny man. Pinkeys on hands very short by other fingers. Carpenter to trade, built & helped to build several houses. believes in Anarchism, variety. and

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Mrs. Verity. Very stout fair and 40 or so. Very good looking face variety & spiritualist son about. 16 years. very good looking large features red in cheeks. both children more backward and modest than many. has fine garden fruit trees & flowers Print office top corner of acre Mr. Govan 5 feet 4″. dark complection small thin wiry man, clean shaven about 40–50 years of age prominent features, grizzled crimpy hair Does not dance, is Free lover. not married, has been and is now printer to trade Native of New Orleans, where he lived till 21 years. Says best place on earth if it were not that it does not get cool at night & you rise in morning without much rest, & mosquitos 10 months in year. regrets having been brought up in big city. is Free lover & believes & practices variety will not marry. Seems truth seeking man but touchy usually goes around with barehead unless when in town— Says, was a typesetter at Ruskin & there became an anarchist because although had rules to abide by did not mind them and found that all in office strove to do utmost & did as much as in competitive type setting outside found that that did not work within laws & rules Fox. Man with wooden foot. Pensioner wife not here one 9 year red haired son here. got eye hurt playing with knife game & other eye is losing sight. Fox is man of 50. bushy beard, ordinary looking [66] 14.4.00. Saturday. “Home” cloudy all day blinks of sunshine all day. light breeze Heavy shower of rain 6 PM. on whole good day. 6 AM., breakfast at Mrs Dadismon’s. Farina instead of Porridge, bacon. Boiled minced eggs, bread butter, own churn, stewed prunes, cocoa. Sawed wood for Mrs Burton also dug pail of “butter clams” in sand on shore. When tide was low dug amongst gravel & got 1 and 2 at spade from size of penny to size of Crownpiece [illegible] shells. wash sand off. then scald, just let come to boil, then take out shell and wash in strainer to take out sand, now eat but can pour over a little sauce from boilings Dinner at 12 noon Mrs Burton. bacon, eggs. Potatoes. Prunes. bread. Pancakes Went with Harry Dadismon to troll for sea trout, with spoon bait, rowed along about 20 yds from shore for hour or so but got none. weeds stuck on hooks often.

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fished more but without success only I broke wood-iron row-lock and spent time from 4 PM to 6. mending it Mr. Dadismond has handy workshop find everyone so helpful and thoughtful to one another “Supper of butter Clams bread butter & Prunes with Mrs Burton” clams good flavour but little tough. 7 PM called at Mr Hubert’s and shaved myself. Then about 8 PM went with Mr. Mrs H and their only boy Dale to the weekly dance at the school house School rough sawnboard house 1 room some 20′ × 40′. at top end platform as for Theatre, in large letters over is “LIBERTY.” & other mottoes decorated with fresh flowers and blue draping. book shelf at other end. some chairs & wood benches along side. Between 40 & 50 Colonists turned out, from tiny children of 4 years to old people of 70. white hair all dancing together. Mainly “quadrilles” but entirely different from Scotch quadrilles. I tried them, but most of time looked on & talked with several of them. Many youths about 16 to 20 and girls same age, all in good humour and not a harsh word or unseemly word spoken [67] and most of them believe in anarchism and “free love” though all dont practice free love. I did not see any unseemly conduct a feeling of homely intercourse. some did not dance, but talked only refreshment “cold water.” lamp light. — broke up about 12 midnight. — every month There is a reading circle & music & readings etc. besides — . evening was calm & cool moon obscured by clouds but lighted water of bay like silver, — trees giving clear dark shaddows. all very fine to feel & see. all dance and meeting etc is free from charge. most of men there wore black or dark clothes various cuts & starched collars a few soft collars & ladies neatly and tastefully dressed skirts to boot heads & light coloured smoke. nothing gaudy or heavy. children clean but not specially fancy did not see looks of rank vanity women invite men to dance as often as men ask women. Violins (2) gave music changed hands once or twice. Mr Allan, young O’Dell & another or two played, one man shouted what to do at each turn. Jones. Man of 50 years or so. mid height & build, common looking face short stubby, gray beard and moustache Wears very untidy clothes has very small shanty 1 room, here about 9 months, used to publish a paper called [illegible] his wife wont come & live here too he is a free lover & also believes in a new mental & Physical Science called Karistianism. explained in the “Flaming Sword” of Chicago. Guiding Star Pub. House 314 W 63rd St Chicago. Ill.

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Members of Home community gathered in Liberty Hall, circa 1902. Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.

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To cure all his ailments he goes with bare feet into the salt water and marches up & down with umbrella if raining. He is down upon shopkeepers & middle man and thinks trusts not bad. only want to put their machinery in hands of people. Mr Jones believes in every one living in little houses and living separately, even husband and wife. [68] 15. 4. 00 Sunday. “Home.” bright sun most of day clear blue sky slight hazy afternoon, Splendid day. Cool breeze but hot sun Rose 6. AM. Took dip in Bay. refreshing. Breakfasted at Dadismon’s. Split wood for hour at Mrs Burtons dug Horse Clams in shore sand about a foot down large size of goose eggs flattened. The neck stretches up from shell to flush with the top of sand about 1 inch dia around, and when touched by shovel squirts water from yard to 2 yards high & in doing so draws in neck like snail. I dug about 20 in an hour, three of which cooked into patties by Mrs. B. made dinner for Mrs B & self. She also gives them to chickens to eat. Another species of clam is the “Groy Duck” bigger still and said to look like shape of duck, only to be got at very low tide. Sand is full of other life Sand worms, prawns, about size of shrimps, small crabs etc The “Typhoon” only steamer calling here came in at 12 noon bringing only 3 passengers They land on floating wharf and thence row ashore. Members have small flat bottomed boats, holding 3 made by O’Dell and Allan cost about $7 each. Called on Mr. Jones and he gave me a journal. his is perhaps the smallest house, but is to build a larger one soon. literary man. Afternoon Mrs Burton & I went to call upon Mrs Kelly the school teacher at head of bay. She is widowed lady. Snap. 1. Mrs Kelly at house There are 8 school teachers in Colony Mr Larkin, Mrs Kelly, Mr Millinger Mr & Mrs Allan, Mr & Mrs Simes Mrs Thomas mostly put out of their schools from their principles Army Pensioners

{Mr Thompson {Mr Miles {Mr Fox {Mrs Parker

2 old soldiers from South Mr. Adams Mr. Dadismon. Mrs Kelly’s house is usual rough sawn timber shingle roof, with two rooms some of seams, 1″ wide one can see out she is going to cut hole through to other room just completed.

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[69]

Mrs. Kelly Family

Mrs Kelly is widow about 40 or 50 midheight, strong build very strong & prominent features but not big face nose broad at base & lower bridge slightly up at front. dark complection, very dark eyes. hair cut shortish. colour in cheeks, and from Colorado, wears bloomers, and looks to be a very exceptional & high minded woman has been & is an anarchist. She is sister of Mr. O’Dell and has a son in his teens & a small boy. She has been teacher in many parts of US.A. and has had to leave schools because of her ideas of Self Government, ie Anarchism. She believes in teaching through love and never using corporal punishment and if scholars wont behave blames herself & says must be something amiss with herself, & searches herself accordingly (anarchist) Mrs. Kelly ran a paper with her father but it got stopped & sold out farm & came here, has bought 15 acres (not in Colony but next to it) She has 2 sons one 18 or so eldest son cleared & farms & takes mail to Lake bay Kelly School was build by some members. The State allows $40 a month for teacher, but Mrs Kelly only takes $25 rest is being held up for building larger School. Mrs. Kelly believes dance every Saty night is too much for scholars, as it last till 12 P.M. Sunset is long enough (9 or 10 P.M.) She believes entirely in teaching by love, and would not force children to go to school nor to do anything tack and care is needed. no more she says. She says she likes children better than any believes in Coop. does not like house work, as well as Coop Manufacturing, does not believe in cutting land up into small plots. She has 15 acres & means to keep it, but sees in future large Coop hotel etc. Son, 18 or so still goes to School young man a little backwards. young son 6 to 8 years old.

Seems decent tall healthy modest

[70] Called on The O’Dells’. [illegible] said to be no poisonous snakes and no poisonous berries. One snake small Many kinds of berries viz; — (1) Huckle Berry. Very plentiful (2) Salmon. solid big Salmon colour as big as cherry (3) Blackberries. Very prolific and grow more in fronds along ground.

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(4) Rasps in quantities. (5) Strawberries, grow nearly size of cultivated ones. (6) Oregon grape, grows 6 inches from grounds. Glossy Prickly leaf Wild plum & wild cherry. from O’Dells’ & Kelly’s, we went to Mrs Verity house of 3 rooms & atticks fine open house nice flowers in front just on water edge, fruit trees Mr. Verity took me to limits of colony land behind settled parts Snap No. 2. Colony back land and Mr Verity at tree. Verity. was in Communistic Colony of Glenis, Wash. 10 hours day was work, but broke up as some would work & some would not work 10 hours as they did not believe in force Verity & others saw it would not do & he and O’Dell & Allan started in sail boat and visited this place as well as many others, and tried to buy several places, but as had only $20 amongst them could not induce any to sell to them till at last the owner of 26 acres, an Anarchist in Tacoma sold to them at $7 an acre. $20 to be paid every 90 days till paid up. — Allan went & got work teaching at $30 & board, while O’Dell & Verity started to cut cord wood &c to keep alive while they cleared land and built houses, and paid up instalments of price. Some of wives did work in Tacoma to help too. and managed to pay up regularly to end of agreement, but during that time they found they could not manage to pay freight on supplies from town, they asked and the Captain of the Typhoon agreed to let them pay freight up in cutting cordwood at Lakebay. [71] Kennon “R maker before coming here” Mrs K — not freelover. been well off but lost by mortgaged ranch said to be very refined. is taking out Shingle bolts and selling to man. does not pay money to association. live at westend of Bay. Mrs Kennons not free lover 4 children 1 boy about 12. good open countenance 3 girls. one 4 or 5 years & 2 in teens boy is clever scholar. The Store Mr Dadismond has a store and simply keeps for good of Colony Mrs Mellinger keeps store open 2 days a week and gets any profit as pay. Goods are sold in work or money to colonists at same cost as retail

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stores in Tacoma. no freight charged. Sometimes cheaper if bargains got Mr Dadismond takes cost of freight only. and Mr D takes eggs or produce in exchange for groceries & gives same price as would get in Tacoma free of freight. Mr D. gets anything colonists wants charges for freight no comm. get most of groceries hardware from a Coop Store in Tacoma Swartz 1542 Pacific Avenue Tacoma [72] King Mr. King ordinary looking man. squint nose, but well meaning Mrs K 4 children 8 to 14 years

not robust looking

Adams family (was farmer) Mr. Adams, old man white hair anarchist Variety and spiritualist Mrs Adams old lady about 65 to 70 Son Jack Adams. Electrician, about 25 years daughter widow Mrs " widow Mrs a lot of grandchildren of Adams think all are spiritualists, Jack Adams. Betw. 4 & 5 wks in S.F. & Yellowstone park, gave me 5 or 6 Photos all busy building 10 roomed house 16. 4. 00 Monday. Home Clear Sunny day all day white mist rose from water at day break. slight touch of frost. mild breeze. Breakfasted with Mrs Burton. Saw a Mr. Chase a Londoner, who was at Topolobampo, but came away, and was Socialist till came here. found him nursing Larkins baby. great talker says met Mr. Carpenter. intends to settle here. seems to me as if he was a kind of [illegible] shiftless man. has wife & family in central States. Dadismon, Huberts & self all dined at Dadismons at 12 noon, as Hubert was house cleaning. very good. Then went to school house and listened 1/2 hour to lessons mainly singing. led by little girl [73] Mrs Kelly. School about full of children and seem to do as desired. Through love of teacher.

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Had supper with Adams and saw large lot Photos by J. Adams. house just lathed. to be plastered. Mr & Mrs Allan & Mrs Hubert came in after supper. Allan says they hope to make large city of this place dont intend to live off elsewhere — The Association only takes ado with property rest is free for all to do as like expect to work in voluntary Coop groups. difference between them & other trials is that minority as well as majority have equal liberty 27 1/2 acres was first land of Colony Association is working under the law that governs the societies. Such as the “Forresters” and cannot make profit. land is sold to colonists at cost to ass, so that if 120 acres now taxes being paid on comes to Colony it may only cost $1 per acre & will be sold to colonists at that. [74] 17.4.00. Tuesday Home Bright sun all day till 3 PM cloudy till 8 PM. but no rain. pretty mild & warm in sun. Hazy all day slightly. 6 A.M. had dip sea very cool & refreshing fine sandy beach. no or few weeds at high tide. Breakfast with Dadismon, about 7 AM. The SS. Typhoon came to wharf we rowed out to wharf in small boats & signalled SS.T. to stop 8 or 10 colonists were going to Tacoma. Typhoon small old decked steamer called at many small places. Lake bay next to Home is pretty narrow bay an inlet about 1/2 dozen houses has wharf. Sheltered fine sand & gravel beaches. fruit orchards here & there all way to Tacoma small fruit & vegetable Ranches trees in full bloom. very pretty and many bays and points, Though sandy shores waters usually deepish standing on bow top deck surveyed the whole landscape all land forest covered unless where numerous patches are cleared, and banks are from level up to about 100 feet of bluff. all same formation of sand brown on top and clay or sandstone. gravel land seems to have risen and edge of land gradually being washed down. about 30 passengers aboard & freight & mail arrived at Tacoma at 10. 30. AM Tacoma is built mainly on hills Some 200 to 500 feet high. it is situated thus. Big ridge Hills

Hill Main Street

Mt.Tacoma

wharf mud flats

water mud flats

saw mill

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has one fine wide business street with some big blocks and electric trams long ways. cable cars cross streets as very steep like Seattle. not a very busy city but quite brisk and not many loafers around, very little shipping perhaps 1/4 of Seattle’s trade. Library quite good but not large in City Hall. Mount Tacoma is fine big cone shape snow covered mountain away at one end of city. much cycling no top hats. long way (3/4 mile) from steamer landing to center of city. [75] big bluff just at side of landing, sand sandstone. clay on shaleley looking formation long wooden hill to left scales bluff at angle. Seems clean bright City. few factories saw aparian operators work & bee farm with about 30 hives. — deep gully at one part town. Streets bridged by tressles & creek in bottom The Puyallup Tacoma is an Angular City well situated on switch back land. Mrs. Kelly of Home introduced me to Mr. Swartz of 1542 Pacific Avenue and his lady They keep a hat & clothes store and have an untidy back shop to eat & sleep in. Swartz is a free lover & is not married to Rosa his companion she is dark and has very angular Jewish features Thin clean cut, Swartz is shortish broad but not stout not prominent features. blunt face and dark German or Jewish look. found here also a woman & baby belonging to the Colony. the baby is the only one born out of wedlock in the Colony and is the result of a voluntary variety connection between the woman and a man called Wronan is tall Thin and kind of absent looking, is of city growth but likes country. did not see anything bad about Swartz’s place, but I felt repelled from staying long. also met here Jas. L. Morton of Boston, a Harvard man, anarchist variety man. Mid height, red fair hair. smallish features about 30 years of a moustache and rather small mouth but thick underlip protrudes slightly. evening went to regular meeting of Tacoma Temple of Coop Brotherhood, branch of Burley. a man Jones seemed to be the official & a Mrs Baker also. about 20 to 30 attended in fine hall and Morton gave a lecture of the brotherhood of man. finishing up by exposition of anarchism he defined it as “Government by none.” he is quite good speaker but did not impress me deeply. uses many big words. Though he gave good scientific resume of evolutionary theory, he did not claim that Anarchism was the only way to reform, but that different minds had different methods of reform. but claimed A. as the ultimate goal. Mrs Baker gave a reading called “send a letter to Garcia” no discussion. Temple then went into private business while outsiders went out. Mr Govan & I went and talked with baker called Rosetck 1105 Tacoma avenue Tacoma a fine middle aged man full of the idea of cooperative distribution. he proposes to say bake bread

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and sell at cost price taking no profit only wages & expenses all benefit to go to consumers — thinks it wrong to make profit. he proposes to start himself in that way. works not to get profit. all industry to be carried on minus profit. Mr Govan says likes country & would not go back to live in town, likes life in Colony. Thinks Colony valuable as an example to the world if succeeds. Some objectionable people in colony. Such as Fox but can’t help that. and Cooperation is only voluntary Govan eats at several different families and sleeps at another. he does the printing advises me to — has firm belief in soundness of system. does not think that living apart from rest of world will hurt them mentally. look upon this as practical experiment.

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Entre-Acte Sexual Harassment Is An Issue of Power Sexual harassment occurs when a person who is in a position of trust or authority engages in behaviors of a sexual nature that are inappropriate, unwanted, and/or nonreciprocal. It is a breach of the trusting relationship that normally exists between professors and students, teaching assistants and students, supervisors and employees, and others in the academic community. Sexual harassment creates confusion because the boundary is blurred between professional roles and personal relationships. The personal element is then introduced into what should be a sex-neutral situation. Sexual harassment differs from ordinary flirting because it is unwelcome and because it usually occurs in a relationship in which one party is in a subordinate position to the other. Sexual harassment may also occur in relationships of equal power. Perpetrators of sexual harassment gain their “strength” from belittling and devaluing those persons against whom they direct the harassment. —University of California pamphlet, “Sexual Harassment,” 1992

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8

When the Heavens Are Bright

“It’s ‘tame,’ Edward. To contrast with ‘wild,’ don’t you see?” Helen said

peering through a magnifying glass at the facsimile of Muirhead’s diary. “‘Apple and cherry out (tame). Huckleberry out. Flowering currant. Redraspberry (wild)’; it has to be to contrast with ‘wild.’” Frank McCrea, looking over his shoulder, nodded judiciously and remarked, “Both a correspondence and a coherence. Helen’s interpretation fits.” Edward took up the glass and looked once again. “You must be right. I’m very grateful. Now what about . . . ?” She turned smiling up to Frank with a look of appreciation for his endorsement of her reading. It was the second of the day, for coming over to Osprey Island he had heard her out on her meeting with John McComber that morning, even as she had received from him the latest news about the flap at the zoo. It was a relief to be at the island. Edward riffled through the manuscript for the next word, but Kudanenaha yipped from the porch. It was high time they began their walk. In unison Helen and Frank responded and moved toward the door, as if by Kudanenaha’s command. Edward followed. It was a clear, fresh day with a few clouds moving slowly north, casting moving shadows on the water. An evening beach fire was promised. Helen

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loved the forest walk and gave voice to her fantasy of living somewhere in the woods at the end of a narrow path. The one they negotiated, with Kudanenaha turning to see whether they were following, was edged by tall huckleberry bushes underneath enormous fir and hemlock. It was cool and dark in the forest with moments of light and varying shades of green. The ends of branches sprouted a bright spring green. Ahead of her on the path Frank adjusted his Tilley hat, his favorite at the zoo, ritualizing, it seemed to Helen, a relation between the zoo and this environment. But as much as the zoo tried with its new habitats, it didn’t duplicate this old first growth timber. Frank would have retorted that it did replicate human nature. He had thought he had achieved resolution in house of the young elephant handler’s complaint against her supervisor, and he had been tempted to selfsatisfaction. He’d spoken to both separately, conveying the senior handler’s respectful regrets and pledge to achieve greater sensitivity, securing the young woman’s solemn acceptance of these messages. It had been surprisingly easier than he expected. Then twenty-four hours later he learned that they had moved in together, having met them by chance in a paint store. They were preparing to redo the bathroom and even perhaps, select bedroom wallpaper. This was revealed amidst giggling embarrassment on her part and tight-lipped murmuring on his. After expressing irritation to himself that he’d been taken in and his time had been usurped by a domestic spat, he thought it best to leave things as they now appeared to be. The path took them to the edge of a ravine covered with ferns, elderberry, and Oregon grape. Suddenly Helen was surprised to see among the trees on the opposite bank what was without question a miniature version of Edward’s cabin with the added feature of a large cedar growing up through the middle of the roof and providing an enormous towering umbrella. The three stopped and contemplated quietly this cunning replica, placed as if it had grown there from a seed of its parent two or three hundred yards away. Kudanenaha was investigating. Helen could only sigh appreciatively. Edward said, “Evan and Jane built it. It’s one room and a loft, same dimensions—well, reduced, of course. They were fourteen and fifteen when they did it.” For Helen it was a little house out of a fairy tale, like what she had dreamed about on the back porch in Ohio, looking out to the woods beyond the field where she had not been allowed to go alone. They were lovely, dark and deep, and she had imagined living in them and wearing a Robin Hood cloak and hat with a feather in it. Only for a moment had she ever really believed her brother when he said there were wolves there.

