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PALGRAVE CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES

THE TOXIC UNIVERSITY

ZOMBIE LEADERSHIP, ACADEMIC ROCK
STARS, AND NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY

John Smyth
Palgrave Critical University Studies

Series editor
John Smyth
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK
Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series
Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and
most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed
by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little
understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.
The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish
scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these
reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed
forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of
ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with
particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have
hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these
changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects
on academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of aca-
demic leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institu-
tional politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate,
where this is being expunged or closed down in universities.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14707
 John Smyth

The Toxic University

Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars
and Neoliberal Ideology
John Smyth
School of Education and Professional
Development
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK

Palgrave Critical University Studies

ISBN 978-1-137-54976-1 ISBN 978-1-137-54968-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54968-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938297

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover image: © Carolyn Eaton/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 Series Editor’s Preface

Naming this as a Critical University Studies Series gives it a very distinct

and clear agenda. The over-arching intent is to foster, encourage, and
publish scholarship relating to universities that is troubled by the direc-
tion of reforms occurring around the world.
It is a no-brainer, that universities everywhere are experiencing
unprecedented changes. What is much less clear, and there are reasons
for the lack of transparency, are the effects of these changes within and
across a number of domains, including:

• the nature of academic work

• students’ experiences of learning
• leadership and institutional politics
• research and the process of knowledge production, and the
• social and public good

Most of the changes being inflicted upon universities globally are being
imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion,
and little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or
destroyed. Benefits, where they are articulated at all, are framed exclu-
sively in terms of short-term political gains. This is not a recipe for a
robust and vibrant university system.
What this series seeks to do is provide a much-needed forum for the
intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of i­ll-conceived
and inappropriate university reforms. It does this with particular

v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have hitherto

been ignored, disparaged or silenced.
The defining hallmark of the series, and what makes it markedly dif-
ferent from any other series with a focus on universities and higher
education, is its ‘criticalist agenda’. By that we mean, the books raise
questions like:

• Whose interests are being served?

• How is power being exercised and upon whom?
• What means are being promulgated to ensure subjugation?
• What might a more transformational approach look like?
• What are the impediments to this happening?
• What then, needs be done about it?

The series intends to foster the following kind of contributions:

• Critical studies of university contexts, that while they might be local

in nature, are shown to be global in their reach;
• Insightful and authoritative accounts that are courageous and that
‘speak back’ to dominant reforms being inflicted on universities;
• Critical accounts of research relating to universities that use innova-
tive methodologies;
• Looking at what is happening to universities across disciplinary
fields, and internationally;
• Examining trends, patterns and themes, and presenting them in a
way that re-theorizes and re-invigorates knowledge around the sta-
tus and purposes of universities; and
• Above all, advancing the publication of accounts that re-position
the study of universities in a way that makes clear what alternative
robust policy directions for universities might look like.

The series aims to encourage discussion of issues like academic work,

­academic freedom, and marketization in universities. One of the short-
comings of many extant texts in the field of university studies is that they
attempt too much, and as a consequence their focus becomes diluted.
There is an urgent need for studies in a number of aspects with quite a
sharp focus, for example:
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii

1.  There is a conspicuous absence of studies that give existential

accounts of what life is like for students in the contemporary uni-
versity. We need to know more about the nature of the stresses and
strains, and the consequences these market-driven distortions have
for the learning experiences of students, their lives and futures.
2. We know very little about the nature and form of how institutional
politics are engineered and played out, by whom, in what ways,
and with what consequences in the neoliberal university. We need
‘insider’ studies that unmask the forces that sustain and maintain
and enable current reform trajectories in universities.
3. The actions of policy elites transnationally are crucial to what is hap-
pening in universities worldwide. But we have yet to become privy
to the thinking that is going on, and how it is legitimated and
transmitted, and the means by which it is made opaque. We need
studies that puncture this veil of silence.
4. None of what is happening that is converting universities into
annexes of the economy would be possible without a particular
version of leadership having been allowed to become dominant. We
need to know how this is occurring, what forms of resistance there
have been to it, how it has been suppressed, and the forms of soli-
darity necessary to unsettle and supplant this dominant paradigm.
5. Finally, and taking the lead from critical geographers, there is
a pressing need for studies with a focus on universities as unique
spaces and places—possibly in concert with sociologists and
­anthropologists.

