The Papers of Tony Veitch

14

^‘A distinct tendency to sculpture whimsy,’ the tall man said. His eyes contemplated nothing thoughtfully.

‘Not unlike Joyce’s poetry.’ The small man was fat with black hair like a bush. He spoke with an assurance that suggested it was burning. He wore the kind of intense spectacles that draw the pupils like a poultice. ‘But at least he had his prose. Isn’t it strange with Joyce how the originality of the prose never seems to transfer to the poetry? As a poet, he remained slightly sub-Georgian. “Lean out of the window, Goldenhair.” My God.’

‘Or like Emily Dickinson. Reducing all experience to lace doilies.’

‘At least it makes a change from the spurious passion of Lawrence. You can’t read his poetry without feeling drenched in saliva.’

‘Jesus,’ Harkness said quietly.

‘If we’re dropping names, that’s a good one,’ Laidlaw said.

‘How about this?’

They were sitting in the Glasgow University Club bar where Mr Jamieson had left them. He was a senior lecturer in English who had known Tony Veitch but he had gone to look for a younger man who had been Veitch’s tutor in his final year. Laidlaw was staring at his lime-juice and soda. Harkness was taking his lager like anaesthetic. Around them the heavy buildings and empty quadrangles seemed to shut out the city, giving them the feeling of being at the entrance to a shaft sunk into the past. Certainly, the only other two people in the room were having less a conversation than a seance, though they only seemed to summon the dead in order to rekill them.

‘Have there not been any good writers, like?’ Harkness asked.

The talk of the two university men reminded Laidlaw of why he had left university at the end of his first year, having passed his exams. He found that the forty-year-old man agreed with the nineteen-year-old boy. He suspected that a lot of academics lived inside their own heads so much they began to think it was Mount Sinai. He disliked the way they seemed to him to use literature as an insulation against life rather than an intensification of it.

He liked books but they were to him a kind of psychic food that should convert to energy for living. With academics the nature of their discipline seemed to preclude that. To take it that seriously would have annihilated the limits of aesthetics.

Listening to their exchange of attitudes in what amounted to a private code, he didn’t regret the youthful impulse which had pushed him out into the streets and now brought him back here, by a circuitous and painful route, as an alien visitor. He didn’t want to be included in that clique of mutually supportive opinions that so often passes for culture.

He remembered what had finally crystallised his rejection of university. It had been having to read and listen to the vague nonsense of academics commenting on the vague nonsense of much of what D. H. Lawrence wrote. Coming himself from a background not dissimilar to Lawrence’s, he thought he saw fairly clearly how Lawrence had put out his eyes with visions rather than grapple with reality that was staring him in the face. You needn’t blame him for hiding but you needn’t spend volumes trying to justify it either; unless, of course, it helped to make your own hiding easier to take.

‘A lot of what passes for intellectuality’s just polysyllabic prejudice,’ Laidlaw thought aloud.

Harkness remembered Laidlaw telling him that he’d left university at the end of his first year.

‘Were you glad to get out of here?’

Before Laidlaw had answered, they saw Mr Jamieson come back in alone. Laidlaw rose to get him a drink. Mr Jamieson took a whisky and joined them.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Tony’s tutor isn’t in today. It’s a pity. He knows Tony well. But the academic year is really over, of course.’

He was a frail man with thinning grey hair and pale eyes. His voice was gentle.

‘But you know Tony Veitch quite well,’ Laidlaw said.

‘As a student, yes. He had what I would call a serious intelligence. By that I mean he thought ideas were for living, not just thinking. Hm?’

He nodded infinitesimally towards the other two, who were still talking. He bit his lip briefly as if dismayed at the garishness of his own indiscretion.

‘Academicism, of course, can be mental formaldehyde. A way for people to put their brains on display without actually doing anything with them. Tony wanted more. For him any idea he accepted carried a responsibility to living along with it. He was an interesting thinker. Is, no doubt. It’s some time since I’ve seen him.’

Laidlaw was set to ask something, Harkness could see, but Mr Jamieson was preoccupied in following his own thought, like someone out to net a butterfly.