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Foxes, perhaps, but not wolves. Edward was telling Frank he’d seen a coyote recently here and another down by the water. “Evan wanted to go on up the tree with another storey, maybe two; but Jane insisted it stay just like our real cabin. So Evan lost interest and went over there and built a little tree house, but that wasn’t ever really finished.” One could see it farther on. “Jane and her friends used both right into college. Their kids come over to play here now when they visit, but they haven’t slept in it yet. Too scary when there’s a wind. And they’re city kids, really.” The path narrowed. Some branches had fallen across it during the winter storms. Up close one noticed disrepair, but mainly the encroachment of the damp. Looking into the big front window, Helen could see that everything was in order inside. There was a tea table and cups. “Where are Riding Hood and the wolf?” she asked, smiling. “The wolf is in the zoo,” Frank said, “and Riding Hood is filing her complaint at the court house.”

It had been a curious coincidence, Helen thought, that even as Frank had settled his problem, or rather had it settled for him (for who knew what had really gone on?), she had been talking in her office with John McComber about his meetings with Francine Wright. “I hate to come to you with this kind of thing, Helen, but I’ve talked with Jack, and we both think you ought to be informed.” That was a typical McComber preface. He always apologized and usually cited Jack. After all these years, without at all demanding it, Jack remained the departmental guru. Well, he deserved it after all the work he’d done. And so the story unfolded. He’d had two unpleasant moments with Francine Wright recently. The first was, well, perhaps trivial, when she’d come to ask him to be sure to invite Cynthia Ragsdale to lecture. It implied that he wouldn’t carry out the department’s vote. But he would let that pass. Helen, recognizing that he had gotten in his shot at Francine, remonstrated and said Francine shouldn’t be too harshly judged. After all she did have an investment and responsibility by virtue of her being an officer of the women’s caucus. She thought better than to say “emotional investment.” It was a man she was talking with. John mercifully let it drop. He went on to report the second meeting. “It was, I am sorry to say, worse.” That was John. Work up to it slowly, with regret.

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“What do you mean?” “A young woman—Francine said that a young woman student, one of our majors, had told her that—that Harley Wales had ‘come on’ to her.” “Harley? What? What do you mean? What did Francine mean? What precisely happened?” Helen was expending more of a diminished cache of patience. Three caballeros from the romance languages department had already raided it that morning, marveling sweetly over, but really conspiring against, a woman colleague. “Well, I-I I’m not sure. I mean, ah, somehow Harley harassed her at a party at his house after the reception.” “Harley? At his house? With all those people there?” Helen felt that her first question was sufficient: “Harley?” It seemed preposterous. But then, of course, you never really knew, and the Lord knows she’d been surprised by other cases she’d had to deal with. “Is Francine accusing Harley of sexual harassment? Is the student? Was it physical? Verbal? Was anyone drunk? Or on drugs?” “Don’t know. Maybe. Francine was vague. I couldn’t quite get the details out of her, as if she, er, ah, she didn’t, well, didn’t want to say too much. Anyway I thought we should talk. She did imply that the student would probably speak out. Jack’s suspicious.” “Speak to whom?” “I don’t know. To the student paper. To the ombudsman—person, I mean. We don’t need this right now with the departmental review coming up.” “We never need it, John.” “Yes, er, yes. That’s true, of course. I was thinking about the department, the chairmanship and all that.”

On the way back from Jane and Evan’s little house Helen was silent, trudging, eyes watching for winter’s impediments on the path. It was darker now. Then ahead she saw the doe and its fawn. For a moment it seemed not at all surprising to have met them here. Both froze, then leaped off into dense underbrush just as Kudanenaha, engaged in a special investigation behind them, caught the scent and in a frenzy of barking rushed off, only to return quickly at Frank’s call. The fawn’s eyes had met hers over the ten yards of pathway, the eyes of innocence. What had the fawn seen in hers—Helen Grant, coper with human foibles?

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Back at the cabin Edward declared I.A. or “independent activity” until the cocktail hour, which would be held on the beach. First siesta, then fiesta. Helen headed for the hammock, settled herself, stared through the madrona limbs to a sky across which white clouds slowly passed. Francine kept turning up in her mind. Something was wrong; a terrible mistake was being made. She thought back on Francine’s agitated state when they had met. It was hardly possible that fate had so conveniently presented Francine with a complaint against Harley Wales. It was too easy, and it made no sense. Harley Wales! Harley had never shown any inclination to . . . No, it was a mistake, or worse. In these days, misunderstandings were the rule. More and more she found herself having to mediate, to sort through a situation of perceived insults and affronts, accusations of insensitivity, and clashing agendas mixed in with them. Faculty still thought of deans as paper-shufflers, but they were more and more becoming mediators. Misunderstandings were bad enough, and it was the worst, she thought, with women. Traitor to my sex, she thought, but it was true. Some clichés were true. Or were they? She’d seen the men do the same. Either way, a misunderstanding was less difficult to deal with than a plot. A nasty plot. But Francine was not a plotter, or not consciously so. What you saw of Francine was what you got. Helen tried to put her mind somewhere else via the clouds, but the best she could do was turn it to her conversation Friday with Cynthia Ragsdale. No coincidence there; the mind had a mind of its own. She had liked Cynthia, who was straightforward and possessed considerable wit. Cynthia was also sentient. Helen liked to divide people into the sentient, the moveable, and the unmoveable. Cynthia seemed immediately aware of the tensions surrounding her candidacy—she was a feminist new historian, but it wasn’t as if this scholarly stance pervaded every move she made. She took some pains to show that she could teach Poe and Hawthorne without a hobby horse. She even seemed to have hit it off with the creative writers in the department, and this was amusing since Cynthia’s strongest supporters thought the writers hopelessly reactionary. The creative writers believed quaintly that they were unified, if sometimes fractured, authorial subjects, and they took literary form and aesthetic closure seriously. Helen decided that Cynthia would probably sustain her support from most people in spite of Francine’s acts of adulation. The capital outlay budget was coming down, but first thing Monday she’d have to get to the bottom of the harassment issue before it

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became an issue, as Yogi Berra would have said. Maybe it would be the only thing Monday. Somehow that closed it all off. The clouds continued to pass above, fluffy sheep, enough goats here on the ground; and Helen Grant dozed. John McComber hadn’t recounted to Helen Grant the substance of his talk with Jack Emory; he’d just invoked his name in a ritual identification, as he so frequently had over the last four years. He had gone at once to Jack after hearing Francine out. This was a matter of genuine concern. A professor in engineering had been dismissed recently in an affair that had begun not much differently. John McComber thought with modest pride that he had weathered four years of his chairmanship pretty well, considering everything. He hadn’t sought the job but had come to enjoy the importance it had bestowed upon him. He wanted to exit it in peace and quiet and with his colleagues’ respect. Oh, there had been the usual things, and some unusual ones that he had kept strictly to himself for the good of the enterprise: he’d secretly gone bail for two colleagues, one accused of being a peeping Tom (never proved) and another of a men’s lavatory incident (dropped). These colleagues remained sheepishly in his debt, and he was embarrassed at their position vis-à-vis him. He lectured to himself that these discretions and distancings went with the job. But it was hard to lose the casual friendships of people you’d helped out of a jam. Even Jack Emory did not know of these matters, or did he? It was hard to know what Jack didn’t know. Then there were the recent ideological wars, in which it was not unusual for accusations to fly out—charges of racism, sexism (conscious or otherwise), insensitivity, attacks in a sort of guerrilla war on the citadels of Western civilization and dead white male writers. John had mused over the term “Anglo.” Anglo-Saxon. He himself was a Celt, true Scot down to tartan and terrier. John had tried to steer his way among combatants, to maintain order at meetings, encourage dignified debate, and move all questions efficiently to closure. Economy he thought a major virtue, and he had (on Jack’s early advice, actually) become an expert on Robert’s Rules of Order, latest revised edition. He was not afraid to invoke it to limit debate even under accusation that he was giving in to or hiding behind Patriarchal Western Rationalism, which he supposed he was. Jack’s face was granite; he kept a replica of an Easter Island statue on his bookshelf. He had said he’d bought it because it reminded him of a colonel he’d known in the Marines back in WWII. John McComber glanced at it, then back to the scowl. The desk between them was nearly

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clear except for one book and a pad of yellow lined paper. Jack still wrote his first drafts out on those yellow sheets before it all went into the word processor behind him. Too late to change that, he claimed. “It’s just not possible,” he said after a moment of silence. “I don’t believe it. Does Harley know yet? Have you talked to the girl? Helen should be told.” John McComber really wanted Jack to talk to Harley, just so it wouldn’t seem so threatening. The good thing about Jack most of the time was that he anticipated you. “I’ll talk to Harley if you’d like, but I think you need to get to Helen right away. She should call the girl in at once and also talk with Francine before the whole thing gets clouded in mythology and the stories get fixed in a web. You know what I mean?” Jack’s Easter Island grimness hadn’t relaxed. “You know, we’re all suspect and vulnerable—we men, in the politics of it, I mean. It could become very nasty.” On the one hand, John McComber thought that this was no news to him; on the other, he was a little surprised at Jack’s uncharacteristic leap to judgment. He’d call Helen. Some hours later Jack was back in touch: “I’ve talked with Harley. He’s dumbfounded, says, yes, he knows the girl. She’d been in his Shakespeare course. She’d written a paper, he remembered, on cross-dressing and boy actors. She definitely was one of Francine’s students, he’d been able to tell that easily enough. Yes, he’d talked to her at the party about some things that had come out on the subject. I asked him, was there any possible way the conversation could have been construed as a seduction effort? ‘No way,’ he said. At first he saw the whole thing as ridiculous, but then he became very upset. Recognized the possibility of . . . well, we know what they are. Harley recognizes that he has a sharp tongue and likes the quip. Maybe something was misunderstood. I can also tell you that some people will be madder than hell and say this is what we get for indulging these children and letting Francine use the classroom to convert them.” John McComber thought about that before he called Helen Grant. Even though he knew it was too simple, he would be in sympathy with the Harley backers. They would probably voice what many people outside the university already thought. You expected the drama department to tweak the public’s nose. So last month only a few complained when

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they put on some German play that involved bringing a truckload of mud and causing three nude female students to cavort in it uttering every possible obscenity in the name of ecology, antivivisectionism, and deconstructive architecture. But the public had trouble understanding the trashing of the literary canon and Western civilization. If you tried to describe reasonably, as he had many times, these things as part of a general social ferment representing admirable ideals, your listener’s eyes clouded to opacity. It was easier to attack or defend than explain, more fun, too. His own wife Katherine, who was rubbed the wrong way by Francine’s single-minded turning of every question to the same issues, attacked. John McComber had recently heard Katherine fulminate at a dinner against the nitpicking for sexist language that seemed to be going on everywhere. Harley had observed with Wildean humor long before this had happened that Katherine’s objections were aesthetic: she hated the boring earnestness of it all. But John McComber did not think that the coming days would be boring. In any case, Helen said she would see Francine and the student in question on Monday. She’d see Harley, too, she supposed.

It was surely going to be a lovely evening. Helen had decided in her hammock that nothing from State would interfere with it. After all, she really did have to expect problems like this. A small irritation, some would say, given her many responsibilities. Still, these were her people, and she would not forget them. The way universities were going these days, they needed her support all the more. In the words of Edward Williams, nothing was easy, as her own career had long ago told her. She had known, on musing about it, that something was about to happen. But Harley? She’d long assumed that Harley was . . . Had she developed occult powers that came along with administrative experience? She thought not. But she had felt it somehow. And where would it end? Reason must prevail, she asserted to herself, hopefully and also willfully. Having extracted herself reluctantly from the hammock, Helen proceeded to the beach. There she settled back against a driftwood log and watched the mountain turning pink as the sun reached the horizon. Frank, with whom she would make love tonight, approached with a promised and promising jar of martinis and two glasses, olive in one, onion in the other. She took the onion. They diverged pleasantly on this matter, but not many things really. They’d been alike and come closer

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together in their tastes. Did they look alike? Some couples did come to resemble each other. Same food? Same thoughts? Phrenology. She had learned a great deal from Frank and his animals. Patience. Silence. Watching. Waiting. Even territory. Frank taught you to watch, which was to see, really. He was sitting next to her. A great blue heron made its way to a point of sand where another one waited. Helen and Frank watched—the feet tucked back, the neck coiled and retracted, the deliberate slow flapping of huge wings. And then the glide to rest a careful, discreet distance from its mate, which now stood quietly, waiting, waiting for the nearly imperceptible flash of silver in the water. “Maybe I shall find a trout if I do not seem to care.” Yeats. A cunning coiled caring, she thought; but no trout here, of course. Maybe a few steelhead. Flounders on the bottom. The first taste of a very cold martini is the best. She sampled Edward’s concoction and found it cold, Tanqueray, and very good, indeed, the second sip almost equaling the first. Edward was now at the fire preparing the salmon. That would also be very good, indeed. She settled into the evening. Edward’s ritualization of this event was a comfort all around. One cooked a salmon in a certain way, she observed. Very soon Walter Joyner would amble down the beach in their direction carrying a big jug of some not very good wine and a salad bowl. The neighbor was an inveterate bargain-hunter, and Edward always commented in advance, and out of earshot, apologizing for Walter’s wine. Just after the blue hour, as the mountain turned gray and then to ghostliness, they would drink enough and perhaps eat a little more than enough. Walter would have occasion to tell about some exotic place he had visited and well-known people he had met. Little of the world had been lost on him, whether it was the Raffles Hotel, T. S. Eliot, or Madame Nehru. Late in the evening, with the stars out and the mountain only a darker shadow, Edward talked about the colony of Home, two big corners of protruding land away down the Sound. It was his passion of the season, the passion of a scholar and an enthusiast who was learning his way into the life of the people there almost a century ago. On this night he was wistfully thoughtful about his Utopia and its fate in ways that seemed to weigh upon him. Walter Joyner was in his usual questioning-interviewing mode like the former foreign correspondent that he was and the CIA agent some friends suspected he had been. He’d been asked outright once and answered, “No,” but then with a sly grin, “I wouldn’t tell you if I was, would I?”

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Edward had read in the paper that the Dalai Lama had addressed Congress, and he remarked, “What could the Dalai Lama say to Congress that Congress would hear?” Edward was setting forth the possibility that Home might have succeeded if it had not been harassed from without? It was doing no one harm. The Dalai Lama’s Tibet had managed centuries of self-containment and was overrun. “Danger to belief, don’t you think? Real fear of the other, as we say today,” Helen observed. “Anyway, what is success?” Frank asked, but had to rephrase it when Edward seemed puzzled. “I mean, how long does something have to last before it’s a success? One no-hitter is a success. Two and a half hours. But was Home ever a success? It certainly had its fifteen minutes of fame. Was that success?” “And also its internal squabbles. Toward the decade of the teens these were more damaging, especially the matter of nude bathing. That was about nineteen eleven or twelve. But in a way a certain kind of dissension held it together.” “Heraclitus,” Helen said. A dean’s philosopher, she thought. “Home built in dissent in a radical way. There was dissent, but no establishment to dissent from.” “What frustration,” Walter said. “The dissent had to have a totally internal purposiveness.” Kant, Helen thought. She noticed that Walter tended to surprise you. Sometimes you thought he wasn’t there at all, and then, lo, he was alluding to Kant or some obscure poet. She saw he was just the right interviewer for Edward. Of course, almost anyone was, as Edward made everyone an audience or at least a seminar participant. Edward clearly liked Walter. “The problem of an achieved Utopia would be that it couldn’t change. Utopias are not to get to but to imagine; if you arrive, why then, there’s nothing to do but sit around and tell stories of the getting there— a bunch of the Old Guard living on the past and resisting the future. Or a poet trying to be interesting writing about Heaven. Hell is just much more intriguing, more poetical in the end.” “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” Helen said. “Blake,” said Walter. “Blake, yes, Blake. A wise man, a man of grand designs.” That room in the Tate. It’s one of the great places. “The only Utopia that there has ever been is the Utopia of animals that human beings are destroying. No time in our sense but still the cycle of birth and death,” Frank observed.

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“And not entirely pleasant either,” said Helen, watcher of animal shows on public television. “Worse when Adam and Eve introduced change.” “Well, Home built in change with a principle of discord: Utopian concord, anarchic discord,” Edward said. “They copied the old preSocratic shape of reality: Never should old time be emptied of that pair.” “So why did it finally collapse?” Walter asked. “It didn’t in one big conflagration. It died slowly back into the body politic that contained it, gradually less resistant to the newspapers, the churches, the sheriff, the invader.” “And a new generation with new questions, a new curiosity,” added Helen. “That had to be a major factor. It was curiosity that created the place, wasn’t it?” Edward nodded and poked the fire. “Change is human desire.” “Humans invented it, or let’s say it’s their nature, not in animals,” Frank said. “But animals do get bored, Frank.” “Only, I think, because of situations humans put them in or cause. The farther from us they are the less boredom and neurotic behavior there is.” “You can see from reading Discontent—that was one of their shortlived newspapers that eventually got banned from the mails—you see that those people kept up a discourse on a variety of subjects. People would write in and question anarchic principles and be answered. The mode was dialectical.” “But without the tyranny of Plato’s republic,” said Walter. “No guardians in an anarchic commune. Say, who won the fight?” “Holyfield won, but Foreman did pretty well. It was no pushover,” Frank answered. “Youth is served.” “Youth serves itself and will serve,” said Helen. “Yes, and the Mariners beat Dave Stewart 11 to 7. What in hell is going on?”