We look forward to this series advancing these important agenda and to

the reclamation and restitution of universities as crucial intellectual dem-
ocratic institutions.
John Smyth, Series Editor
Professor of Education and Social Justice
University of Huddersfield and
Emeritus Professor, Federation University Australia
 Acknowledgements

Works like this do not come about easily because they are not atomistic
individual constructions. They are works that owe a huge debt of grati-
tude to a lifetime of colleagues who have helped me in various ways and
at different times, to think through the changing kaleidoscope of ideas
that constitute the modern university. In the most recent part of this
near half-century tortuous journey, I would like to sincerely thank Barry
Down, Robin Simmons, Michael Corbett, and Helen Gunter—all of
whom sustained me in conversation as I engaged in the lonely process of
the long-distance writer. I am grateful as well, to Andrew James, Eleanor
Christie, and Laura Aldridge at Palgrave for their support and encour-
agement throughout. Finally, I continue to remain indebted to my life-
time partner Solveiga, for her patience, forbearance, good humour, and
for just being there! This book received no institutional funding. Names,
institutions, places, and incidents referred to in this book, unless explic-
itly named, are fictional. Any resemblance to actual events, institutions,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction: ‘Getting an Academic Life’   1

2 Neoliberalism: An Alien Interloper in Higher Education   27

3 Why the ‘Toxic’ University? A Case of Two Very

Different Academics   55

4 Why Zvombie Leadership?   75

5 Cultivation of the ‘Rock Star’ Academic Researcher?   99

6 The University as an Instrument of ‘Class’   125

7 The ‘Cancer Stage of Capitalism’ in Universities   149

8 Enough Is Enough…of This Failed Experiment

of ‘Killing the Host’   179

9 Gevt off My Bus! The Reversal of What We Have

Been Doing in Universities   209

Author Index   221

Subject Index   227

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: ‘Getting an Academic Life’

What Is This Book About?

I can cut to the essence of what this book is about through retell-
ing an anecdote. In the opening pages of his book Surviving identity,
McLaughlin (2012) talks about growing up in Scotland in the 1970s
and of it not being uncommon in the streets of cities and towns to see
‘eccentric looking men wearing sandwich-boards proclaiming that “the
end is nigh”’ (p. 1). We have all seen them, and they are usually railing
against all manner of sinful practices and urging us to ‘buy’ into their
particular religious views in order to be ‘saved’. As McLauglin says, we
generally ignore these people, treat them as being harmless, regard them
as having some sort of mental problem, and go on with our business.
McLaughlin’s point is that while we have no difficulty in dismiss-
ing the sandwich-board proclaimers as being somewhat deranged and
alarmist, we are much more reticent to dismiss a whole range of not
dissimilar contemporary practices that are underpinned by fear and the
same ‘survivalist’ mentality. McLaughlin’s claim is that these days we
are continually assailed by political claims that unless we follow certain
policy trajectories and ideologies presented to us, and construct our lives
accordingly in particular ways, we will be doomed! In other words, if we
want to be ‘survivors’, to use McLaughlin’s terminology, then we will
have to construct ourselves along the lines of a certain kind of identity.
The fear-inducing industry is possibly the most powerful, potent, per-
vasive, and profound force shaping all aspects of our contemporary lives,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

J. Smyth, The Toxic University, Palgrave Critical University Studies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54968-6_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

as Furedi (1997, 2004, 2005) has shown—and this extends considerably

beyond the obvious threat of terrorism. What we are being told by our
political and policy elites is that we are under threat at a number of lev-
els—collectively as a society, there is the constant spectre of economic
oblivion by our smarter international economic competitors; at the level
of our social institutions, universities as a particular example, face cer-
tain obliteration unless we continually strive to be in the top echelons of
the ‘academic rankings of world universities’; and, individually, academ-
ics within universities will perish unless they operate and comport them-
selves according to a particular set of narrowly conceived rules, in order
to survive and insulate themselves from a precarious and fiercely com-
petitive academic world.
What this book is seeking to do is to puncture some of these deeply
entrenched and emotional myths as they pertain to the kind of academic
identity that is being constructed in/by the contemporary university, and
the way academic work is being shaped. It pursues two basic questions:

• Why have academics been so compliant in acquiescing to the con-

struction of universities as marketplaces?
• When universities are conceived in econometric terms, what is the
effect, and what kind of consequences flow?