‘That’s rare, of course. Though less rare here than in some other places. I was glad to come back to Glasgow for that reason. The borders are crossed more easily here, of course.’

Laidlaw noted the intellectual trick of that ‘of course’, a way of stating something you might only just have realised as if only fools could be unaware of it. It disarmed close examination.

‘How do you mean?’ he asked.

‘You get a lot of first-generation academics here. And some of them are not inclined to endorse the rules of academe too quickly. There’s a strong autodidact tradition in Scotland, you see. I happen to believe it’s especially strong in the West. Such people don’t submit too happily to academic categories. They can have a refreshing swingeing freedom of mind. Mind you, too often career seduces them and they conform to get success. Every year some Visigoths arrive. And every year I feel renewed hope. Perhaps among them there’s an Attila of the mind — if you’ll excuse a racially mixed metaphor. Someone who will reanimate our rituals by attacking them. Tony had possibilities in that direction.’

Laidlaw was beginning to be more and more interested in Tony Veitch.

‘As far as his crossing of borders went? I mean, did he associate with people who didn’t seem to fit with university life?’

‘Hm? Well, I was his tutor, not a social worker.’

When he stopped talking, the voices of the other two men seemed never to have let up. They weren’t reading or drinking or even looking at each other. They just sat casually communing with their own profundity.

‘A despair as actual as leprosy.’

‘Imagine a Somme,’ Mr Jamieson said, ‘where everyone is immortal. Nothing can happen, of course. But, oh my God, the noise!’

‘Mr Jamieson,’ Laidlaw said. ‘About Tony Veitch.’

‘Yes. Tony hated that.’

‘Is that why he ducked out of his finals?’

‘I should imagine so. He seems to have been doing well in the papers he sat. He was rejecting us, I suppose. Perhaps not without reason.’ For the first time his eyes achieved a clearly specific focus, emerged from the abstract. ‘Do you think you’ll find him?’

‘We were hoping you might help,’ Laidlaw said, not without some recrimination in his voice.

‘Yes. I’m getting an address for you. We tried ourselves, you see. At first. We hoped it might be possible to make some arrangement for him to take the other papers. But he obviously didn’t intend that anyone should find him.’

‘Did he seem to you a violent person at any time?’

The pale eyes smiled.

‘Isn’t everyone?’ The remark was unexpected in his mild mouth. ‘He was certainly intellectually violent. Iconoclastic. But then many young people are.’

A woman with glasses came in, wearing a smile that was like opening a window in a stuffy room. She gave Mr Jamieson a piece of paper and went out.

‘Thank you, Sybil,’ he said and passed the paper to Laidlaw.

‘Who’s Guthrie Hawkins?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘He shared a flat with Tony Veitch. The other addresses are Tony and Guthrie’s home addresses. The flat may be vacated by now, of course.’

Laidlaw drained his lime-juice and soda. A bit of ice, eroded to a lozenge, slid down the glass as he replaced it.

‘Thank you, Mr Jamieson,’ he said. ‘I appreciate the time and all the help you’ve given us.’

‘I hope that he’s all right. I think I understand him a little. I think I understand his decision. One of the terrors of academicism is that our criticism becomes absorbed as merely one of its own techniques. Hm? It’s an endless maze. Every exit from one dilemma is merely an entrance to another. Hm?’

It should have been eerie as a man carving his own epitaph. He sat looking old, gentle, charming and hopeless. He gave off a sense of defeat. Yet he spoke without feeling, seemed merely to be commenting. It was as if he had reduced himself to the status of a gloss on his own life.

‘There is something. Guthrie Hawkins is perhaps an example of the crossing of borders I was talking about. Tony Veitch once mentioned in tutorial that Guthrie had a brother in the criminal world.’

‘Do you know his first name?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Observatory Road,’ Laidlaw said as they came out into University Avenue. ‘That’s just round the corner. Off Byres Road. We may as well try it. The other address is in Hutchesontown.’

They got into the car. Laidlaw lit a cigarette. As usual, Harkness was driving.

‘You think Eck knew about Paddy’s death and had to be shut up?’ Harkness asked.

‘Could be, I suppose.’

‘Nice old man.’

‘Brave enough, too. When you think how near his heart the hemlock is.’