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Entre-Acte Our government is indeed weak if it can find no method of eliminating the pests that inflict it. If it cannot find the method, the people will find it. The anarchist must go. He can betake himself to other lands. He can stay there and subject himself to the risks involved. It is no time to talk of the dignity of the law. The law was made to correct the erring human; it has no application to the case of the mad dog. The people are aroused, and they will not again sink into a state of apathy. They realize that no form of statutory law can reach the outcasts of civilization. These creatures care nothing for the death penalty as formally prescribed. They court the peculiar martyrdom that is the portion of the wretch among them bold enough to strike a blow. There is but one remedy. It is the absolute elimination of the brood from the body politic. This elimination must come, and quickly. Unless the law can lay hold upon the vile leaders of the vile, the people, rising superior to the law, will attend to the matter. An anarchist, avowed, deserves to be killed. If the unclean things cannot be restrained, herded, sent where they can do no harm, they will be killed. Some may be banished, some sent to prison, one to the gallows, but this will leave alive the hateful sentiments of the unclean and murderous horde, and these sentiments must be stamped out of extinction. —Tacoma Evening Ledger, September 14, 1901

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n the previous Wednesday of 1991, a cross had been burned on the lawn of a black family in Bothell. On Thursday three white teenagers were apprehended as the culprits. On Friday striking high-school teachers marched on the Capitol in Olympia. The Detroit Tigers went to Chicago to play the first game ever in the new Comiskey Park and won 16–0. James Baker was trying to get the Israelis to compromise. Edward Williams had read all this in the morning paper, but his mind was elsewhere. In the late winter of 1902, James E. Larkin and James W. Adams of Home colony were indicted for unlawfully sending through the mails “a certain obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent publication and newspaper of an indecent character entitled, ‘Discontent.’” The alleged obscene article, written by Adams, was entitled “A Healthy Compromise.” He was also charged with posting an obscene letter to one John Howard of Fulton, Kansas. Edward Williams verified the wording of the indictment by consulting the court records in the regional National Archives in Seattle. (“Items brought into the research room are subject to search.”) He noticed that the charges against the printer Charles L. Govan had been dropped, presumably on the ground that though he had printed the paper he did not post it.

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James W. Adams near the beach at Home, 1902. Photo by R. E. Muirhead. Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.

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At the same time Mattie Penhallow, as postmistress at Home, and Lois Waisbrooker, as sole author and editor, were indicted for mailing a copy of Mrs. Waisbrooker’s journal Clothed With the Sun, which contained also a “lewd, lascivious and obscene” article entitled “The Awful Fate of Fallen Women.” Some strange bureaucratic confusion had caused the defendants to arrive at court in Tacoma on March 4, even though the trial was scheduled to be held on March 11. A clerk had erred in some way, so the defendants, with their band of supporters, returned across the Sound to Home, only to have to reappear a week later. In the interim, there were several conferences, in which Assistant District Attorney Cushman seemed at times ready to dismiss the indictments, but Postal Inspector C. L. Wayland tenaciously held that the defendants could be convicted. His testimony before the grand jury had been secret; and he had been the only witness brought. All of this was known from documents and newspaper reports.

Mattie Penhallow had not been in a courtroom before and was a bit uncertain what to do and how to behave. She walked up the aisle slowly so as to help Mrs. Waisbrooker, who, hobbling, moved deliberately. Mattie Penhallow knew that Mrs. Waisbrooker had been in court before back in Kansas, fighting the same battle, so she would know what was going to happen and what to do. In any case, there were Mr. Verity, Mr. Allen, Mr. Dadismon, and Mr. Morton filing in and taking their seats as if it were a recitation or a play. Of course, she and Mrs. Waisbrooker were defendants, so probably they should go down to the front right away. She saw seats where Mrs. Waisbrooker was heading. There were lots of people, even some from Anderson Island. It was nice of them to come such a distance. Not as far as Home, of course, but they didn’t have to come. It was crowded in the front. She had to excuse herself for moving up the aisle. Over the heads of others she saw seated on the right, staring at her, that strange little man Mr. C. L. Wayland. Scowling was more like it. She waved. She didn’t know why. She waved and she smiled. Mr. C. L. Wayland, that strange man, he was unhappy, she thought, so nervous. He nodded ever so slightly, turned away, staring elsewhere. She wondered, did he like the tomatoes, did he have a wife and family? What would it be like to . . . Just as they found their proper seats, the door opened. The clerk ordered everyone to rise, and Judge Hanford, all in a black robe, came in

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and took his place. Mattie Penhallow knew, of course, that a true, that is, a serious and consistent anarchist should take all such trappings and folderol with a grain of salt, but then one should have good manners and not offend others. And, too, she found herself solemnly impressed nevertheless, even though the court was what Mr. Morton called an alien power, perhaps a persecutor. Lost in observation of the occasion’s ritual, she was startled when Mr. Cushman called Mr. C. L. Wayland to the stand. He was dressed as he had been for his visit. It could have been an hour ago that she had given him the tomatoes. He was just as serious now as then. For a moment she thought he looked her way. She smiled. But perhaps she was wrong. He stared now directly at Mr. Cushman. He was already saying that he had subscribed to Discontent and had received through the mail the issue with Mr. Adams’s article “A Healthy Compromise.” He identified the paper and the wrapper in which it had come, and he declared that he had had conversations with Mr. Adams and Mr. Larkin which he certainly construed as containing admission of responsibility for the article and the paper’s mailing. It was all very precise. Mattie Penhallow glanced at Mrs. Waisbrooker beside her. She sat impassively as if enduring a boring reading or recital. Of course, she knew about these things and therefore wasn’t excited. Mattie Penhallow was momentarily surprised that Mr. Cushman asked Mr. C. L. Wayland nothing about the article’s contents, about what he thought was obscene in it; but then she realized that this testimony had to do with establishing facts. His idea of obscenity or whatever he called it was just opinion. Of course, he must have said something about this to the grand jury, but that had been secret. Mr. Swett for the defense then asked the witness why he had subscribed to Discontent. This seemed to disconcert him, and he did not give what Mattie Penhallow thought was a straight answer. Mr. C. L. Wayland was not going to say what everyone knew, that he was trying to trap the defendants. Nor would he admit to an interest in Discontent itself. It did come out, nevertheless, that he had subscribed under an assumed name. When his testimony was finished, Mattie Penhallow heard her name called. She was aware of everyone watching her and decided to address the judge with her eyes. She smiled at him, seated there in his robes. Judge Hanford smiled briefly back. She took her place in as proper a manner as she could.

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It was very short and really not very exciting. No one asked her anything about her views. She did not have to say, nor did she have the opportunity to say, that she was an anarchist. She was quite willing to do so, and, after all, that was what this trial was really all about. No one asked her what she thought about Mr. Adams’s article. All that she was required to assert was that, yes, she was the postmistress at Home, successor to Mr. Miles, and that Discontent was indeed entered there as second-class matter. It was quickly over, and before she could take her old seat, the judge called a recess for lunch. Mattie Penhallow found Mrs. Waisbrooker quiet and uncommunicative as they ate their sandwiches and dried fruit in the outer hallway. She made no comment on the testimony except to say that it all depended on what the judge thought. This was a surprise. Mattie Penhallow assumed that what the jury thought was all that mattered. But Mrs. Waisbrooker took the view that the judge could decide about what was obscene and what wasn’t. She then began to talk about the Comstock obscenity law that Mr. Morton had criticized in Discontent. This case could be a test of it. Mattie Penhallow could not tell whether Mrs. Waisbrooker was optimistic or not. She spoke flatly and with what seemed a depressed weariness. When they returned, Mr. Cushman proposed to call his next witness, but before he could do so Judge Hanford addressed the jury and the court generally. He remarked that during the noon recess he had read Mr. Adams’s article carefully and could not find that it was obscene or unmailable. There was surprise and rustling in the courtroom. Mattie Penhallow heard Mrs. Waisbrooker sigh. It was a sigh neither or relief nor of pain. There were whispers and more stirring. Quickly Mr. Murphy moved for acquittal. Mattie Penhallow observed Mr. Cushman, in an agitated state, rise to oppose the motion, his voice strained as he described the licentiousness of free love which the article, he said, invited people to practice. She thought he was unnecessarily sarcastic in tone when he quoted from the article. He said that both human and divine law were being blatantly challenged. Mattie Penhallow wondered why, if the article was so evil, Mr. Cushman was reading parts of it aloud with women present. When he was finished, Mr. Murphy rose to argue that contrary to its expressing lascivious thoughts, the article intended to repel them. He offered, cleverly, she thought, examples of similar cases from the past. In the back of her mind was the conclusion that she was witnessing an argument among some quite silly men, Judge

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Hanford excluded. The fact was that there was just nothing to get all het up about and make these silly arguments. When Mr. Murphy had finished, the judge spoke again. The room was otherwise absolutely quiet. He recognized, he said, that the question of obscenity was usually left to the jury, but this was an extraordinary case in which there was no evidence to support the charge of obscenity in the indictment. The judge was rebuking the grand jury. In his opinion the case should not have come to trial. True, the article upheld radical views, but they did not in themselves lead to licentiousness. The article implied that the same evils that it censured in marriage would be equally condemned if they should occur under free love. He then spoke, and Mattie Penhallow was relieved that he did—for Mr. Cushman had really taken quite excessive liberties with Mr. Adams’s words—of Mr. Cushman’s reading and declared that, if the sarcasm were absent, the words contained no obscene implication. If, he continued, Mr. Adams’s article was judged obscene, there would be a vast burden put upon courts to select the small amount of mailable matter from the enormous amount that would be unmailable. Mattie Penhallow heard some slight titter of amusement from the onlookers. She looked around. Mr. Morton was nodding, Mr. Allen whispering to Mr. Dadismon, who smiled. Beside her, Mrs. Waisbrooker was impassive. Mr. C. L. Wayland’s face was flushed. It deserved to be. He had brought all of this silliness about, and it ended as harassment for those at Home and exasperation for him. Judge Hanford was in fact, instructing the jury to bring in a verdict of not guilty. It was all over for Mr. Adams and Mr. Larkin, but she and Mrs. Waisbrooker remained to be tried. She was disappointed to hear the judge declare that their trial would be put over to the July session and the bond required would be $300.

Edward Williams noticed that the Tacoma Daily Ledger, which had been attacking Home at every opportunity since the assassination of President McKinley, relegated its report of the trial to its back pages. Quite a contrast to its triumphant account of the arrests. Then the headline had been “Leaders Arrested, Anarchists of the Home Colony Now in the Law’s Clutches.” The final report was brief. The Ledger declared that Judge Hanford “held that the matter contained [in the article] did not come within the purview of the law.” Mr. James M. Morton was the author of a lengthy account in Discontent for March 19, 1902. It was enti-

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tled “Victory.” Morton had been writing editorials for some time in Discontent attacking the Comstock law, which had been employed to attack Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. His urging was to maintain extreme vigilance against “the Movement in Favor of Ignorance, or whatever other name you please to give to the concerted and church-led attempt to destroy all freedom of thought and expression and plunge our modern civilization back into the night of the Dark Ages.” This was the man whom the Ledger in an editorial of September 14, 1901, had called “The Outlaw of Home.”

The Outlaw of “Home” Close to Tacoma is a settlement known as Home. Possibly it is so called because it possesses no element of home life. As nearly as can be ascertained, it is a collection of outlaws, male and female. They defy all the decencies of life. They flout virtue. They rail at government. Their sympathy is with the unspeakable thing that shot President McKinley. Some of them have the hardihood to draw pensions from the bounty of the institution they insult and defy. What is to be done about it? Is this nest of vipers, this unclean den of infamy, to remain undisturbed? Are there no statutes that can reach it? The men and women there are not fit to associate with normal beings. Their flag is the flag of anarchy. Their sympathies are with the Goldmans and the Isaaks. They see no wrong in the murder of the chief executive. They have among them creatures capable of writing, and who have the hardihood to address The Ledger in defense of their unspeakable doctrines. One of these is named Morton. He is a dangerous man, not fit to breathe the air of freedom. His affilia-

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tions, in which he seems to gloat, have been with the vicious and the incendiary. He claims to be a graduate of Harvard, a descendant of an honored American family. Granted that in these respects he does not lie, the shame upon him is all the greater. He and all his kind must be driven forth. This is not to advocate violence, but to vindicate decency. There surely must be legal methods of reaching these filthy things. There is more than one charge on which they may be proceeded against. If the government of the United States has no method of reaching the traitor, the government of Pierce county is not helpless. The vile can be driven hence. The Ledger has had little to say of these vermin, biding its time, but has had an eye upon them. They constitute an insult to every proper instinct, and there is no reason why they should be tolerated. They despise the constitution, and thus have thrust themselves outside the pale of the constitution. They are not citizens, but excrescences, and in the effort to purify itself Pierce county must drive them away.

Edward Williams observed of all this, as his mind fabricated Mattie Penhallow’s experience, that perhaps somewhere in the life of each of us is a microcosm of heroic and monumental events. And this was the fact that made both fiction and the small histories of nearly forgotten places into larger truths.

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Entre-Acte Girls Should Not Begin School Until Seventeen Dr. S. Weir Mitchell deliberately maintains that for all the best purposes of female society it would be better that American girls were not educated at all until they were 17, than that they are overwrought as they are at present. They study seven or eight hours a day when two or three would be sufficient to keep their intelligence in training—and all for what? To spend their after years on a sofa or sick room, and to be a burden instead of a help to those are dearest to them. It is a tremendous saying, from one speaking with authority, that as much domestic unhappiness is caused in America by nervousness among women as by dram-drinking among men. Yet such is Dr. Mitchell’s verdict. He holds that every girl ought to be examined as to her nervous temperament when about to go to school, and at frequent intervals afterward: that leisure, exercise and wholesome meals ought to be insisted upon, and that studies ought to be compulsorily diminished or discontinued altogether the moment the wellknown signs of overstrain appear. If girls are maintained in a normal nervous condition until they are 17, they may study as hard as they please afterward without imperiling the woman’s life. But let there be no mistake about it. Overwork and unnatural worry from 8 or 9 to 17 mean ruin and wretchedness from 17 till early death. —Tacoma Daily Ledger, March 12, 1902

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“I’m glad you called,” Francine said, “I’ve something very important

to talk to you about. It involves a student, and I want to bring her by with me if you don’t mind.” Helen signaled to Elvery to close the door to her office. “I think I know what it’s about, Francine. I talked to John, and that’s the reason I called.” “I’d rather discuss it in your office.” Francine was being curt. No doubt Helen had taken her by surprise. Nevertheless, Helen sensed some hesitation in her voice, perhaps a weakening of resolve. She certainly knew that these charges were difficult to prove. “That’s fine, but if it’s a student making a complaint against Harley, I’ll of course want to speak with her privately. I’d like to arrange that right away if it is going to happen—before the rumors go any farther.” “That wasn’t a sermon, was it?” Helen didn’t answer. There was a brief pause. It occurred to her that perhaps, just perhaps, Francine was having second thoughts. “I suppose that’s the way it will have to be, Helen. I’m just helping to convey the message, that’s all. But I hope you remember that she came to me.” So Francine realized there might be a suspicion that the girl had been put up to it.

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Helen wouldn’t forget. “Francine, are you sure she is willing to make an official complaint? It won’t be like talking to you. If she comes to me, I’ll be acting as an official, you realize.” A pause. “I’m sure.” Helen well knew that this whole matter could go around her to the ombudsperson. She wondered why Francine hadn’t taken that route. Was the case not really strong enough? Was it a deliberate attack on Harley, an attempt to influence the dean against him? Was Francine afraid of the outcome even as she seemed to march resolutely toward it? Helen certainly didn’t want the ombudsperson involved at this stage, and apparently Francine didn’t either. Or was Francine testing her feminism? Rather old style, she was afraid. “Well then, if she wants to lodge a complaint, you should bring her by or, better, send her. I’ll see her alone, of course. And Francine, I needn’t tell you, but you should explain to her that this is a very serious matter. There’s a point in these things when there is no turning back—for either of you.” “I, I—I’m not the one making the complaint, Helen. I’m the one she appealed to. I’m just doing what anyone . . . Anyway we’ll be there. I’ll call ahead to Elvery to get on your schedule.” “Yes, when you’re certain the young woman is really going to complain.” Helen could tell that this angered Francine, for she had to clear her throat. There was a wavery tension in her voice. “Frankly, I would think that you, Helen, would want to see justice done in this case.” “I would, of course.” Helen chose to ignore the implied accusation and not take it as an insult. Had Francine thought it would all somehow stop in the dean’s office, an unresolved and damaging charge floating around in Becker Hall and beyond? If this did go on, Harley would have to be called in, and the Lord knows what would be next. Certainly a campus hearing, perhaps a lawsuit, not untypical in these litigious days. And public revelations.

At two-thirty that afternoon, Elvery Briggs ushered Nancy Thacker into Helen Grant’s office. A fidgety Francine Wright, lurking outside, was clearly prepared to wait Helen out. Helen thought this not a good idea. She warned Francine through the door that she’d probably end up late for the department’s meeting over

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Cynthia Ragsdale’s appointment. Then she closed the door with Nancy Thacker safely inside and ushered her to a leather upholstered davenport. Helen seated herself on a chair, a coffee table between them. “Now . . . now, Nancy, what is this all about?” It was important to approach the matter directly without fuss. She recognized that the girl might very well not carry through this conversation even if there had been harassment. It was not an easy situation. She wanted Nancy to speak out, but she wished neither to encourage nor discourage. Where did encouragement to speak become encouragement to accuse? She imagined also that Nancy might bolt from the room in a moment of silence, so she went on, as if to speak was to hold her there. “Perhaps you’d care to tell me as clearly as possible what it was that brought you to me.” “I—I’m here, I mean, you, like, Francine, I mean Professor Wright was there, you know, at the party after Professor Ragsdale’s lecture, and afterwards she asked me what Professor Wales had said, and I, I thought he’d, you know, come on to me. It was real uncomfortable.” “What Professor Wales said? Did he do anything?” Helen prompted, but the young woman leapt in more quickly than she expected. “No, no, I mean like trying to tell Francine, er Wright, what had happened. She wanted to know exactly. But it was like, you know, vague. You know, subtle. “My dear, harassment isn’t subtle.” “Well, he came on to me. It made me uncomfortable. He kept getting close to me.” Helen thought of Harley in conversation, rocking back and forth, rocking toward you. It was sometimes too close, an invasion of one’s space. Others had remarked about this good naturedly. Harley was an intense and relentless conversationalist. “Did he touch you, dear? Did he say anything that disturbed you?” “Well, no, I mean yes, he was talking about our class at first, you know, and he was asking me these embarrassing questions that came up like in class about censorship and he sort of like pushed up to me.” Helen reminded herself not to say too much. “And where did this happen? Were others around? Was it crowded?” “Yes, kinda. We were in the hall. There were quite a few people. A big party. I had friends there.” “Yes, of course. And Professor Wright?” “She saw it. She even said . . .”