The elephant in the room question, after we strip away all of the market-
ing hype universities construct around themselves is:

• Have universities become toxic places in which to work?

Why Am I Writing This Book, and in This Particular

Way?
It is not always the case that in academic writing we stop and ask our-
selves the question—why am I writing this, especially in the present
times when universities are continually reminding us to ‘publish or per-
ish’. It is almost a no-brainer! However, this is hardly a justification for
writing a book like this one, especially where there are already hundreds
of books that describe the carnage being done to universities around the
world. The fact that I am writing this at all is all the more remarkable,
given that I am no longer in a remunerated university position. I am
what is euphemistically called an ‘independent scholar’, made ‘surplus to
 WHY AM I WRITING THIS BOOK, AND IN THIS PARTICULAR WAY? 3

requirements’, and who is not driven by the mantra of the performativity

agenda.
The explanation of why this book has come into existence at all
resides, in my case, in looking back over more than 40 years as a univer-
sity academic, in light of the most recent marketized turn (Rule 1998)
that has brought with it a particularly viscous and unsavoury ensemble of
unwarranted intrusions into universities that are having all kinds of path-
ological effects. So what, you may ask? That’s life, and life has changed in
all kinds of ways, so just move on! It is not so simple.
If I can put a more precise finger on my animating motive, and there
has to be one in taking on such a mammoth task in ‘retirement’, then
it has to be to try and cast some light on what I am calling ‘getting an
academic life’, and the obstacles and impediments. As a number of schol-
ars have indicated before me, there is something mystical, even magical,
about how one gets an academic life—most of it occurring out of sight,
invisible to the eye, and at best what we get to see, are the products at
the end, and only passing glimpses of the process. I will not be venturing
into that space, because it has already been done—for a superb collection
of examples on the ‘hidden’ from view nature of academic work, see the
edited collection Academic working lives by Gornall et al. (2015).
When massive and possibly irreversible damage is inflicted upon a
social institution with little or no opposition, then this ought to be a
cause for alarm. When the work of that institution is poorly understood,
or mischievously misrepresented in the wider public imagination, then
this ought to add urgency to the angst. When that institution happens
to be the last remaining place in which social critique and criticism is
incubated, nurtured, fostered, encouraged, and supported, then our
indignation ought to be almost in hyper-drive. Well, that is the situa-
tion in contemporary universities today, and most of what is occurring
is largely invisible, and is being covered up or shrouded with a logic that
is simply laughable. Put as directly as I can state it, what is happening
to universities is placing our societies in a parlous and possibly terminal
state.
If we are to unmask what is going on within and to universities, then
we need to look forensically at the forces at work and the pathological and
dysfunctional effects that are placing academic lives in such jeopardy—
hence my somewhat provocative-sounding title ‘the toxic university’.
One of the most succinct explanations of what is animating me in
writing this book was put by Lucal (2015)—echoing arguably the most
4 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

significant sociologist ever, Charles Wright Mills (1971 [1959]) in his

The sociological imagination—when she said:

…neoliberalism is a critical public issue influencing apparently private trou-

bles of college [university] students and teachers. (p. 3)