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“Said what?” Nancy Thacker didn’t answer. She was staring at Helen, her eyes large, as if she stared at a revelation. Her hand went to her head; she brushed back her hair. “I—I.” She seemed unable to say more. Helen waited. And then there were tears. Through them she sobbed out a desire to forget the whole thing. Maybe it hadn’t happened the way she had thought. She was sorry, very sorry to have brought it up. She’d been encouraged. She’d . . . Helen went to her desk for a Kleenex, took a place next to her on the davenport, put her arm around a huddled crying child. “Shall we just say that it was an honest misinterpretation?” “I—I, yes. I’m so sorry.” “Consider it a learning experience, Nancy. It’s so often a question of interpretation.” She thought of Harley. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to make the right reading. We know that from our literary study, don’t we? But in a matter like this it’s particularly important to get things right, isn’t it? Other lives are involved.” Nancy nodded and stared at the carpet, in which there were little figures of animals and people. Then Helen ventured a worried conjecture to herself. Nancy’s collapse had been terribly sudden. Had she felt intimidated in the dean’s office? Helen had to clear that away. “Now are you absolutely certain nothing happened, that Professor Wales did nothing untoward? It’s very important to be sure of your own reading and not merely to take someone else’s.” Nancy looked up wide-eyed. “You never know why someone else might want to see things differently.” Nancy was staring at the rug again. “I’m a feminist. I thought . . .” “We all are, in our own ways, Nancy. We all are. You’re sure now?” “Yes.” “You should not be ashamed. You’ve just acted very admirably.” “I, I’m so sorry.”

Shortly thereafter, when Harley Wales came to see her, he could suppress neither his anger nor his anxiety. He entered her office talking, and

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she decided to wait him out. He was outraged, his character had been impugned. There was a plot against him. It was beyond imagination that a colleague—a colleague he had supported for tenure, incidentally— could do such a thing, for certainly it was Francine who was behind this, she with her fake political morality, her genius at manipulation, her sexual hatreds. Why, he could not even remember the incident with, who was it, Nancy what’s-her-name. He’d likely not recognize her if she entered this room right now. He’d talked to lots of students that evening. There were others around. He’d have been crazy to pull a stunt like that in full view, even if he’d cared to. Pause. By now he was seated on the davenport, his head in his hands. Silence. Helen was formulating the words to tell him that Nancy Thacker had rescinded her accusation. She wanted him to understand the depth of the girl’s remorse. Time had seemed to slow. She did not get the words out. “And besides, for God’s sake, Helen, for God’s sake!” A long pause. A phone rang once outside the office. Helen waited. An airplane was droning over. Propeller, she thought. “Helen, I’m, for God’s sake, I’m gay. He was sobbing, curled over, shaking. “I know, Harley, I know. It makes no difference.” “Of course it makes a difference.” She went to him.

The meeting had proceeded fairly well, Jack Emory thought, everything considered. Until the accusation. It hadn’t been the same as the old days, of course, when there’d been tacit consensus on many things, and often with a little advance work one could build on it. No question about that. There had been a process of disintegration, and now the department stood for nothing in particular, even tacitly. Jack couldn’t remember a time when political ideologies had been so diverse and hung so decisively over every decision. Some people were relentless. Single-issue people, Helen called them. And so the speeches came and went. The supporters of Cynthia Ragsdale’s appointment praised her lecture, reported favorable student response, and argued that she would provide a needed perspective. They referred to Ragsdale’s scholarship with praise and claimed her work as a contribution to culture studies that opened out to break down stereotypes

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of race, class, and gender. Some of the speeches were reminders of the department’s need to appoint more women. Jack had often recently thought that fairly soon the profession would be predominantly female. Already women students outnumbered men in the English graduate program. Opponents of Cynthia Ragsdale disliked the talk or were indifferent to it, declared that it did not address significant literary matters, yet conceded Ragsdale’s likely collegiality. Clark Marshall was one of those who objected to the lack of “true literary emphasis” and thought Ella Wheeler Wilcox hardly worth her attention. But it was Harley Wales, a late arrival, who spoke most vigorously on the negative side, attempting a general critique of culture studies, claiming they were usually grounded in a political ideology out of step with the real world and unwilling to subject their own motives to scrutiny. This, he claimed, represented the emerging decadence of critical theory in politics plain and simple. At this, Francine Wright, who had arrived a little late, interrupted from the back of the room. John McComber seemed for a moment ready to rule her out of order but apparently decided that Wales had concluded his remarks. Not so Wales, who remained standing, but uncertain what to do. She barged ahead, declaring that she could not believe what she had just heard. Wales attempted to regain the floor, but she refused to be silenced and said as much. She had been silenced too many times in the past. Wales’s remarks were certainly sexist, paternalistic, and even by implication racist, still another effort to denigrate the work of women and minorities, to entrench the canon and keep hegemony over the curriculum. Clark Marshall attempted to intervene, rising and shouting out that this was not the time or place for such accusations. Wales, still standing and staring back at her, seemed on the verge of explosive speech, but the speech did not come. She held the floor, and her voice rose a pitch. She went doggedly on with hardly a pause. Elaine Brinnon, sitting next to her reached out and touched her arm, but to no avail. Furthermore, and she was almost shouting now, for those remarks to have come from someone who had shown what he thought of women four nights ago, who had sexually harassed students in public at a reception, who had shown himself unfit to vote or even comment on this appointment—all of this was too much. It was obscene. Wales, still standing, shouted out, “I won’t stand for this” and lunged past colleagues toward the aisle. It was not clear whether his intent was to

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approach Francine Wright or leave the room. At the end of the row Clark Marshall, fearing the former, attempted to intercept him, and they struggled with each other, exiting together. Their shouting voices receded down the outer corridor. Then there was absolute silence, broken by mutterings from Francine Wright, still standing, about good riddance. Elaine Brinnon was whispering “hush, hush” and reaching again for her forearm. Francine finally took her seat. John McComber cleared his throat. He said in as quiet a voice as he could muster that he thought these remarks and the response to them to have been equally unfortunate and out of order or at least a breach of necessary decorum. If anyone had anything more to say about Cynthia Ragsdale, not about others in the room, they should do so now. “Or forever hold your anger,” was a sotto voce remark from somewhere. Otherwise, silence. Jack Emory raised his hand. Colleagues stared at the door where Wales and Marshall had departed. “We’ve been a long time coming to this. Maybe our whole profession has been coming to it. I don’t know. But when it becomes impossible to discuss a candidate without these recriminations we no longer have any business making such decisions at all. When we can do nothing but press our own narrow interests at every turn, when we can argue only by attacking the motives and the dignity of others who share our enterprise, we deserve to be disenfranchised. And yet it is our business. And we can’t allow unfounded accusations to sway our judgment.” “They are not unfounded,” Francine interrupted in a loud voice. Jack stared at her and replied, “Before I was interrupted (I do have the floor), I was saying that we are dirtying ourselves and the candidate we invited here. I think the best thing we can do now is to vote. I call for the question.” A voice seconded. “But what about Clark and Harley?” someone asked. “There is a quorum. The question has been called,” John McComber announced and proceeded to ask for a show of hands. Seeking closure, the body agreed to vote, though two colleagues rose immediately and left. As the ballots were distributed Francine Wright sat stolidly in the rear staring at the ceiling. Elaine Brinnon collected the votes from rear to front.



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“After the dust settled, we voted to appoint her 20–16. Of course, Harley and Clark had left. That would probably have been two more opposed, and a couple people lit out after the ruckus and didn’t vote. On the other hand, you can’t tell. Clark might have voted yes.” “You’re not serious,” Ellen Emory said. “I can’t believe it. They just left? With a vote like that maybe Helen won’t approve it.” “We’ll have to see. Some of us may have decided a negative vote would be an injustice, a vote against Francine instead of Ragsdale. And some of us were just tired of the whole thing and thought the only way we could survive was to hope she’d heal the wounds when she got here. She might do that.” “I can’t believe it. It’s giving in to those harpies. Are you saying you voted ‘for’?” “Yes, but I could and maybe should have voted against. I decided that I should be voting about Cynthia Ragsdale, not a lot of other things.” Ellen shook her head. “Anyway, that’s not the worst of it. It’s Francine’s accusation and Harley’s anger. John had told me a student complained to Francine that Harley had made a pass at her.” “Come on!” “Yes. It’s in Helen’s hands now. Strange, Frank had to handle a harassment case at the zoo last week.” Ellen laughed. “You mean political correctness has entered the animal kingdom?” “No, no. It was the elephant handlers.” “Well, if the elephants can’t keep them in order . . .”

Frank had just finished reporting on a serious fight between two cougars, including a severed ear, and Helen had just put Kudanenaha in the backyard to investigate whether a possum was present when the phone rang. It was Jack, who said it was in her lap now and good luck. Worse was his news about Francine’s making public the accusation. “There is no accusation,” Helen replied calmly. “The young lady has withdrawn it, or rather never actually made it. Francine brought her by on the way to the meeting, and we had a talk. I’d hoped that would end it.” Jack saw at once. “Francine didn’t know the student had turned around.”

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“That must be so.” “And so in your view this is just the beginning.” “Yes.” “I’m sure you’re right. Harley is very angry, certainly he’ll complain.” Jack was correct. There was much to consider. They’d talk more tomorrow. Helen almost laughed to herself as she thought that the Ragsdale decision was no longer the principal worry in this matter after all. Anyway, she had not had time to think about it, leave alone the inclination, after Nancy Thacker had left. The late afternoon had been monopolized by space problems. How to expand the chem labs in an old building. Unexpected costs. Deans had to be ready for things to happen this way. Harley Wales— a new Harley perhaps—was not going to be a man to forgive or forget. He worked over a piece of scholarly or any other kind of information like Kudanenaha with a marrow bone. He’d pursue the matter for justice’s sake if for no other. And he had other reasons now. Or, rather, he’d always had them but now would act. Well, enough was enough for today. She switched on the answering machine, went into the TV room and sat down to watch the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.

He wouldn’t do that again. He wouldn’t fail. He would let everyone know. It would be a relief at last. Why hadn’t he done it sooner? Others had been doing it. Because he feared what could happen. Because he wanted to be the chair? Because he would do a good job. Because he didn’t want the accusations if he pushed to hire someone who happened to be gay? No, it was simply fear, the same fear that had invaded his whole being when after years he had admitted to himself, to his wife, to his children . . . And his elaborate ruses. So much for them. If Helen had known, then probably others had. He wouldn’t hide any longer. He’d fight them in the open.

“I’m afraid I’m a little late on this one, Jack. Harley was here at eight and just insisted on seeing me. He wouldn’t allow me to delay it. And he’s extremely vehement about Francine’s attack on him. Now, it’s he who wants to go to the ombudsperson. I spoke to him again about Nancy, but I doubt that an apology from anyone is going to suffice. He came out to me as gay, you know.”

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Jack had hardly sat down when Helen said this. Was it the groan of a man over sixty getting settled or a barely perceptible sign? “Ah, yes!” And then, “How was Duck Soup?” She smiled. She sensed his intent. “Oh, Harpo was wonderful. Always is.”

Helen Grant hoped to keep Nancy Thacker completely out of all subsequent conversations and events. She hoped Harley could be made to see that this hadn’t been the real Francine, but who was this Francine, and did the old one remain? Francine should apologize and Harley accept, but she feared that at best Harley would dig up this bone over and over. She saw one thing quite clearly, and Jack readily agreed. It was going to be very difficult to appoint Harley department chair and also difficult not to. By comparison the decision on Cynthia Ragsdale’s appointment to the Morgan chair was duck soup. Well, that’s what deans were for.

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Entre-Acte Anarchists are popularly supposed to be extremely wild and intolerant. Certain recent events here have demonstrated the contrary, in the courteous hearings given to an opponent of anarchy who began by telling us that we were shallow and ignorant and refused to listen to any criticism of his ex parte statements. We are not afraid to hear the other side, no matter how unfairly it may be presented. The more scope allowed to the opposition to Anarchism, the more its weakness betrays itself. —Discontent: Mother of Progress, August 21, 1901

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11

From the Sea

In the manuscript room at the University of Washington on the after-

noon of Monday, April 22, 1991, knowing that back at State at this moment the English department was meeting, and why, Edward Williams studied once again the 1902 entries pertaining to Home in Philip Van Buskirk’s diary. It was clear that Van Buskirk wasn’t the most pleasant fellow in the world. He was a loner, but then he had some reasons perhaps to have become a difficult man. In Marine Corps sea duty before the War Between the States he wasn’t popular and remained aloof from his shipmates. They shunned him and made him the object of pranks. His subsequent service in the Confederate Army ended in capture and imprisonment by the Union. He was finally discharged as unfit, only to rejoin the Marines and later serve in the Navy. Edward Williams could see from a brief account of his life prefaced anonymously to the diary that Van Buskirk was chronically discontented and appeared arrogant to those who met him. He must, on arrival at Home, have thought himself an appropriate person for an anarchist settlement. This was the man who on April 2nd of 1902 received a reply to his letter of inquiry from Mr. George H. Allen at Home.

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PHILIP VAN BUSKIRK’S DIARY April 2—Letter from Mr. George H. Allen in answer to my enquiries respecting the Home Settlement and P. O. April 5—See in the newspapers that the Home Post Office was discontinued May 1, by order of the Post Office Department. April 11—If my feelings are criteria I may describe myself as half dead and half alive, or indeed more dead than alive. . . . Home. May 14. Leaving my trunk at the Bayview, I depart from Tacoma in the steamer “Lotus” (Wm. Bradford, master) at 8 a.m. Arrive at the Home Settlement at 1:10 p.m.—Mr. Allen recognizes me on float, and kindly invites me to his home. The family consists of Mr. and Mrs. Allen and five daughters, Grace, Leila, Georgia, and Glennis. Their ages ranging from 15 to 7 years. —In the evening after supper and chores, Mr. Allen and Grace with violins and Leila at the grand piano treat us to a delightful musicale. Home. May 15. Weather too bad for a long stroll. —So far, my newly made acquaintances in the Home Settlement are: George H. Allen, Secretary of the Mutual Home Association, Charles Penhallow and wife. Mrs. Penhallow was postmistress till the 30th ultimo, when the Home Office was discontinued. Since then the Home Settlers use the Lake Bay post office, a mile and a half distant, a messenger being sent every other day for the mail and the distribution to the settlers being done as before by Mrs. Penhallow and her husband. James F. Morton, graduate of Harvard and editor of “Discontent,” a weekly published by a “group” of Home Settlers. Mrs. Fannie Burton, President of the M. H. Association. Mrs. Lois Waisbrooker, a lady 76 years old, editor, printer and publisher of the Home monthly journal entitled “Clothed With the Sun.” Home. May 16—Part of the afternoon very pleasantly spent with Mr. and Mrs. Penhallow at their home, which is just a few steps from the Allens. Home. May 17. My walk this forenoon over to Lake Bay—sometimes picking my way around and through muddy and swampy places—takes just 42 minutes, pace very leisurely. Everything, it seems to me very fine over there—land, water, and people. In the afternoon stroll along the water side to the North end of the Home Settlement and spend awhile in the woods reserved for the Park. —At night the Allen family, excepting the two smaller children, go to a musicale given in a neighboring house. Home. May 18. —In the afternoon trudge over to Lake Bay to get a handful of cigars: two friendly loungers are in the store, whom I join in

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a round of beers. In the Home Community no tobacco nor intoxicants of any kind are to be had. —In the Allen family become acquainted with Joseph Haiman, a Russian Jew, member of the H. M. A. and a fine little fellow. —In the evening with the Allens on a visit to Mr. J. W. Adams. Home. May 19. —Over to Lake Bay again for cigars. In the afternoon visit Mrs. Waisbrooker. Home. May 20. —Again the Lake Bay for cigars. —Chat with Cap J. B. Wilson over there. Otto Lichtenberg is the postmaster of Lake Bay. —Coming back I have for company Cash Thornhill, a fine boy of thirteen. Home. May 21. —Morning and evening rather cool for comfort. —To Lake Bay again—cigars—afternoon this time. —The Allens have a new boarder—a very nice man. Home. May 22. —Still another trip to Lake Bay for cigars. —Have quite a little spat with Mr. Verity and another with Mr. Allen. I guess I started both spats being nettled by the two’s persistent use of the terms “thief,” “bloodsucker,” and “vampire,” also “parasite,” whenever allusion is made to those classes in the Nation whose members are not actual and manual laborers. Home. May 23. —Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Leila depart in the 7 a.m. steamer for Tacoma, leaving Grace in charge. —The new boarder and I take a walk together over to Lake Bay. —To Mr. Penhallow’s in the evening to hear Mr. Morton read from Shelley. He had for audience only three ladies and myself. Home. May 24. —If I remember aright we had chicken for dinner last Sunday; with that exception, I have not eaten flesh of any kind since coming here. Home. May 25. —The Allens get home from Tacoma at about noon. —Two strangers came in the same boat; dine with us, and will depart for Tacoma later in the afternoon. Their visit is only to see what “anarchists” and “free lovers” look like. Home. May 26. —In the evening pay a visit to Mrs. Verity. Home. May 27. —Trudge across to Lake Bay in the forenoon—for cigars. —our new boarder—Mr. W. Gloerfeld, of 109 Yesler Way, Seattle—will leave us tomorrow before I am out of bed, and so takes leave of me to-night. He impresses me as an excellent man. As his home is in Seattle and not on Joe’s Bay I place his name on my Seattle list of “Acquaintances newly made.” Home. May 28. —Over again to Lake Bay for cigars. Home. May 29. —In the dusk of evening call to have a talk with Mr. Penhallow, only to be trapped into listening to another reading of the

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Poets (this time Wordsworth) by Mr. Morton. Audience same as before, with addition of Mr. Penhallow, who, however, needing rest from the labors of the day, soon falls asleep. Home. May 30. —Twice over to Lake Bay. —Mail from Monroe at six p.m. Hear from Mr. Clyatt, Cousin Nellie, and Mr. Olson. Home. May 31. —Stroll up the hill to rear of settlement. Tacoma. June 1. Bid my good friends the Allens good-bye! Kiss all the children excepting Grace who is too far advanced towards womanhood to be kissed. —Mr. Allen takes me out to the Float; and at 2:50 p.m. I depart in the Tyconda from Home.

Edward Williams closed the diary after reading a few more entries. By July 10 Van Buskirk had returned to property he owned near Monroe, northeast of Seattle. The community, such as it was, was called Lone Hill, an appropriate eminence against which this rolling stone came to rest, Williams thought. He supposed that the test of any anarchist community would be the loner, the fellow who didn’t pitch in, who walked to Lakebay daily and eventually twice daily, who found himself trapped into abiding indefatigable local lecturers, and who uttered different political attitudes. Well, Discontent had announced that some would not find it tolerable there. A young librarian trying to be of help suggested that he might also want to see the Louis Haiman and Jay Fox papers. He was always pleasantly surprised by the altruistic zealotry of good librarians and told her he’d certainly be back another day for a look. Right now he was checking his transcription for accuracy. In fact, he was finished for now. Just one puzzle. Yes, Van Buskirk had written “five” where he must have meant there were four Allen daughters. He had tentatively marked “sic” in his transcription. Was there another daughter away from home? He’d check. Stopping for coffee at George’s under Odegaard Library, Williams idly turned the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He was deliberately wasting time before getting into his car and onto the freeway back to State. The White House was defending John Sunnunu’s airplane travel. The Marines in Iraq were going to create refugee camps for the Kurds. Several school districts were threatening to take the striking teachers to court. The Mariners had swept the series with the As. Helen Grant would be happy, particularly because it was the As. She had developed a special antipathy toward José Canseco, who had looked bad at the plate.

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Williams imagined himself visiting Home in 1902—the embarkation at Tacoma, the first view of the hillside as the steamer came into Joe’s Bay, the greeting at the dock, no doubt by George Allen, the musicale, and the Shelley reading, discussions of politics and economics. Would he, too, eventually have made compulsive trips to Lakebay? Would it be the isolation that finally did it? The enclosed society? He observed to himself that Muirhead had worked every day cutting wood. Van Buskirk hadn’t, or at least hadn’t recorded any like activity. Those were, he thought, Home’s best days. The legal disputes of the teens, mainly over property ownership changed Home irrevocably. Liberty Hall was sold for lumber in 1921. Back on the freeway Edward Williams knew that he had taken the opportunity to absent himself from State so that there was no possibility of his contact with anyone in English before the meeting about Cynthia Ragsdale. As the local member of the review committee, he wished to be as much like an outsider as possible. One thing he knew. Once involved, he wouldn’t have time to be trudging to any Lakebay for any reason at all.

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Entre-Acte We also find that those who are the most enthused when they come are often the ones who leave the quickest. —Discontent: Mother of Progress, May 15, 1901

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12

Cloudy all Day

In his hotel room after their dinner meeting Jason Talbot, external

member of the review committee for the department of English, former colleague of Jack Emory and Will Person in the dark, far days at Walton University and still a good friend, though separated by distance, considered his cohorts. It was, he thought, not only a proper but also a politically correct committee. There was first of all José Riera, the minority figure, an expert on the literature of the Americas. There was the redoubtable Devere Ferguson for the women, scholar of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Ann Radcliffe, in her own department a chair, chairwoman, or chairperson, according to your druthers. The local representative was Edward Williams, from another department, of course, according to university protocol. And finally there was himself, a good ole boy from Texas and southern places East, to represent all that was wise and true in the traditional canon of English literature and to lend sectional and, yes, he supposed, a certain cultural diversity. This fellow Williams was clearly an old cowhand. He’d herded them to and from table without help of other drovers or lariat. They’d acquiesced to his seating arrangements, drunk the wines he’d ordered (very fine), heard his stories, and told theirs when prompted. It seemed that Williams had made a certain reputation as a historian of the British Isles, but now

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he was working on Utopias in the West. That was why he referred frequently to Home, which turned out to be a commune somewhere nearby and was not, as Jason at first naturally thought, well, home. Once they had been seated, Williams recycled (why, surely they had been used before) a few wry comments on academic departments as anarchic, intellectual Utopias, the only problem being that all Utopias known to him had eventually died out, but departments went on forever. Deans could put them in receivership, remove their phones, curtail their supply of yellow-lined paper and marking pens, double up the professors in offices, but they’d persist, drastically reduced and humiliated as they might have become. Paranoia was the strong glue that held them together. They represented the social analogue of chaos theory. They were the places where it was not unnatural for eccentricity to be ubiquitous and normal behavior to be slightly aberrant. Departments were, Williams allowed, when they functioned, similar to what critics called great poems, a tension of oppositions and, in the best postmodern way, without closure. Jason remembered these remarks through the ensuing conversations. Williams’s performance was designed to set all at ease, but it was also possible that he had sketched out their problem, a department in disorder. José Riera, a fastidiously dressed little man, provided a contrast to the billowy Devere Ferguson of ample shape, beside him. Jason imagined them momentarily as characters in an early movie comedy. Riera had responded to Williams’s peroration by declaring for difference within the same. There were departments and then there were other departments. In his view some were tyrannies or had a recent history of tyranny, and some had attained the condition of anarchy, a state by no means necessarily bad, given the university as an institution. “My remark is malicious, is it not?” he said, smiling, fingering the stem of his wine glass and then carefully adjusting his well-linked shirt cuffs. He begged to declare that departments of Spanish were preeminent in the orderly distribution of chaos and revolution. He had been an unfortunate hostage in one years ago where there was played out relentlessly a microcosmic version of the Spanish civil war of the thirties, complete with loyalists and fascists. There had eventuated a total inability to distinguish justice from revenge. Then came a move to pass the chair’s duties from one member to another monthly. This the dean had considered a deliberate affront to reasonable behavior and his own leadership. He was known to have declared that to deal with the department had been every bit as discouraging as a series of calls to his publisher. A different person was always behind the desk at the

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other end of the line, and sometimes the whole company had been sold. Fortunately for a time, some professors were deeply moved by the dean’s anguish, never before having recognized him as human; and the department reverted to replaying the thirties. It was this department that had driven Riera entirely into English at his institution, a citadel of order, presided over by a famous bibliographer of the school of Fredson Bowers and who openly declared that academia should be run according to the law of the Medes and the Persians. Spanish departments, as he had experienced them were, wind driven, existential windmills. Every dean, mad or sane, must have at one time or another, tilted with them. Devere Ferguson added that every type of department harbored an archetype of its subjects. She knew colleagues in German who yearned for order but hated the type imposed. And French departments possessed a mad excess of rationality, no doubt descending from Descartes. Williams nodded. “And can we characterize ourselves?” Devere asked. “English departments appear more like the Balkans,” Williams said. “Yes, that’s fair,” she replied. “Diversity become civil war, at least these days.” “Do you think that the best to be hoped for is a live-and-let-live anarchism? After all, I think we all know that there needs to be reorganization of the curriculum. Things have changed. Budgets are far worse, yet there are more demands on us. We don’t have all the many pretty toys we used to have, and we’ve never had anything like what the scientists have had. ‘Our goodies,’ a biologist here called them.” “Indeed, granted, but how to begin, with all the fragmentation.” “It’s not really fragments of an original order. No one remembers an original order. Of if they do it’s a myth. It’s a thing growing in all of these different directions with no concentration on the outcome for the student.” Devere Ferguson looked directly at Jason for some reason, not Williams, and said, “I hope we aren’t going to be witnessing diversity in diversity here. You can’t escape communal decisions, after all—granting or withholding tenure, for example. People are often chewed up by that, especially women in some places.” “Yes,” Jason replied, “especially those who tilt with windmills. I bet we find some windmill-tilting has gone on hereabouts.” Riera looked up, a little surprised. Jason had been nearly silent to the moment.

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An interesting group, maybe. Then the phone rang. It had to be and was Jack Emory. “You here to see we sit up like folks?” the voice asked. “Why, as sure as this ain’t Texas! How are you?” “You’re going to tell us.” In the few times they’d met since the days they’d been colleagues at Walton University under the Fastest Dean in the West, it had always been as if little time had passed. Their friendship had been based on common adversity and an appreciation of each other’s wit. It had been like an ongoing conversation merely punctuated by the years. More recently, however, time had lengthened out to equal the almost fifteen hundred miles between their universities. Having now reached their sixties, they were somewhat farther apart by virtue of the loss of common ground and common acquaintances. In many ways this was the same Jack, but he seemed, as he talked on, a warier one. It then occurred to Jason with rather a shock that for the first time in their long acquaintance he was in a position that might be regarded by Jack as one of judge, and it seemed to make a difference. Jack was ever so slightly on his guard. It made Jason begin to measure his own words. Jack was describing the English department in the manner of a very circumspect houyhnhnm of instruction. It seemed that he was about to hold out for inspection a piece of information while deliberately refusing to name it. Jack described disagreement over an impending appointment and the usual unrest that preceded the naming of a new chairman. Yet he did not quite refrain from leaving the effect that there were deeper currents of discontent. The words didn’t seem to say what he meant, or maybe they were precisely conveying a mood he intended. Jason did not like this situation. Oh, it was not that something was hidden. He’d find that out eventually. It was that Jack was disturbing Jason’s long-held impression of him. Jack had always said what was what, a man of “absolutely no bullshit,” as a colleague had once put it. Later the next morning, after sleeping on it, Jason decided that Edward Williams, too, had produced but the ghost of a rabbit from an elegant top hat of words. Jason just hadn’t been on the lookout at the time. Aristotle had advised to avoid ambiguity unless, of course, you intended to be ambiguous. There was something odd about the search to fill the Morgan Professorship. No names had been mentioned, no implied judgments. Far too reticent on that subject, both of these men.

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The theme of the appointment kept recurring in a similarly ghostly way through the morning’s interviews with faculty. It was not until Elaine Brinnon came by that there was what he regarded as a ray of light. You never knew what was going to turn up on a faculty these days. Years ago one might have asked, what’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this? Fact was, Jason saw before him a very attractive young woman. About ten years back his students would have declared her a fox. What the epithet was now, he didn’t know, having lost some touch. He did recognize that she brought out the best that he had to offer in Southern gentlemen. And so he stood when she entered the office temporarily assigned to him and responded with a good natured grin when she said, “Well, Mr. Talbot, you’re an unlikely Savonarola.” “Is orthodoxy a rule here?” He realized she’d interpret that as a leading question. “I think, or hope, that orthodoxy is no longer to the point.” “Ah, yes, but there always remains a lingering trace.” “Are you drawing me?” she asked gaily. “Why surely. As an inquisitor, I must. Have to justify my presence. Tell me now, what do you think the department needs most to do?” “Mr. Talbot, I’m just an assistant professor. What they need to do is promote me.” “Top of the agenda. And next?” “Try to get people back together.” “You mean promoting you will cause a fracture?” He had decided to misinterpret her intent. She laughed. “Hmm, I suppose, but just another one of many. No, that’s not what I meant. Do you know that fifty percent of the freshmen here are minorities? It won’t be long before the Asians will be a plurality. We’ll all be minorities. Shouldn’t we recognize that if we don’t look at what we’re doing we’ll go the way Classics departments have gone?” “What’s your subject, Miss, ah, er, Elaine. Do you mind?” “Oh, no. Me? Now you’re going to think it’s special pleading. I do postcolonial stuff—what used to be the British Empire. But, of course, that’s too big a subject, so we need some other people. There’s English literature written in Africa, India, Australia . . .” “You really are dealing with lingering traces.” “Yes. It doesn’t help to find colonialist attitudes in your colleagues. The hegemony of English—you know, ‘real’ English, manufactured in Albion.”

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“Do I detect that you see yourself as colonized?” “No, I just have promotion paranoia, I suppose. I shouldn’t be taken all that seriously, but I do think we have to rethink and open up our curriculum. But not so everyone just teaches what they want to. And we need a direction. We don’t have it. Every time we meet we argue and get off the subject and can’t reach any decision. We decide not to decide.” “What kind of arguments?” Elaine Brinnon looked at him intensely, looked around the room. “Oh, you know—just arguments with each other, sorta personal sometimes.” “And you think it’s because there’s no basic consensus.” “I—I think so.” “You hope that’s it?” “Yes, I’d hate to think there are other reasons. You know, personal hatreds that build up and poison the atmosphere. Or any kind of personal matters. We should be professionals, after all.” As much as he wanted to follow this line, he balked. There was something not right about continuing it, especially with an assistant professor in a tough spot. But could any group function merely by changing its curriculum or the way it voted or how it chose its graduate students? Wasn’t the question really a deeper one of communal behavior—a consensus at least about that? But Jason Talbot was not going to change the world of State. He was not here to be a missionary in the spirit he recalled and didn’t quite trust in Jack at Walton years ago. Nor had he the zealous individualism of Will Person. He was certainly not the political animal that Edward Williams seemed to be. Jason thought by now that he knew himself a little bit and that he could listen and report. And so he listened through the day. He watched Clark Marshall pace and fulminate against culture studies; two thirtyish scholars spoke urgently in their behalf. He heard creative writers complain of politicization in the classroom and abandonment of interest in literature, especially poetry. He heard younger faculty complain about being chewed up in the “culture wars,” worried about how their stances would affect their hopes for tenure. A group of graduate students expressed unhappiness about the way teaching assistantships were awarded and wondered where the power really was. They suspected conspiracy. None of this came as a surprise. It was, he thought, in the nature of things. But when he spoke with Harley Wales it was different. Harley Wales, he had been given to believe, was the principal candidate for the

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chairmanship. Yet there sat before him a fidgety, distracted White Rabbit. He allowed his conversation to run down what seemed odd corridors. His references to colleagues were strangely veiled, as if he and they actually did exist in a conspiratorial world. This certainly didn’t auger well. How had Wales become a candidate at all? Was he under some new pressure not revealed? Late in a full day, shortly before the review committee was to meet to discuss its report, Jason Talbot was visited by a woman professor, who virtually burst into his office, introducing herself brusquely with “I’m Francine,” as if by now surely he would know about her or maybe always should have. It was not necessary in this case to encourage conversation. Her oratory was what Aristotle would have described as of the forensic type, attack or defense, and she was all attack. This was, she claimed, a racist and sexist department, and the worst thing was that most of the men in power were so insensitive that they just didn’t get it. She wouldn’t make it to tenure here now or even be appointed. There was insufficient effort to hire minorities and women, and now they were going to have a new administration that would do nothing. Someone had to do something before it was too late. Furthermore, the young female faculty—excellent people, people like Elaine Brinnon—were in jeopardy. She stared across the desk at Jason as if somehow he were responsible or would be. She declared that she put little faith in his committee to have any effect. She hoped she was wrong. Then she rose and departed as abruptly as she had entered, with nary a cordial word. Jason sat there for a moment, gathered up his notepapers, and headed for the committee meeting. He wouldn’t have to make any notes about that! Well, maybe, “Off with their heads!”

Down the hall in the faculty common room, Edward Williams and Devere Ferguson were already in conversation. “She wasn’t terribly agitated when I talked to her,” Devere said. “She was concerned about the women in the department, of course, and women studies generally, but that’s not unusual. Few women are going to be complacent about it.” Jason joined in. “You’all must be talking about Francine, a, Francine—Wright. She just ended her oration to me. I was spellbound. I mean to say that we did not engage in dialectic. Why, I doubt I said six words!”

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Williams looked pained, but he left Jason’s remarks sitting there. It was his only moment of cracked aplomb. Jason thought, there’s more of a problem here than a typical bristling feminist. Devere’s face was a mask. She would not comment. At that moment, José Riera entered. “You see before you, dear colleagues, begging your reverences, the recipient victim of hours of relentless high seriousness. Matthew Arnold could not have known what a toll it would take when it is not diluted by laughter, raillery, farce, or even bitter irony.” This pleased Williams, who had appeared for a moment in need of comic relief. Devere Ferguson smiled but said nothing. It seemed to Jason that Riera’s elegant mode threw her a little off stride. It was not a brief meeting. First, they discussed the curriculum and decided on some recommendations. Jason thought Elaine Brinnon would be pleased. He wondered if anything could please Francine Wright, and he imagined at best grim acquiescence from Clark Marshall. They talked about graduate student enrollment, admissions, class size. Then very slowly they arrived at personnel. It was clear to Jason that Edward Williams was not going to let things get out of hand. Yet he managed this with no show of anxiety. The attitude he projected was based on his experience that committees such as this could recommend organizational changes and sometimes intellectual, that is to say, curricular decisions, but as to personnel, ah, only merciful time could take care of that. Yet Jason was sure that for each of them during the day, it had been personalities that dominated their experience; but there was no image emerging, only a cloud of innuendo. Something remained unsaid. It was a situation of anger and anxiety. Devere had not grasped it. José probably saw it as exemplary of a ubiquitous confusion that one must accept. Edward Williams? He knew, but he was not talking. Jason thought, fairly enough, that if Francine Wright and Harley Wales were not at the center of it, some of it had surely rubbed off on them. He casually remarked that he was puzzled by some aspect of his interviews; there should be a figure in the carpet or a beast in this jungle. Williams looked at him intently, perhaps waiting for him to proceed. A quizzical expression passed over his face that revealed amusement. Jason felt challenged, put to the test.

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Entre-Acte The seats in the United States court room will hold a motley crowd this morning, for the little colony at Home across the Sound, which advocates the abolition of man-made laws, including those that restrain the sex relations, is coming to town in force. The colonists will not be the guest of United States Attorney Cushman and they will not smile when that genial gentleman makes his appearance. Not being in love with the law itself, they are disposed to look with contempt upon an arm of it that attempts to meddle with their affairs. —Tacoma Daily Ledger, July 15, 1902

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13

If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame

In July of 1902 the case against Mattie Penhallow and Lois Waisbrooker

involving the journal Clothed With the Sun, its article “The Awful Fate of Fallen Women,” and the mailing thereof finally came to trial in Tacoma. This time there was no mistake about the date, July 15th. Against Mattie Penhallow was the charge that as postmistress at Home she “unlawfully did knowingly deposit and cause to be deposited in the post office thereat one certain obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent publication, to wit a newspaper and periodical of an indecent character.” Mrs. Waisbrooker was likewise charged as author of the article and editor. A bail of $300 had been paid on March 11th by friends at Home. On March 8th, the Tacoma Daily Ledger had referred in an editorial to Mrs. Waisbrooker: “. . . the worst is the work of an old woman, apparently a senile pervert. There does not appear to be any reason why she should not be in an asylum.” A friend, Mr. J. W. Gaskine, responded quickly on March 10th with a vehement defense of both women: The postmistress—a Mrs. Penhallow—is a woman of admirable character, self-contained, well informed, modest, respectful to everybody and respected in return. There is not the slightest reason to suppose she ever wrote or mailed an obscene letter, except as interpreted by the muddy imagination of a bigot or a fool.