I could not have put it any better myself. To briefly unpick the distinc-
tion Lucal is making, just so we do not miss its significance, Mills (1971
[1959]) argued that the purpose of sociology as a perspective, is to go
beyond what are presented as ‘personal troubles’ (p. 14)—which he
argued reside ‘inside’ individuals and their lives—to looking instead at
the ‘public issues’ (p. 15) that constitute the social, economic, and politi-
cal forces that are really responsible for, and that lie at the heart of these
‘troubles’.
As I have argued elsewhere (Smyth et al. 2014), Mills was scathing of
the academy—his peers—for the way in which they had retreated from
the real world into what he labelled ‘the lazy safety of specialization’
(p. 28) within the academy, often doing work that spoke to only a hand-
ful of people. What he was referring to, over half a century ago, was the
way universities were forcing scholars (and they were complicit in this),
into ‘keeping problems isolated within narrow disciplinary sites’ (Smyth
et al. 2014, p. 6), with the effect that their unwillingness to ‘take up the
challenge[s] that now confront them’, meant that academics were able
to ‘further abdicate the intellectual and political tasks of social analysis’
(Mills 1971, p. 29).
My title to this chapter of ‘getting an academic life’ could quite eas-
ily be misinterpreted. It could be seen as an opening for the provision of
a recipe into how to get a sinecure—a cushy, nice, clean, well-paid, and
not too demanding job, with lots of holidays—which is the way academic
work is constructed in the wider public imagination. Nothing could be
further from my intent. The ‘real’ academic is the complete reverse of its
public caricature!
What I am pitching towards in this book is the polar opposite of the
popular view. The line I take is that ‘getting an academic life’ means
being prepared to experience considerable discomfort, to focus on issues
that are not the subject of close critical scrutiny, and taking on power-
ful and entrenched views that have a lot to lose through being exposed,
even when doing so is likely to jeopardize one’s livelihood. Getting an
academic life means having the courage to take on and puncture elitist
 PATHOLOGICAL ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION 5

views that are hard to penetrate because they are made to appear differ-
ent from what they really are. This is how power works, and challenging
it is a very risky thing to do. Being a ‘true’ academic is lonely, hard, and
dangerous work!

Pathological Organizational Dysfunction

Just on 40 years ago, for all of my sins, I studied ‘organizational the-
ory and ‘management behaviour’ as part of my doctorate in educa-
tional administration. I cannot remember encountering the term, but in
light of my subsequent four decades of working in universities around
the world, I think I have encountered a good deal of what ‘pathologi-
cal organisational dysfunction’ (POD) means in practice. I regard it is
an ensemble term for a range of practices that fall well within the ambit
of the ‘toxic university’. The short explanation is that what I am call-
ing POD has become a syndrome within which the toxic university has
become enveloped in its unquestioning embrace of the tenets of neolib-
eralism—marketization, competition, audit culture, and metrification.
In other words, POD has become a major emblematic ingredient of the
toxic university, which as Ferrell (2011) points out looks fairly unprob-
lematic on the surface:

Higher education on the corporate model imagines students as consumers,

choosing between knowledge products and brands. It imagines itself lib-
erating the university from the dictates of the state/tradition/aristocratic
self-replication, and putting it in the hands of its democratic stakehold-
ers. It therefore naturally subscribes to the general management principles
and practices of global corporate culture. These principles—transparency,
accountability, efficiency—are hard to argue with in principle. (p. 166
emphasis in original)

What is not revealed in this glossy reading of neoliberalism is the way in

which it does its work, or its effects, as Ferrell (2011) puts it in relation
to universities, the way it has ‘wrecked something worthwhile’ (p. 181).
John Gatto, an award-winning teacher of the year in New York,
comes closest to what I mean by POD in his description of ‘psycho-
pathic’ organizations. Gatto (2001) says that the term psychopathic,
as applied to organizations, while it might conjure up lurid images of
deranged people running amuck, really means something quite different;
6 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

he invokes the term to refer to people ‘without consciences’ (p. 305).

The way he put it is that:

Psychopaths and sociopaths are often our charming and intelligent room-
mates in corporations and institutions. They mimic perfectly the necessary
protective coloration of compassion and concern, they mimic human dis-
course. Yet underneath that disguise they are circuit boards of scientific
rationality, pure expressions of pragmatism. (p. 305 emphasis original)