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The Lois Waisbrooker, who has also been indicted, is a woman over 70. She has been a writer of books most of her life and there is a great deal of truth in those books and it would do many ignorant people a lot of good to read them. Last winter she went to Home, bought $60 worth of lumber from her slender savings and the people put up a nice little house for her without charge for their labor. She had it neatly painted and has planted flowers about it with her own hands and in one of the rooms she sits quiet most of every day composing with the type as she thinks out the sentences for her articles in her own monthly paper called “Clothed With the Sun.” A refined, crippled old woman who has devoted her life to what she thinks human good. Shame on the American manhood which permits this old woman in feeble health to be dragged in custody from the pretty house her kind friends have given her and be placed in a jail for trial.

Thus the stage had been set several months before for a trial. Clearly, jury selection would be a tedious, drawn-out process.

The time it had taken was wearying to Lois Waisbrooker. Mr. Gaskine had been correct about her health, which, she was convinced, she had inherited from her parents. Her father was from a consumptive family, and she remembered her mother, who had died at 36, saying she could not recollect when she had seen a well day. Lois Waisbrooker herself had seen “some days once in a while, one, two, and even three at a time, when it was a glory to live,” but “they would not tarry,” and most of the years, by her own account had been “years of weariness and pain.” She was 76 now, white-haired, plagued by rheumatism. Her face was deeply wrinkled and her cheeks thin and shrunken. But her eyes were bright, and no one challenged the vigor of her mind. Mattie Penhallow was right that she was no stranger to courtrooms. Eight years before, when she was editing and editorializing from Topeka in Foundation Principles, the postal inspector had charged her with mailing obscene matter. The case dragged on, as had this one. It was put over from 1894 to 1895 and finally 1896. She had plead guilty then. Not now. For almost 40 years, back beyond the time when she had published Suffrage for Women and her novels Alice Vale, Helen Harlowe’s Vow, and Mayweed Blossoms, she had expected opposition and even hatred. She had experienced it before the War Between the States when she had taught in schools for colored children. She had been ridiculed because she had later

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Lois Waisbrooker at the side door of her new house at Home, 1902. Courtesy Sylvia Retherford.

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taken up spiritualism for a while. But the attacks had been mainly because she had spoken out forthrightly and explicitly and often about the lives of women. The judge—he wasn’t the same one as in March—was instructing the jury, and she listened with less forbearance than her outward demeanor would indicate. All her writings, a lifetime of work had not changed things enough. Here she was once more. Most of the instruction pertained to Mrs. Penhallow. From what he was saying, Mrs. Penhallow would be acquitted: “If you find from the evidence in this case that the defendant was not engaged in the mailing of any other paper except one, the one on which the indictment is founded, and that said copy was mailed by her at the solicitation of a postal official, and that she would not have mailed the same had it not been for such solicitation; then it is your duty to acquit the defendant.” Well, she knew that Wayland had used the assumed name of Lane to solicit a copy of Clothed With the Sun. Indeed, after many evasions he was admitting it as the first witness on the stand. It would be a long day. Lois Waisbrooker sighed deeply. It was hot in the room. She expected that she herself would be convicted once again. “You are to determine as to whether or not the grouping of the words into sentences produces in the mind thoughts or desires forbidden to be conveyed by the statute.” The jury would see the difference between her situation and Mrs. Penhallow’s. The jury she gazed at was composed, of course, strictly of men. She and Mrs. Penhallow were the only women officially involved in this case. The judge, the attorneys, the prosecutors, the other court officials and guards—all were men and always were men. They would have judged any issue of Clothed With the Sun obscene. The charge against her was a way men kept power. By mystifying sex. Any effort to get some of that power for women would be obscene, no matter what the words. “I demand freedom for woman as WOMAN, and that all institutions of society be adjusted to such freedom, and I demand a home for woman. Did you ever stop to think that woman is homeless? “That which another controls is not mine. It is man’s home and the children are his. True thro’ earnest agitation there are some exceptions, but as a rule the above is true. Man says that woman’s sphere is the home. Well, let her have a home then; one that she can control, to which she can admit whom she pleases, and shut out such as she can not harmonize with. Adjust economic conditions to women’s freedom.” She’d written that.

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Yes, they would have said it was obscene. The fool Wayland had finished testifying. With his admissions, it had to be clear to all that Mrs. Penhallow should be acquitted. But Wayland swore that Mrs. Penhallow told him she had read the article before mailing it. That returned everything back to the obscenity charge. Mrs. Penhallow was being sworn in now, and Cushman was going to ask her, yes, whether she had read what she had mailed. She was certainly vehement in her denial. She insisted that Wayland had somehow misunderstood her, not that he was lying. But he was always lying. He lied to himself. He was one of those selfappointed godly people. Part of the curse of godism. She’d written on that in connection with the necessity of absolute freedom for women and angered the Waylands of the world: “If there were an infinite personality he would be morally responsible for the welfare of the beings he created. The present conditions of the human family are proof positive that no such almighty, all-wise, all-good personality exits.” Obscene, of course, by Wayland’s standard. But if there was a god and he was male, as the scriptures and Milton and everyone else had it, well, perhaps the present conditions were his will. But he’d not be all-wise or all-good. Cushman was asking Mrs. Penhallow if it was true that she was an anarchist. Mrs. Penhallow smiled at him. “Oh yes,” she said. “Are you an atheist?” “Yes.” Cushman paused, stared at her and then at the jury, and turned the witness over to the defense. During the lunch recess Mrs. Lois Waisbrooker, born Adeline Eliza Nichols, author of The Three Fold Power of Sex, The Sex Revolution, and Women’s Sense of Power, who had once formally addressed the Kansas Free Thinkers Association on the subject of motherhood, mother herself of Mr. A. B. Fuller of California, anticipated a grueling examination. It was so. The questions inquired into her beliefs and past writings. Yes, indeed, she held for individual freedom and responsibility; only the completely free woman could speak for women. She opposed social planning. Yes, she was an atheist and anarchist. To have no laws would be better than to have those that treated women as chattel. Did she believe in female superiority? She believed in female power, in the female as the creative principle, the male as the destructive. There needed to be a balance of these forces. The female was nature’s builder,

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the attractive force, the force of love. That love had to be free of all fetters, free of the institution that imprisoned it. “The family?” Cushman asked. “The family as we know it. All external bonds.” As to the article in question, was it not obscene, if not in language, then in the thoughts suggested? She could not see why. It advocated freedom for women, freedom to love. It was mainly an appeal for help for desperate women, including those reduced to prostitution, to free them from ignorance of venereal disease and their own bodies. It tried to alert women to the dangers to mothers and infants. The language was clinically explicit. It referred to female bodily parts and functions as it had to do. The article combated the ignorance in which male society imprisoned women of all classes. It was not protection that they needed but knowledge, just as it had been for the colored children she had taught decades ago. If male society was so squeamish about the parts of the female body that they were afraid to hear certain words uttered, so much the worse for the family. It had been a tiring effort for her, but she had given no quarter, and she could sense a rustling of approval from some in the courtroom. She had carried her message as she always had, a bitter message for woman and man. And now she was exhausted. It was very warm in the crowded room. She was light-headed and feared she might lose consciousness, though it mattered less now. Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Penhallow were supporting her as she left the stand. Others conveyed her to the hallway. She was uncertain for a moment who they were or where she was. A wet cloth was being applied to her forehead. Someone was urging her to drink some water. She wanted to sleep.

Lois Waisbrooker was not able to recover sufficiently to be present at 10:15 that evening when after 3 1/2 hours of deliberation the jury returned to pronounce Mattie Penhallow innocent and herself guilty. She was, however, in court the next morning at the culminating moment of sentencing, the moment that James Morton several weeks later in The Demonstrator, successor to the banned Discontent, called a “moral victory entirely on our side.” Judge DeHaven, that morning, could have pronounced a fine of as much as $5000 and imprisonment up to five years. But it was abundantly clear that he disagreed with the verdict, and he

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imposed the lowest possible fine, $100, and then, to the surprise of everyone, suspended even that. Mrs. Waisbrooker was free to return to Home with the many friends and well-wishers who had made the voyage to Tacoma and had faithfully attended the trial. The Tacoma Daily Ledger tried to make the best of it in an editorial on the following day, July 17th:

Improper Use of Mails An aged woman who has just been convicted of sending improper matter through the mails has been given a minimum sentence. It was not supposed the court would be harsh with her, her years suggesting mercy. There was no desire to see the prisoner exposed to great hardship, and any course that would serve as a restraint would seem to be sufficient. The character of the matter published by this woman was objectionable rather for its sheer nastiness than for any harm it could work, for it could not excite any other emotion than disgust. It is inconceivable that the theories she advocated could find lodgment in any mind reasonably sane. They might, however, pervert the mind of youth by turning it into channels best avoided. Every time there is a conviction for an offense of this class it is a triumph for decency. There is no desire to restrict the proper expression of opinion but there are rules of propriety that may not be disregarded without degrading society to a certain extent. An opinion that cannot be expressed without shocking the senses would better be left unex-

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pressed, and certainly the mails are not for the purpose of disseminating such trash.

At Home, life resumed as before, except that the inhabitants were still adjusting to the absence of their post office. It had been moved down the road to Lakebay by the Postmaster General on advice of the grand jury that had brought in the indictments in the first place. So what happened now to the mail was as follows: It was collected in bulk at Lakebay, and, just as before, Mattie Penhallow distributed it.

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Entre-Acte A declaration of principles was adopted last night by a sub-committee of the committee selected at a meeting held in Custer post hall Saturday night, when it was determined to take active steps to put down anarchistic tendencies. The principles outlined by the sub-committee will unquestionably be approved and an active effort will be made, beginning this morning, to secure members for the new organization. The committee proposes, in effect, to form a vigilance committee. Its declaration of principles is drawn with that intention and one provision specifies that the members pledge themselves to obey the orders of superior officers. The rules of the organization are also to be obeyed promptly and in different ways the committee has provided for rigid enforcement of its edicts. No Violence Expected The committee, however, does not contemplate violence and does not believe it will be necessary. If possible, all proceedings will be taken in a strictly legal manner, but, as a member of the committee explained last night, if fifty men marched to a street-corner agitator who was expressing anarchistic sentiments and ordered him to desist they would be interfering with a public meeting and acting illegally under the present statutes, especially so if it became necessary to lead the agitator out into the country where the breezes could fan his fevered brow and he could take a dispassionate view of the situation.

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The committee is in deadly earnest and proposed to be prepared for heroic action if it becomes necessary to meet the question in that manner. Proceedings will be commenced along legal lines against those known to be anarchists or sympathizers with that sect. Set of Principles The set of principles adopted follows: “Name. —This organization shall be known as The Loyal League of North America. “Object. —Its object shall be to accomplish the utter annihilation of anarchists and anarchistic teachings within the borders of North America, and to prevent disloyalty to the existing form of government. “Membership. —Any citizen of the United States, the Dominion of Canada, or Mexico, over the age of 25 years, who has never been convicted of an infamous crime, is eligible to membership. “Pledge. —We, the subscribers herein pledge ourselves, on our honor, to obey such rules as may be adopted for the government of the organization, and, for the purpose of carrying out its objects we will give instant and unquestioning obedience to such executive officers as may be elected by the league.” The Home Group A group of anarchists living on Joe’s Bay at the postoffice of Home has been attracting considerable attention,

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and there has been considerable talk of an investigating expedition which would make a trip to the place on a specially chartered boat with the proper equipment for an immediate and respectful hearing. The new vigilance committee does not propose to take such drastic measures. It is declared the colony can be broken up by legal proceedings against those known to be practicing the doctrine of free love. This would include most of the colony, and the members left, it is believed, would quickly scatter. At the same time, the committee holds to the belief that there are but a few rabid anarchists at Home. So, while some steps toward eradicating the colony will be taken, it is not likely force will be attempted. —Tacoma Daily Ledger, September 17, 1901

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14

Thoughts From Abroad

May 20, 1991 Jay boy, Well, I wasn’t shocked. Hell, I wasn’t even surprised when they called on my friend Ole Eagle Eye to look over what in Beelzebub’s name was going on out there. I’d heard even here that they couldn’t agree on who should have an endowed chair. I suppose Jack poured it all into the portals of thine ears. Gawd, but he looks like a colonial officer type in these his dotage days, eh? I say, the mustache is a bit much, wot? Anyway Ellen’s still beautiful Ellen, thank the Muses. Under oath I’d admit I had a good time, especially defending my honor ’gainst the serape-clad horde of local Cerridwens. Looked like a whole camp of teepees coming towards me. Woods to Dunsinane and all that. While I was there, and you probably heard tell of it, they were actually about to appoint, or not appoint, Cindy Ragsdale, a bold act for a collection of aged post-new critics and post-Fryeans, post-structuralists, post-post-structuralists, post-colonial colonialists, and post-patriarchialists. I had the distinct privilege and high honor of feeling the very idea would cause Jack to swallow his mustache, if it wasn’t sure to tickle him inside. And I don’t think he’s in a laughing mood inside or out. I suppose Cindy was scuttled by her friends and supported by those who opposed her but, on the principle of fair play, voted “aye.” I

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haven’t heard how it came out, if it did, and I don’t care except that, entering in medias res, as I never say, one wants to exit with some movement, whether forward or flashback, accomplished. Will you, good sir, therefore finally inform me at your earliest convenience, so that I can leap off that plot at the next stop? I prefer the report to be clear of deliberative rhetoric, which seems to have become Jack’s way, at least to and from airports. Thus, I call on you. I believe he has been infected by years of proximity to that Williams chap. I shall not mind your ancient bardic tendency to embody information in a suspenseful narrative structure, as that delights as well as teaches. One is never too old to learn, and at our ages we can do with some minimal delights. You see, I still place great trust in your powers to order vast masses of materials into beginning, middle, and end. Of course, you must realize that whatever you tell me I’ll keep secret to no one. I’ll subject it to a dressing of hyperbole as it passes through me. Incidentally, things pass through me pretty well these days, except for gallstones. I’m reading around, risking the usual social diseases that beset late manhood, including enlargement of the ego, not at all unusual in aging poets. Oh, there is always the threat of being quarantined for sexism, perhaps genetic, in my case, but hell, you can pick up that virus steering among the behemoth women in the supermarket. So I’m all right, and from what I could tell of State, my program of moralistic abstention from academe (with periodic lapses), self-prescribed after our glorious stint at Walton, was the correct action. The present culture wars are not appropriate for poets. I’ll just struggle with the squaws who attend me, thank you. Those wars have nothing to do with poetry, which most of the combatants on either side respect so highly that they rarely ever approach it. They’re reading each other commenting on each other in books that footnote each other and titled “Reading Geoffrey Bluenose Reading Paul Bluenose Reading.” Anyway, how do you scan Jacques Derrida? \\x\? or \xx\? or perhaps \xxx? Who’s to say? Not like, “Lord Byron who wrote such fine poems / That we know just how finely to read them.” Just gallop along. But very few meter maids left these days. If you want to know what I think, I think they should have hired ole Cindy, who at least can negotiate a prose passage and whose feminism is the right stuff. She’ll do them no harm and make some of them feel better when the weather turns brillig. As for Jack, he’ll just have to get into decolonialization, starting with removal of accumulated facial hair. After a thaw he was cordial. Beats me! Cheers, Will

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May 25, 1991 Dear Will, As an academic sleuth, it turns out, I’m a bust, unless falling into the answer counts for something. Let’s say it does. The Ragsdale thing, when I left, was on the dean’s desk, and we all know what that means— the personnel committees have ground finely the subtle double negatives of referees. So I’m of absolutely no help in reaching a grasp of denouement. Patience, though, dear reader, another tale doth unfold, of which I have middle and end and concoct a beginning. In medias res, I begin—the heroic turnpike road as the bad Lord said. I studied Jack’s face until it became clear to me what was what. Yes, the mustache! It has, in my opinion, brought out something that perhaps lurked there unnoticed by us over the years. Jack has a richly pukka side. This, I now see, helped him to deal with the West’s Fastest Dean (you recall that gentleman, do you not?). It led Jack to resolute action in those days based on high moral purpose if not quite the Kantian categorical imperative. Jack’s present case is now, I should say (or at least I so view it), less definable as yet another example of our dotage all around. No doubt this appears to the young as inscrutability, partly because our facial and other muscles do not work as well as they once did and partly because there is less and less to smile about. But like the mad, bad, dangerous Lord, I digress. I arrived and at once faced the problem of determining Jack’s position on the issues of the day at State. Not easy. Jack was in an on-this-hand, on-that-hand mood. He was acknowledging the problems of the profession in general—p.c. and all that—and he worried over the future, imagining how a new departmental organization might alleviate some of their problems, but then he would declare that the same horses would be there, rearing up and nipping at each other. In the metaphor there was, you can see, a remnant of the Jack of old. The clean-the-Augean-stables Jack, vying with the old fogey everything-has-gone-wrong last mastodon figure. I might add that this conversation did not mention the person of Cynthia Ragsdale. And it went on quite a while. Indeed, my friend, after a day’s interviewing, it was as if Cynthia Ragsdale did not exist. One could detect some indeterminable ghost in this machine, or, as the good Henry would have said, and I am wont to say, the figure in the carpet. I couldn’t see it, despite dark utterances of dissension and elaborate circumlocutions. The local member of our committee made no mention of this black hole, nor did he inadvertently fill it with recognizable matter. I have now almost concluded that he did not know about it—in any detail, at least.

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It was on the way to the airport with Jack that it came out. I had said to him that I was puzzled, that I sensed an unexplained tension, a mass of silence that exceeded circumspection. I ventured the conjecture that a woman professor Wright and a male professor Wales were involved. At commedia dell’arte neither was very accomplished, incidentally. Ah, yes, friend, from my aerie I had seen that much. I would like to say in melodramatic style that Jack’s mustache twitched or that his hands almost imperceptibly tightened on the steering wheel, or that the colonial officer briefly appeared clad in pith helmet and khaki shorts, swagger stick in hand. But no, dear reader, Jack Emory merely broke up in laughter. The car remained in its lane. “My god, Jason, eagle eye as ever.” This made me realize that we all in one way or another in our small worlds have our images to maintain. I waited for the solution to the puzzle to be delivered—without a recapitulation of every trick played and taken. “In short, our newly announced gay Professor Harley Wales is suing our recently decided lesbian Professor Francine Wright for slander (and conspiracy against the State if he could get away with it).” At which again Jack broke up with laughter, apologizing, but not quite able to control himself. Car still in lane. The apology was for not filling me in, but he explained first it was so ridiculous on both sides that one was likely to recast it as farce in the telling. Also, it might distract the committee. Even Williams probably didn’t know about the suit. It seems that Francine Wright had put some student up to accusing Wales of sexual harassment and made accusations at a meeting where they voted on Ragsdale. By that time the student had recanted, but Professor Wright didn’t know that. She won’t apologize, and Wales wouldn’t any longer be likely to accept it. Cynthia Ragsdale is but the catalyst, perhaps only a casual walk-on in this motley comedy, as Jack put it. Nature has copied Art, Will, the comic art of, say, Molière; since these characters loom up before us as familiar humors. In this case a crude copy of art, as the Divine Oscar would surely have said. The actors overstate their lines and gesticulate wildly. They are unsure of their audiences or have perhaps forgotten that we exist and that we require purgation of our pity and fear or of our tendency to ridicule, lest we ourselves rush to find a scapegoat to dispatch. The curtain is not down. I leave you with an unfair question, a disreputable and disheveled trick: Is it the parody of a lady or the parody of a tiger behind the door? Sit up like folks, Will. Sit up like folks for the final episode, should it arrive. Your ob’t. servant, Jason

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May 22, 1991 Dear Jason, It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and I enjoyed working with you. Jack Emory has often spoken highly of you. We here are grateful for your help, but our task is not quite ended, I’m afraid. I enclose a draft of the report. Please do not hesitate to make any suggestions, emendations, deletions, and editorial corrections that you see fit. On receiving these I shall prepare a final version. If there are further problems, I shall call. I hope we shall have occasion to meet again. Sincerely yours, Edward Williams

Jason Talbot scanned the report. It was unexceptionable, in form a conventional piece of academic bureaucracy. It analyzed enrollments, commented on faculty strengths, on space allocated to the unit, on support for graduate students—the usual things. It made sensible recommendations on which they had all agreed. But then Jason noticed that Williams had appended to it a brief personal statement, the “chair’s comment.” It was written in the most general way. It named no names, dealt in no particulars. To anyone on the outside it risked appearing to be a gratuitous pomposity. But it could be read inside as an oblique statement of censure. The dean would see it that way. Jason Talbot read through the whole report again, more slowly and carefully this time, then penned a brief note saying he had no suggestions for changes.