As they say, the devil resides in the detail. How then does this work?
The essence, Gatto (2001) says, is that we have to start with the para-
dox: ‘All large bureaucracies, public or private, are psychopathic to the
degree that they are well managed’ (p. 305). What he is saying is that
when the profit motive, or its ideological proxy, is the animating force
(i.e. homo economicus), then the underlying logic is that ‘the pain of
the moment leads inevitably to a better tomorrow for those who survive’
(p. 305). Organizations that blindly follow this article of faith in the pur-
suit of profitability succeed, and they are acting rationally within their
own logic, but they do so at the cost of enormous suffering and degrada-
tion—because they have no conscience, and in this sense they are ‘evil’.
Here is the way Gatto (2001) puts it, and it is worth quoting at
length:

The sensationalistic charge that all large corporations, including [universi-

ties], are psychopathic becomes less inflammatory if you admit the obvi-
ous first, that all such entities are non-human. Forget the human beings
who populate corporate structures. Sure, some of them sabotage corpo-
rate integrity from time to time like human beings, but never consistently,
or ever for long, for if that were the story, corporate coherence would be
impossible, as often it is in Third World countries. Now at least you see
where I’m coming from in categorizing the institutional corporation of
[the university] as psychopathic. Moral codes don’t drive decision-making.
That means [decisions are made] in order to oil greater wheels… [They
have] no tear ducts with which to weep. (p. 305)

Where Gatto (2001) is pointing to is that ‘psychopathic programming is

incapable of change’ because pragmatic solutions inevitably trump ethical
considerations:
 PATHOLOGICAL ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION 7

It lacks moral dimension or ethical mind beyond the pragmatic.

Institutional morality is always public relations; once institutional machin-
ery of sufficient size and complexity is built, a logical movement com-
mences that is internally aimed toward subordination and eventual
elimination of all ethical mandates. (p. 307)

The way I have discussed this phenomenon in my own work, is by invok-

ing the confession by Hamlet to his two courtiers in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, that his ‘wit is diseased’ (Alexander 1971, p. 78) because he had
lost his capacity to reason because of the imposition of degraded stand-
ards of the court of Denmark. Claudius had ascended to the throne by
‘poisoning his brother and marrying his widow’ (Alexander 1971, p. 78).
I use this little example to coin the term ‘diseased reasoning’ (Smyth
and McInerney 2012, p. 188) to refer to organizational situations of an
‘incapacity’ and ‘inability to make judgements’ that reflect an ‘under-
standing of the wholesomeness of consequences’ by virtue of ‘conniving
acts [that] usurp power’ (p. 188).
Diseased reasoning is a good way of describing the inability to pro-
vide authentic explanations for complex issues, because the capacity of
organizations to make judgements have become infected with alien ideas
like those of neoliberalism. The way Apple (2016) puts it is that neolib-
eralism is able to operate because of the ‘epistemological veil’ (p. 880)—
or as Davis (2006) terms it, the ‘epistemological fog’ (p. 45)—that is
spun by those in dominant positions to conceal what is really going on.
This lack of knowledge is crucial to neoliberalism, because ‘what goes on
under the veil is secret and that must be kept from “public view”’ (Apple
2016, p. 880).
There can be little doubt that all of this is ‘dysfunctional’—in the sense
that what is being undermined and diverted here is the real purpose of
organizations like universities. We need look no further than the hyped up
banal utterances from university PR departments for evidence of that. If all
of this were merely the occasional aberrations of a few misguided individu-
als, that might be understandable, but my claim is that it is much worse. It
is pathological in the sense that what it constitutes is ‘extreme, excessive or
markedly abnormal… in a way that is not normal or that shows illness or
mental problem’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2016, http://www.mer-
riam-webster.com/dictionary/pathological). Riemer (2013) says that the
8 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

ascendancy of the PR and marketing aspects of universities is symptomatic

of this ‘new era of managerial radicalism’ where one of the most dramatic
dysfunctions is that ‘expenditure is lavished on marketing and landscape
while research and teaching are starved’. In this regard he says:

…the managerial stranglehold over academia shows striking parallels to the

disastrous financialisation of the world economy. The neoliberal superin-
tendents of the new academic order are, in their little world, just as detri-
mental to the public interest as the high priests of Lehman Brothers and
Goldman Sachs (https://newmatilda.com/2013/02/04/sandstone-aca-
demics-against-wall/)

I can illustrate in some detail what I mean about POD most expedi-
tiously, through what Hall (2014) has termed the university as the ‘anxi-
ety machine’. Collapsed down, Hall’s (2014) argument is that when the
intellectual capacities of universities are rendered in a way that makes
them ‘just another commodity in the market’ serving an ever-narrow-
ing conception of ‘economic growth’, then this marketized abstrac-
tion from reality means that everything in the university must be ‘made
contingent on the production of value’ (http://www.richard-hall.
org/2014/03/19/on-the-university-as-anxiety-machine/)—and this
can be money from research grants and student fees, but also in symbolic
forms like ‘status, rankings and citations’ (Berg et al. 2016, p. 171),
then we will have reached the point described by Hall (2014) where ‘we
are scrubbed clean of our humanity, and this is done systemically’. The
notion of ‘scrubbing’ our souls of any vestiges of humanity is an inter-
esting way of concealing what both Hall (2014) and Berg et al. (2016)
show is the production of ‘anxiety’ behind the veil of economic rational-
ity—that it is all about ensuring efficiency, viability, and institutional sur-
vival.
Insisting that university academics operate as if they are ‘small busi-
nesses’ (something I deal with in some detail in Chap. 7 and how this
demand arose), overrides and undermines the real purposes of universi-
ties with quite tragic consequences (also in Chap. 7). In an impassioned
letter to The Guardian newspaper (https://www.theguardian.com/edu-
cation/2015/jul/06/let-uk-universities-do-what-they-do-best-teaching-
and-research) that universities be left to do what they do best, 126 senior
academics in the UK put the dysfunctional effects of what was occurring
to academic work in the following terms:
 PATHOLOGICAL ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION 9

Unprecedented levels of anxiety and stress among both academic and aca-
demic-related staff and students abound, with “obedient” students expect-
ing, and even demanding, hoop-jumping, box-ticking and bean-counting,
often terrified by anything new, different, or difficult.

The way Berg et al. (2016) describe this production of anxiety as being
held in place in the neoliberal university, happens in several ways. First,
there is what they term ‘precariousness and audit-induced competition’
(p. 176). Universities invariably interpret ‘state’ mandates more vigor-
ously and institute them even more intensely than the way in which they
are proclaimed—this has the effect of providing legitimacy for ‘com-
mand and control in academia’ (p. 176) in the form of what I describe
as ‘the enemy within’ form of managerialism (Smyth 1990, p. 63; and
Meisenhelder 1983, p. 303). Another anxiety-inducing mechanism is the
development of ‘grant income targets’ for academics at various levels,
often built into workload formulae, and that are made part of the ‘per-
formance requirement’ process (Berg et al. 2016, p. 176). Sometimes
referred to as ‘grant capture’ (p. 177), such targets can also be built into
formal contractual requirements of faculty. Second, the even more insidi-
ous way anxiety is produced is through what I term the ‘ever receding
horizon’—the work is simply never able to be finished; the goalposts are
continually moved by management, so that faculty are never allowed to
arrive at a definitive end to their work (p. 177). Third, anxiety is solidi-
fied by continuing to insist that academic work is not primarily about
the ‘production and dissemination of knowledge’, but rather it is part
of a macro-economic process of ensuring institutional survival and inter-
national economic competiveness—in other words, an endless process of
maximizing ‘profits’ for the university in the interests of ‘accumulation’
for those who hold power (p. 178).
These are themes that recur repeatedly throughout the literature on
academic work, and I will conclude on a summation by Horton and
Tucker (2014):

… academic workplaces are frequently characterized by isolated, individu-

alised working practices; intense workloads and time pressures; long hours
and the elision of barriers between work and home; anxieties around job
security and contracts (particularly for early career staff); and processes
of promotion and performance review that effectively valorise individual
10 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

productivity, and reward and institutionalise each of the above-listed char-

acteristics. (p. 85)

Here is an interesting little example from Höpfl (2005), who begins her
paper with a ‘conceit’ (an affectation) rather than an abstract:

‘Hang on. I am just parking the car. I am walking into the building. I am
now entering the mouth of hell…’ (Conversation with a friend who was
calling from his mobile phone as he entered his workplace).