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Entre-Acte Too Willing (Chicago Chronicle) Late arrivals from the Philippines tell a good story of the embarrassing position in which a young American woman found herself in one of the Southern islands. She understood the native language very well and a leading chief was much surprised and delighted by the circumstance. After some conversation he inquired if there was any favor that he could confer on the white maiden. She replied that she was lost in admiration of the beautiful beadwork which she saw on the native garments and she asked that she be allowed to buy a piece of it so that when she returned home she might be able to show her countrymen how skilled and artistic the Filipinos were. The chief was astonished at the modesty of her request, but declared he could not allow her to buy. The white maiden would honor him and his people by accepting as a gift as fine a specimen of beadwork as he knew. And he thereupon quickly slipped out of his trousers, which he offered her with the true politeness of a child of nature. The young woman hurriedly turned away and the chief was sorely wounded. With considerable difficulty he was induced to understand that disrobing in the presence of ladies, even for such a generous purpose as he had in view, was not considered strictly correct in

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the white maiden’s country. Thereupon he was mollified and later sent to the fair American the identical garments which has caused her so much embarrassment. —Tacoma Daily Ledger, March 12, 1902

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Seen From Afar

To Edward Williams, Francine Wright now seemed from another

country, uncertain of the manners and mores of the place she had unaccountably come to inhabit and incapable of adjusting herself to them. Accusations were being made. Should he have deliberately pried into these matters? Was his little peroration, tacked on at the end of the report, appropriate? Of the least use? He couldn’t know. In this case, personalities had loomed up and cast shadows over whatever practical action might ensue. He turned to the materials on Home in the Tacoma library with some considerable relief, but he could not rid his mind of the situation at State. It intruded as it had even more forcibly at the Emorys’ the previous evening. He had been speaking casually of events at Home in 1911 that involved some members of the community who were prosecuted for bathing nude in Joe’s Bay. Ellen had remarked that with all the claims these people made for varietism, they didn’t seem to have a lot of fun. She thought nude bathing should have been de rigueur; of course, the water in the sound was pretty cold. Anyway she could think of a number of people around State who needed a cold bath. The parallel she had suggested was not lost on Williams: the department at State and the dispute over the nude bathers. The latter marked

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the beginning of the colony’s loss of identity. Home had survived vicious attacks from without, and its members had periodically proclaimed and celebrated victories, but the bathing incident revealed internal dissension brought about by the conflict of what each side thought were high moral purposes. One side, at least, had forgotten the principle, more than once enunciated in Discontent, that one should mind one’s own business and not that of others. The internal differences at State had some of the same character. Ideological disagreements had exacerbated personal idiosyncrasies into hatreds. A philosopher colleague had once warned Williams jocularly that one should beware of someone who always stood on principle. The philosopher’s quip fit well at the moment, but he also thought that the mind-your-own-business principle wouldn’t have been a bad one for everyone to have stood on at State. When people stood on principle, the trope that the ancients called synecdoche became the ground for logic: the small event took on epic proportions, a part for the whole. Where you stood on the appointment of Cynthia Ragsdale became a symbol of your ideological purity or impurity. Strict moral uprightness was, of course, being practiced on both sides, and only two sides were allowed. Indignation was a virtue. One should not even speak to certain other people. Apparently for some years in a small inlet at the end of Joe’s Bay, rather far from the main community so that you would have to strain your eyes or use binoculars to see them, some citizens had been taking to the water naked. Among them were a few immigrants from Russia, practicing what they had done by accepted habit in the old country. But in 1911 there were new arrivals in the community, and they disapproved of this behavior. Accusations were made. Some claimed that the plaintiffs had gone to considerable trouble, including binoculars and the sending out of scouts, not to mind their own business. On July 5, 1911, Adrian Wilburs was charged by Mrs. Della Guthman of “indecent exposure of his person.” All told, four Home residents were arrested, including three women—Anna Falkoff, Ethel Ostroff, and Stella Thorndale. All were eventually found guilty. Roger Meakins, attorney for Mrs. Thorndale, who was fined sixty-five dollars, remarked to no avail in the court held at Lakebay, “Persons possessed of an enormous amount of virtue who do not like the community had better get out of it.” His sarcasm was buried in further bitterness that split the community and from which it never recovered.

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Even before the accusations and the trial, there had been some snooping around by a reporter for the Tacoma Daily Ledger, intent on photographing the scandalous behavior. All he managed to find was a fiveyear-old girl, indeed nude, playing in sand on the beach. He bribed her with candy for a photograph, but the Ledger thought better and ran neither his story nor the picture. Yet reports did appear implying that the beaches of Joe’s Bay teemed with naked bodies. Tourists began to show up to see for themselves. By the time that all of this had occurred, James Morton, the editor of Discontent and then the Demonstrator, had left Home for New York. The Demonstrator had published its last issue in l908. Its successor was the Agitator, edited by a newcomer named Jay Fox, who would become, in part because of an editorial he wrote on the bathing incident, Home’s best-known citizen. Jay Fox already had a long record in socialist causes. He had been present when the Haymarket bombing took place in Chicago, and a part of his left little finger was missing as a result. He carried a bullet in his shoulder from the McCormick Harvester strike. He had been in the I.W.W. In short he had a history of agitation in the labor movement. The Agitator was “an advocate of the modern school, industrial unionism, and individual freedom.” Fox was much more the agitator than Morton had been with Discontent, and the new paper showed it. Yet even he probably did not anticipate prosecution for his editorial on nude bathing.

The Nude and The Prudes Clothing was made to protect the body, not to hide it. The mind that associates impurity with the human body is itself impure. To the humanitarian, the idealist, the human body is divine, “the dwelling place of the soul,” as the old poets sang. To the coarse, half civilized barbarian, steeped in a mixture of superstition and sensualism, the sight of a nude body suggests no higher thoughts, no nobler feelings than those which the sight of one animal of the lower order of creation produces in another.

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The vulgar mind sees its own reflection in everything it views. Pollution cannot escape from pollution and the polluted mind that sees its own reflection in the nude body of a fellow being, and arises in early morning to enjoy the vulgar feast, and then calls on the law to punish the innocent victim whose clean bodies aroused the savage instincts, is not fit company for civilized people, and should be avoided. These reflections are based on an unfortunate occurrence that took place recently in Home. Home is a community of free spirits, who came out into the woods to escape the polluted atmosphere of priest-ridden, conventional society. One of the liberties enjoyed by Home-ites was the privilege to bathe in evening dress, or with merely the clothes nature gave them, just as they chose. No one went rubbernecking to see which suit a person wore, who sought the purifying waters of the bay. Surely it was nobody’s business. All were sufficiently pure minded to see no vulgarity, no suggestion of anything vile or indecent in the thought or the right of nature’s masterpiece uncovered. But eventually a few prudes got into the community and proceeded in the brutal, unneighborly way of the outside world to suppress the people’s freedom. They had four persons arrested on the charge of “indecent exposure.” One woman, the mother of two small children, was sent to jail. The one man arrested will also serve a term in prison. And the perpetrators of this vile action wonder why they are being boycotted.

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The well-merited indignation of the people has been aroused. Their liberty has been attacked. The first step in the way of subjecting the community to all the persecution of the outside has been taken. If this was let go without resistance the progress of the prudes would be easy. But the foolish people who came to live among us only because they found they could take advantange of our co-operation and buy goods cheaper here than elsewhere, have found they got into a hornet’s nest. Two of the stores have refused to trade with them, and the members avoid them in every way. To be sure, not all have been brought to see the importance of the situation. But the propaganda of those who do, will go on, and the matter of avoiding these enemies in our midst will be pushed to the end. The lines will be drawn and those who profess to believe in freedom will be put to the test of practice. There is no possible grounds on which a libertarian can escape taking part in this effort to protect the freedom of Home. There is no half way. Those who refuse to aid the defense is aiding the other side. For those who want liberty and will not fight for it are parasites and do not deserve freedom. Those who are indifferent to the invasion, who can see an innocent woman torn from the side of her children and packed off to jail and are not moved to action, can not be counted among the rebels of authority. Their place is with the enemy.

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The boycott will be pushed until these invaders will come to see the brutal mistake of their action, and so inform the people. This subject will receive further consideration in future numbers. —J. F.

It took almost two months for State of Washington authorities to get around to arresting Fox for publishing this editorial. The ground for the action was a statute that came about as a result of the McKinley assassination, making it a misdemeanor to “encourage or advocate disrespect for law or for any court or court of justice.” Fox spent two nights in jail in Tacoma before a friend posted bail of $1000. On January 10, 1912, he went to a trial that gained national notoriety, for not only was the charge itself at issue, there were also the entwined matters of nudity, anarchism, free speech, and the many rumors about Home that had persisted over the years. Fox took advantage of the courtroom situation to plead the case for agitation as the only way that social reform could occur, claiming that tyranny and the suppression of free speech everywhere went together. He got a national readership for his views. The jury was impressed, or at least some of it was, for it had much trouble making a decision. After twenty-four hours it compromised with itself: Fox was guilty, but leniency was recommended. On the 6th of February, 1912, Fox was sentenced to two months in jail. The maximum penalty would have been one year and a fine of one thousand dollars. With the help of fund-raising rallies, some as far away as Boston, and with support of the Free Speech League, forerunner of the A.C.L.U., Fox appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but the sentence was upheld. Three years after the trial had been held, he went to prison. Efforts were made by union leaders to gain him a pardon. The governor of the State of Washington finally issued one twelve days before Fox would have completed the full term of his sentence. Upon his return to Home, Fox was warmly greeted as a champion of free speech, but The Agitator was dead, and Fox never again edited a paper. The community had been badly fractured, as his editorial had

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implied, and it would never be the same. Fox and his wife lived on at Home until his death in 1961, but by the end of the decade, other internal disagreements had occurred. The Mutual Home Association was involved in internal legal difficulties that eventually brought it to an end. People left. The depression of the thirties took its toll on home ownership. Summer people began to move in. George Allen, the last of the founders, died in 1944. The Tacoma Public Library was eventually bequeathed notebooks of reminiscences by the third generation. Gradually all signs of Home’s colorful past disappeared. The post office retained the name of Lakebay. Edward Williams read one last entry in a loose-leaf binder: One day a stranger stopped our house when my mother was alone with me, I was only a baby then. He asked for a drink of water and after mother gave him a drink he began making ardent advances to her. When she told him he had better be off about his business at once or she’d call for help, he got mad and wanted to know what was her idea of spurning his attentions, he thought this was a Free Love community. Mother couldn’t resist the temptation of delivering a lecture and setting some one straight—so she explained to him that Home was not a Free Love Colony in spite of the newspaper stories and that even if it were the place he imagined it to be, didn’t he believe a woman has a right to decide whose attentions she would receive? The stranger left shaking his head incredulously and with a look on his face indicating that in some way or another he was cheated.

Williams closed the binder. He had read virtually all there was to read—in files, notebooks, and newspapers. He had examined old photographs. Yet he felt unprepared to write, as if he now believed that his scholarly historical approach was destined to fail. It would not make those people live. He could not sufficiently bridge the gap of time. As only a historian he could not create the necessary empathy. Where were the tomatoes that Mattie Penhallow cradled in her basket? Could one possibly recreate the tilt of C. L. Wayland’s pince nez, the pain of Lois Waisbrooker as she hobbled from the courtroom, the stifling closeness in there, Judge Hanford’s thoughtful demeanor. The ardent commitment of James Morton and Jay Fox remained but reported in the old newspaper files. He was, he admitted, an old horse of history. For what he really wanted now, history was not sufficient, though he would be faithful to it.

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He could not make a history of Home. By omission and by the rules of evidence, violence would be done to the lives he attempted to embody or to report on and explain. Meddling. Edward Williams gathered up his things and headed downstairs toward Twelfth Street and his car.

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Entre-Acte I have a good pair of binoculars and I know how to use them. —witness at the trial of nude bathers at Home, July 21, 1911

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16

A Discouraging Word

It was a gloriously clear, fresh May morning. There had been rain in

the night, but now only a few fleecy clouds were moving overhead. Helen Grant poured herself a second cup of coffee and watched with amusement from her patio chair as Frank’s frown knotted in puzzlement over the Sunday crossword. “Can’t you finish it?” “Once I could meet with them on every side, but they have dwindled long by slow decay. Yet still I persevere. It’s just part of the aging process, I guess. Comes to all creatures in their time.” “Alas, I still come upon them everywhere, the words of reports,” Helen said as she stared at Edward Williams’s committee report atop a substantial stack of other documents. There was no avoiding using this Sunday to catch up, for the coming week promised to be full. She had to decide some things. Helen Grant was aware of the contents of the report. Edward had met with her already about it, and she had skimmed it at that time. She also knew what it did not contain. It did not contain anything that would be of direct help in deciding about either Cynthia Ragsdale or the question of who should become chair. Apparently the committee, perhaps with Williams’s advice, had studiously avoided any comment on these matters.

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As she read, she nevertheless recognized it as a clean and constructive piece of work. What impressed her (she had not noticed it when she had first skimmed the report; perhaps it was not then attached) was a brief addendum in the form of a personal comment by the chair. EDWARD WILLIAMS’S ADDENDUM This report has been the result of the compilation of much information followed by interviews with all faculty members and some students. It has sought to be objective and to offer practical suggestions in a number of areas rather than ideological peroration. I hope I am not abusing my role as committee chair in adding the following observations. A report such as this one can but touch the edge of the inner life of any group of scholars and should not presume to speak to issues not within its scope and competence. The best of advice is always based on a knowledge of individuals, their needs, and motives. If the report fails to give sufficient attention to individuals, the committee members can feel justified in thinking that no report ever does. But departments come to decisions in part as the result of the attitudes of personalities composing them: attitudes toward the issues at hand and attitudes toward each other. Perhaps the last is, in the end, most important. Any scholarly group must be able to engage in conversation. Accusation and suspicion will rule and will corrupt if conversation is suppressed or is for any other reason absent. I sense that the Department of English as a whole needs to seek ways to reestablish conversation. I wish it success and believe success is possible.

As Helen Grant read this statement, which seemed to her to have a valedictory tone, she recalled in memory Edward as vice-president years ago speaking before some faculty group and encouraging voices to be heard, voices expressing such wrong-headed ideas, and sometimes so inarticulate, as to make one wonder how they could have managed a Ph.D. examination or how Edward could tolerate the time they wasted. In that meeting nothing said was too inane for Edward not to attempt to rephrase it in a way that caused it at least to make sense. Most people, she thought, wanted to be recognized as properly belonging to the company they kept. Edward had people’s respect mainly because he seemed always to respect those with whom he conversed. If there was a bit of managerial strategy in his approach, that was perhaps unavoidable, given the position he held. It was, after all, no different from what a good teacher did.