‘My heart sinks every time I have to go there. It takes away your spirit’.
(Former colleague writing about her experiences of going to work). (p. 167)

The interesting imagery here is of the idea of ‘work as hell’ (p. 173)
and that it is taking away something of one’s spirit. Both of these lit-
tle vignettes fit with the provocative imagery conjured up by De Vita
and Case (2016) in their critique of the managerialist culture of business
schools in the UK, when they refer to the ‘climate of mistrust and aliena-
tion [engendered] amongst academics’ (p. 348) as fitting with the meta-
phor of ‘the smell of the place’—the notion that within a few minutes of
being inside a place you can quickly discern what it is really up to.
Ferrell (2011) sums up what is being lost or ‘wrecked’ here beauti-
fully, when she says:

…it takes candour and trust, to research, write and teach well. But that
trust is no longer there, between the university and its collegium. We are
no longer a guild, we have become ‘employed’; vocation has mutated into
vocational. (p. 181 emphasis original)

What Then Is My Perspective in This Book?

The approach I bring to this book is one that coalesces around a ques-
tion posed recently by a Wolverhampton born Oxford-educated
Guardian journalist, as to ‘why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is
back in fashion’ (Jeffries 2016). The essence of his argument is that the
ideas of a group of German Jews (Walter Benjamin Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm known as the
‘Frankfurt School’ of ‘critical theorists’), opposed to the rise of fascism
during the Third Reich, are back in vogue because of their trenchant
 WHAT THEN IS MY PERSPECTIVE IN THIS BOOK? 11

critique of capitalist society. Their critique in the 1930s was of the ‘per-
ils of customised culture’ which they saw as a ‘chimera’ because of the
way in which capitalist culture was transforming humans into ‘desir-
able exchange commodities, [to the point that] all that was left was the
option of knowing that one was being manipulated’ (Jeffries 2016). The
ideas of the Frankfurt School are as relevant for us today as then, because
of the exponential way we have been seduced by the marketing and
advertising industry—something that is very relevant to the invasion and
takeover by them of universities.
To expand on this point a little, I will need to make a brief excursion
into a key philosophical idea that will course through in the background
to this book, and that I will revisit in the final chapter in addressing the
‘so what’ question. My positioning in this book is that of a critical soci-
ologist—which is to say that I support, in a general sense, the idea of
critical social theory as a way of uncovering what is going on, how power
works, in whose interests, as well as providing a mindset or disposition
from which to act. My focus is on the notion of discontent, disturbance,
interruption, disruption, and how this feeds into the change process.
Critical social theory has many different adherents and variants, which
I will not go into here, but the particular inflexion I wish to bring to
bear is that espoused by Boltanski and Thévenot (1999), Chiapello
(2003), Celikates (2006), and Geuss (1981) in their slim but impres-
sive work titled The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt
school. These commentators make an important distinction that is more
than a matter of mere semantics, as Celikates (2006) summarized in the
title of his paper ‘from critical social theory to a social theory of critique’.
The important point people like Boltanski and his collaborators are mak-
ing is that what they call a ‘practice of critique… [that] starts with the
critical capacities of the agents themselves’ (p. 35). What they are saying
is that critique is something that starts from within, rather than being
imposed from outside.
What is essential with this notion of critique is that it is founded on
the view that social change comes about through self-reflection on the
circumstances one finds oneself in. The way Celikates (2006) puts it,
the dispositions we hold are a product of the interaction of social forces
around us and the way we acquiesce to them. Change, therefore, can
only occur when discomfort is produced through ‘confrontation’ with
evidence about the way we see and judge things. Summarizing what
Geuss (1981) calls ‘reflexive unacceptability’, Celikates (2006) says:
12 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

…once I am shown that my judgments were made under conditions I did

not know and cannot approve of, I may have to revise them. (p. 33)

Critical theory, according to Geuss (1981), operates on the basis of ‘the

criterion of free assent’ (p. 80)—meaning:

…the agents [us] to whom the critical theory is addressed will both know
they are suffering pain and frustration and know the source of that frus-
tration. They know which social institution is repressing them, but accept
that repression and that institution because of the world-picture they have
adopted. (p. 80)