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He treated others not as adversaries but cohorts in a search. But the addendum, though certainly measured in tone, was unusual for Edward because it departed from conversation to implied admonition. One might even say it pulled rank. Helen Grant had never heard Edward express the least regret at leaving administration. Neither had he ever denigrated it, as many faculty members were wont to do. What she saw here was the old war horse, bit in mouth. Yet at the same time, it seemed he was about to move beyond it all. The report itself was a model of clarity and decorum. It was politically astute, even though the addendum made astuteness appear detached and even perhaps helpless. The addendum acknowledged a messy variegated world where decisions are indirectly reached. She concluded that Edward had felt deeply how inadequate to the real situations and interrelations of the department’s people the report had been. The addendum would perhaps be of help. It was a plea to seek liberty—freedom from the personal animus that seemed now to rule debate, the astonishing degrees of anxiety and self-pity, the intolerance of others, and the refusal so often to discuss major issues. Finally, the unforgiving appropriation of the high moral ground. Helen was saddened that Edward had felt impelled to step out of character and make that addendum. She knew him well enough to realize that he must have deliberately taken the risk of being called a pompous old bore. On the other hand, if it was a sort of valedictory it seemed to be saying, “You are now on your own.” “I am on my own,” Helen said suddenly out of what had been a long silence. “What?” “Oh, I’m sorry, just thinking out loud.” There was a lot to think about. Even though the academic year was winding down in warm clear days, the girls suddenly in their spring shorts, and people sitting about on the grass in the quad, Helen Grant had to deal with Harley Wales’s complaint against Francine Wright. It was now formally lodged, and it was highly unlikely that news of it would remain within the walls of State. Harley intended to take legal action as well. Helen had heard him out. She had advised restraint. Perhaps if Francine apologized . . . No, that was entirely insufficient. It was a matter of principle. Francine, he had retorted, endangered any hope of collegiality. The

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department could not function as a coherent body under the conditions she imposed and the threat of repetition. Helen had gently remonstrated, realizing it unlikely he would change his mind right away, but hoping that not too long . . . She advised forgiveness. He was adamant. She had carried the distracting burden of what to do about Francine through the rest of a week filled with budget conferences. Her mind had to be on next year—and the next. Frank put down his crossword with a sigh. “Finished it,” he said. Frank always finished them. “And now have you decided?” “Decided what?” “The Ragsdale case.” “Almost.” Yes, she must. It was Frank’s way of causing her to act. He believed in decisiveness. Yes, dear me, she must. What a shame that the vote was so nearly an even split. A major professional appointment. It should be an occasion for celebration. If Cynthia Ragsdale were turned back, would the next candidate get even as many votes? Stalemate? As she read through the Ragsdale file and absorbed the very careful wording of John McComber’s ambivalent letter, she worried more about future votes than the danger of approving this appointment. Cynthia Ragsdale would make her peace with the doubters and end up with no more enemies than anyone else and a lot fewer, she guessed, than most. Even if it was the politically correct thing to do (she hated that phrase), even if some would say it was putting feminism ahead of quality (their version of it), even if there was grumbling about tilting the balance of power (ok, she’d heard all these things), she knew what needed doing. Worse, perhaps, would be the glow of victory in the eyes of Cynthia Ragsdale’s strongest supporters and accusations by others that they had gotten to the dean. She wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, enunciate to herself the principle on which she’d act, and she wasn’t convinced that there was one to stand squarely on. (Perhaps this was why there had to be deans.) It clearly made sense to turn down a favorable vote of 20–16, especially, as she had learned, with two almost certainly negative votes missing. But it also made sense to bring this long process to an end. She had finally to trust to her own hunch that Cynthia Ragsdale would be a good appointment. As for her good friends like Jack, she would have to trust to their good will. Time marches on, the old newsreel used to intone. She had recently heard an administrative colleague say vehemently that they needed to get rid of the last of the World War II generation. Well, they’d be gone soon in any case. A new generation was taking charge. But the

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divisions weren’t just generational. That’s what made this situation different from those of the past, or so it seemed to her. Then there was the question of who would succeed McComber as chair. This would be more difficult. She certainly could no longer agree to appoint Wales. It was not Harley’s anger, which was understandable; nor was it the homosexuality; that he’d come out made it easier, if anything; it was his intransigence. Principle was one thing, and it was all very well to stand on it. Justice, too. But they were not everything, and besides, there were different ways to conceive of them. Harley had proved himself too narrow to make a good chair. His decisiveness might in the end be worse than Francine’s, being so dogged and without, yes, the human touch. Francine’s action would go down in the mythological history of the department. It would eventually take on a certain aura as a moment of absurdity. She had harmed herself, but no one else really, not even Harley. His own style had hurt him more than hers. He was now seeking personal satisfaction, as if demanding a duel. She would not appoint Harley Wales. On Monday she would ask John McComber to stay on for another year. John would look extremely pained and remind her he had a sabbatical coming. He’d appeal to her to find an alternative. He’d suggest Jack, and no doubt she’d steel herself to ask Jack to stand in for a year, even as she informed him that Cynthia Ragsdale was to be appointed. (How had he voted?) Jack would decline, saying it was time for a younger generation to take over. He would be right, of course. It would be difficult. But—a younger generation. Then, there was what to do about Francine. Helen Grant wished only that John McComber was more able to cope. But she admitted to herself that she might have seen something coming and done something about it almost a year ago. Recently Francine had isolated herself more and more from her colleagues and from Helen. Somehow, she should have acted on her awareness of this. She had simply not paid sufficient attention. Her job, time, Frank. Well, it was true, the job really did limit your more intimate contacts. In a certain way it made true collegial friendship impossible. But she should have done something. There was trouble ahead for Francine if Harley did not withdraw his threat. She needed to talk again with Francine, and the sooner the better. There also had to be a way to reason further with Harley. Deans, she thought, must be optimists.

Edward Williams placed a metal garden chair and small table in the gazebo near the beach. He dusted off both and sat. He stared down the

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long inlet to the point upon which, discreetly apart, the herons fished. He was unhappy with the report and the addendum. He felt burdened by the necessary decorum of the situation. Perhaps he was too old now to keep the old patience, or maybe he had been too patient. Some real intervention was necessary, some act to clear the air. The problems of the department had no body, remained specters, casting shadows from apparently nothing. He recalled the old witticism (he had forgotten who had invented it) that academic infighting was so vicious because so little was at stake. But was this really so? Wasn’t freedom somehow at stake? Weren’t the little worlds of State and, yes, of Home synecdoches of the surrounding larger world that contained them? All were political worlds where principle either clashed with or contained practice. The trials of Adams, Larkin, Govan, Penhallow, Waisbrooker, and Fox played out in small the principles that would make or destroy a larger community. The departmental review and professorial appointment at State tested a political process and all those involved in it. Flawed as it seemed, the process contained in microcosm the larger questions of decision-making. Both processes seemed to preserve the right to individual eccentricity and to protect it against the neatness that is the temptation of autocrats. Perhaps that was their major value in the end. A little opposition was preserved to counter the tendency of politics to bog down in a struggle between two monolithic forces. In the end, it was a good thing that the academic world was unruly at times, even if it often seemed what another wag said it was, a parody of a lost original. He watched the herons. Suddenly one flapped away squawking. The other followed. The beach was empty. There rose to his mind on the empty beach a vision of the naked bathers of Home. They had stout, elderly bodies; they entered the cold shallow water slowly and deliberately, laving their arms as they proceeded. They stood waist deep, then swam parallel to the shore. The moment passed. The beach was empty of all but driftwood gray logs and trees toppled onto the shore by the water’s power of erosion. The island was ever so slowly being eaten away. Edward Williams felt for a moment his own spirit traveling slowly, deliberately beyond himself toward Home.

In her next few days Helen Grant was buffeted by events surrounding Harley Wales’s complaint against Francine Wright. About thirty young

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Looking west across Joe’s Bay towards Home, early twentieth century. Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.

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women forcibly entered her outer office, carrying placards and banners. Despite the militant efforts of Elvery Briggs they remained for nearly two hours, demanding to see the dean. Helen Grant was in Elliott Hall discussing problems in the Music department’s equipment budget and had a lunch engagement. On her return the dean’s suite was empty except for an angry Elvery, who was muttering and busily clearing up the residue of plastic cups, plates, and placards, one of which said, “Justice for Nancy.” Nancy Thacker had not been present. Indeed, in the mail that very morning was a letter to Helen stating that she had taken a leave of absence and gone home. She thanked the dean for her help. Helen could tell that she was humiliated. The mail also included half a dozen letters from parents of young women students declaring their shock at Nancy’s treatment, the behavior of certain male professors, and their intent to withhold all donations to State until justice had been served and corrections made, especially in the English department, where sexism was clearly rife. At the meeting of the Academic Senate on Tuesday, Harley Wales’s complaint was heard and debated with rancor and much misinformation. The Senate adjourned for the year without taking action. This left many people angry and confused. On Wednesday the Women’s Caucus met and issued a formal reprimand of Dean Grant, asserting that she had failed to call upon the ombudsperson to review the case and determine responsibility in the incident. It did no good for Helen to call its leader and try to explain that the ombudsperson responded to complaints only from those directly involved, that neither protagonist had complained to that person’s office, and that in any case the charge against Harley Wales had been withdrawn. The leader insisted that Helen’s failure had given the Senate an excuse not to act. Helen refrained from remarking that in the past the Senate hadn’t needed excuses not to act. The ombudsperson herself, a black sociologist who had worked on inner-city problems and had run for city council, was of little help when she complained from her aerie in Wheelis Hall that the matter had not been directed to her. Nancy Thacker’s recantation had been forgotten or deliberately ignored, or perhaps just not known about. Some of these people were creating or saw opportunity for a cause célèbre. The Women’s Caucus intended to seek faculty censure of the dean, implying collusion and cover up. Francine Wright had not been at their meeting, and Elaine Brinnon, after arguing against the resolution, abruptly left it. The student newspaper strongly attacked the English department as hegemonic and anachronistic with respect to the issues of the day. It

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called for Wales’s resignation or dismissal and named the administration sexist. There was no mention of Nancy Thacker’s action. On Thursday morning, Harley Wales, entirely undaunted by these attacks, made it known that he had hired counsel and was suing Francine Wright for slander and possibly the university itself. All spring quarter, it had turned out, Francine Wright’s and Harley Wales’s afternoon classes had been consecutively scheduled in the same room in Becker Hall. Each had deftly avoided the other during the tenminute break. But on that Thursday, Wales, at the head of his Renaissance poetry class entered Wright’s class on French feminism almost immediately after the bell had sounded its conclusion, appropriating the interval normally reserved for orderly movement in and out. Loud accusations of deliberate provocation were heard. The mainly female class of Wright greatly outnumbered Wales’s group and rose to meet the territorial and temporal challenge. Surrounding the formidable body of Francine Wright herself, they forced the inconspicuous Wales and the vanguard of his cohorts bodily through the room’s double doors, proceeding in a rush down the hall, and on to the courtyard which faced Duffield Pond, usually called Frosh Pond, annual scene of various springtime frolics and pranks. What had by now become a small mob as other students emptied out of classrooms was met there by about twenty young women and a handful of young men carrying placards saying, “Ho Ho, Wales Must Go” and “English Doesn’t Need Wales.” These groups converged with Wales and Wright borne along at their center, both being driven helplessly toward the pond on the edge of which they teetered together in what for a moment seemed an embrace. Larger and heavier than Wales, Francine Wright held her position and no doubt in an act of desperation attempted to free herself from his, to her, indecent proximity. This she did by grasping him by his shoulders, spinning, and releasing him with a shove, meanwhile avoiding, by a headlong lunge into the crowd, a fall into the pond. Wales was less fortunate. Whirled about, suddenly released, losing his equilibrium, he met the water face first. Several young women, in a show of strength generated by the elation they were feeling, hoisted Wright on their shoulders and bore her in triumph back through the great doors of Becker. Jack Emory had heard the commotion and arrived at the scene of tumult as the crowd turned back toward Becker. What he saw was a man flat in the water of Duffield Pond, two placards floating near him and two young women entering the pond to drag him out. As Wales was brought

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to the water’s edge Jack Emory saw that he had been stunned. He was unconscious and perhaps without breath. He attempted to administer resuscitation. Suddenly Clark Maxwell was at his side. “I’ll call 911,” he said. “Jesus H. Christ, what happened?” At the hospital, a doctor pronounced Harley Wales all right except for symptoms of a slight concussion. His sight was fuzzy, his recent memory lapsed. It was fortunate someone had gotten him breathing in time. They’d keep him overnight at least. That made Ellen nod with approval at the doctor, at Jack, and at Clark. But then she said, “I don’t think anyone deserves to come out of this very well.” Jack looked at his wife ironically. Clark grimaced, and the doctor had a very puzzled expression indeed when he excused himself.

On that evening, Jack and Ellen Emory discussed retirement. The catalyst had been Helen Grant’s request that he act as chair for a year. The conversation had taken Ellen rather by surprise. They’d not talked about retirement as an immediate possibility. “You’d write, of course.” “Yes, but not criticism. I suppose I’ve had my say there, and anyway I’m outside what’s going on now. I’m just not at home with it. I’ve lost the patience to keep up with the buzz words. There’s so much damned repetition.” “Fiction then? That’s what you’d like to do, isn’t it?” “Why, yes, but no, it would be a flop, all formulaic, too academic, maybe too theorized. Hey, listen to that. I’m using it as a transitive verb. You’d think I was thirty years younger.” “Part of you is,” she said archly and then laughed. “All the important parts, in fact. But you’d regret retiring, especially giving up trying to set a whole wayward generation straight.” “Hmphf. No way to succeed there!” “Just go ahead and write it, then. Put all that narrative theory to some use for once. Put all your friends in it. They’ll be offended if you don’t.” “Hmphf.” “Don’t snort like a colonial officer. You know you’ve been keeping notes on all those people.” “Not notes.” “Well, a journal then. Transform it, but exclude me if you know what’s good for you.”

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“There’s no journal. Hasn’t been for years. Anyway, how can I exclude you and still have the necessary amount of sex in it? After all, one has to write from one’s experience. What about a minor part? Don’t fear. Even the writers of memoirs are liars.” “That’s what I’m afraid of, but go for it. Anyway, right now I’d like to take you to bed.” At that moment the phone rang. Edward Williams’s body had been discovered at Osprey Island.

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Entre-Acte Well, the short story of it all they got to boycotting each other with the result that many animosities were aroused and depredations of a forceful nature were done by the prudes. —Owen Verity to Roland Eugene Muirhead, January 13, 1915

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F

rancine Wright wanted to hide somewhere. It had not been easy to extricate herself from the crowd that swept her into Becker. Only later, when she had left her office, did she learn what had really happened to Harley Wales. Now, shocked and humiliated, she hurried across campus toward the parking lot. How could this possibly have happened? The silly tiff about control of what? Ten minutes between classes. The struggle at the pond. That ridiculous chanting mob of kids, as if she were a sports hero or something. It was all so stupid! How could she have let it happen? But she knew it was worse than that. It was appalling. She had allowed the self that she had become to happen. She’d killed some earlier self with malevolence, misplaced hatred. As she hurried along, she brought her present self to accusation, trial, and judgment. Beginning with the best of intentions, with commitment to justice, to fairness, to what was right, she had somehow lost her balance and fallen into a condition of hate. She deserved one of the circles in Dante’s Hell. She could not remember where she had parked. Everything seemed strange, even her car when she finally located it. Climbing in, she had to readjust the seat. The steering wheel seemed too close. She adjusted the rearview mirror, looked in, and saw a stranger’s eyes.

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At the memorial service that morning, Elaine Brinnon felt some vague unease that kept intruding itself quite rudely between the lines of Jack Emory’s eulogy. Then she realized that in the large audience she could not see Francine anywhere. Panic crept into her limbs. Francine would be here in spite of everything, wouldn’t she? Elaine heard only vaguely the words of Jack’s anecdote about Williams building his summer house. He’d turn to Williams’s administrative career and to his scholarly work. He’d touch on his teaching. What Jack said wasn’t coming alive. She couldn’t really concentrate. The confrontation with Francine two nights before kept rising up. The tears, the confession, anger, and, unaccountably, she thought, accusation of betrayal; then her own sudden impression and immediate denial to herself of what she should have understood. Francine loved her and was lonely, and her deliberate criticism of Francine’s behavior had been an intolerable rejection. It was read not merely as a rejection of Francine’s politics and her behavior in the whole chain of events set off by the Nancy Thacker affair, it was a rejection of Francine’s passion for her, a passion which she could never have reciprocated in kind, a passion she doubted anyone but Francine herself, and now she, knew about or even suspected. Maybe Francine herself had not fully known. Elaine had, she now realized, resisted acknowledgment of its existence. As a result her behavior oddly, unwittingly had driven Francine to more and more extreme acts. She had merely let life go on as usual. Would she never learn that life was never usual? In her own way she shared Francine’s humiliation. Music was playing. The alma mater. A few voices chimed in. People got up from their chairs, but she was already by this time in the foyer, hurrying to her car, trying to locate the keys as she broke into a trot, her heels clicking. Tears were interfering with her search. Later she could not remember driving there. Reaching Francine’s house, she hurried to the front door. It was unlocked and unlatched, and she entered. Then she heard the engine running in the garage. She rushed there and raised the door. The fumes choked her, but she fought through them to the car. She was too late.

After the service, Helen Grant returned to her office. She had sent everyone home, everyone, that is but Elvery, who insisted on coming back to work on “unfinished business.” The truth was that Elvery was

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trying to keep occupied and not dwell on Edward’s death. She had greatly respected him. There were demonstrators gathering again outside. They hooted and jeered: “What are you going to do about Wales? Nancy for dean!” “This is quite enough, I do not have the patience,” she thought, and pushed away from her desk as if preparing to go home. But at that moment she had what she later called “a sort of vision of Edward.” She strode quickly to the door of the building, threw it open, raised both hands, commanding silence. There was silence. We shall reason together, she thought. At least she would reason. She described to the students what had occurred: Nancy Thacker’s recantation, Francine’s misunderstanding (though she did not mention her name), Harley Wales’s response, and then Harley Wales in the hospital. (The concussion had been more serious than first thought; there was persistent double vision.) At this point, Dean Helen Grant resisted a major temptation. It would serve them right to tell these moralists that they were persecuting a man who was gay. That would have been for good measure. Instead (Edward would have understood), she declared that she had just returned from a memorial service for a distinguished colleague and very dear friend. One young man tried to speak, but he was silenced by two young women near him. There was a momentary scuffle, then silence. She thought again of Edward. He would be smiling, though she could no longer see him. She imagined, for she had contrived it (though it was true enough) that the students saw before them a tired and deeply saddened senior woman professor on whose grief they had innocently intruded. There was only the sound of a slow, light flapping of a flag on the pole in front of “Old Chem,” Goldschmid Hall. The crowd was dispersing. Elvery opened the door behind her and whispered, breaking the quiet that had mercifully descended. “I think you had better come in here. Something terrible has happened.”

In the days that followed, Elaine Brinnon walked the paths of State’s quadrangles and the corridors of Becker in a silence that was like a hermetic enclosure. She had not avoided conversation. Nor had she sought it. There was, in fact, little conversation to be had. Her colleagues seemed as self-absorbed as she. Events occurred at a distance. She had acknowledged to herself that an untenured assistant professor could never quite

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feel at home. Now she wondered if she ever would, even if she was promoted. The student newspaper mourned Francine’s death and began to construct a myth implying she was a martyr to the search for justice. Elaine began to describe it to herself as an example of undergraduate political romanticism. She remembered that once upon a time she would have bought into it. A woman from the alumni magazine came around to interview her as Francine’s colleague and friend. She explained that there had been an outpouring of requests for a memorial article. Francine was, the woman said, a much-loved professor. Telling me, Elaine thought. The student paper cursorily reported Edward Williams’s death. It was indicated that he had been at work on a book on American utopias. When Elaine had mentioned him to the woman from the alumni magazine she responded vaguely. Yes, he’d been in adminstration for a while, hadn’t he? Harley Wales was recuperating at home. No reference to his accident ever occurred in print. Nor had there been any mention that the student’s charges against him had been withdrawn. Elaine heard more than once that Francine’s suicide was an expression of remorse. This interpretation became, in the eyes of many who had been offended at her behavior, the truth of that event. She was thereby rehabilitated by those who had been her most severe critics. As her stock rose, Harley Wales’s plummeted, for it still seemed to many that he had been her tormentor. What had appeared as comedy, even farce, some department members now classified in the genre of tragedy with Francine the heroine. And so it was confirmed even by her critics that her moral sense had in the end prevailed over her political commitments and her quarrel with Harley Wales. No one mentioned, though it was now known by some, that Harley Wales was gay and that perhaps he also was a victim. Elaine thought it just as well to let the myth stand, though she knew it was wrong. Elaine walked entirely alone with the belief beyond empirical proof that Francine’s passion for her had made her unable to bear rejection or even indifference. On one of her solitary trips to the mailroom in the following week of that late spring, she read a notice from the dean that Cynthia Ragsdale had been appointed to the Morgan Professorship of American Literature and Culture. She looked up from her form letter and saw Jack Emory perusing his. “Francine would have been glad about this,” he said. As she nodded, she looked away.

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Envoi All those intending to make us a visit will come to Tacoma and take the steamer TYPHOON for HOME. The steamer leaves Commercial Dock every afternoon except Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 o’clock. Be sure to ask the captain to let you off at HOME. —Discontent: Mother of Progress

The sign greeting visitors to Home today. Photo by Diana W. Adams.

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