The crucial point made by Geuss (1981) is that:

The experience of pain and frustration is what gives [us] the motivation to
consider…[what needs to change] and to act on it to change [our] social
arrangements. (p. 80)

Where the cause for optimism comes in here is that, while ‘there cer-
tainly are dominant positions in the social field’ in which certain views
prevail over others, they can only be sustained and maintained as long
as they are accorded ‘stability [based] on a belief in their legitimacy’
(Celikates 2006, p. 35). In other words, dominant ideas might present
as ‘closed social conditions’ (p. 35), but there is always space in which to
engage in actions for their dislodgment.
To arrive at what Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) refer to as a ‘critical
moment’ (p. 359), which is really the point of ‘realizing that something
is going wrong’ (p. 360), requires a stepping back and placing some dis-
tance between the frustrating events and the past that has created them.
Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) argue that it is this ‘retrospective turn’
that effectively enables us to ‘stop…the course of action’. When some-
thing is not working, ‘we rarely remain silent’, because we are unable to
remain in a constant ‘state of crisis’ (p. 360), and we have to share our
discontent with others.
The first step in drawing others into sharing our frustration with
a state of affairs is some manifestation or ‘demonstration of this dis-
content’—this can be some kind of a ‘scene’—an argument, a dis-
pute, criticism, blaming, or violence. If this state of disputation is to
advance beyond name-calling, then it will have to be accompanied by
 WHAT THEN IS MY PERSPECTIVE IN THIS BOOK? 13

a ‘requirement for the justification of action’ (Boltanski and Thévenot

1999, p. 359). What this means is that in order to engage in criticism,
we have to produce ‘justifications’ in support of those criticisms that fol-
low certain ‘rules of acceptability’ (p. 360). In other words, they will
have to go beyond the kind of personal accusation that ‘I don’t agree
with you because I don’t like your face’ (p. 360).
Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) claim that, in the second step, what
has to occur is the ‘establishment of equivalence’ (p. 361)—or to
put it another way, we have to establish a set of connections between
events and occurrences so that people can see commonalities. What this
amounts to are narratives or stories of some kind that move back and
forth, in ‘intercrossing’ (p. 374) ways, between the situations being
described so that a ‘matrix’ of ‘legitimate criticisms’ (p. 374) is able to
emerge.
In the instance of academic work being canvassed in this book, it is
not quite that simple. The deeply entrenched problem that is the central
focus of this book and that is causing so much frustration and angst in
universities worldwide, and that goes under the rubric of ‘neoliberalism’,
has an inbuilt refusal to countenance any other possible views. As Giroux
(2004) summarized it, as the ‘paragon of modern social relations’, the
ideology of neoliberalism has arrogantly assumed the ‘market’ to be
the undisputed regulator of all aspects of our lives. In Giroux’s (2004)
words:

…neoliberalism attempts to eliminate [any] engaged critique about its

most basic principles and social consequences by embracing the ‘market as
the arbiter of social destiny.’ (Rule 1998, p. 31) (p. 494)

Accompanying, and exacerbating this obdurate unwillingness to debate

its agenda, intent, processes, cultural ends, or purposes, has been what
Preston and Aslett (2014) refer to as ‘an unwavering confidence in
managerialism and economic rationality as “best practices” for any
organizational setting’ (p. 503). The defining hallmark of this intrusive
and alien ideology of the market in universities and other educational
organizations, is the way it constructs an unassailable singular view of
‘market-driven identities and values’ that the market both produces and
legitimates (Giroux 2004, p. 494) . This is given most prominent expres-
sion in the fanatical ‘preoccupation with efficiency and outputs, and [in
the] consumerization of students’ (Preston and Aslett 2014, p. 504).
14 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘GETTING AN ACADEMIC LIFE’

The ‘glue’ that holds this perverse and quite ridiculous idea of the
supremacy of the market together in universities, and allows it proceed
uninterrupted in doing its deforming and disfiguring work, as I argue at
some depth in various chapters of this book, is the notion of fear. This
works at a number of mutually-reinforcing levels, but the strategy always
has the same hue—if we do not follow the rules by playing the ‘only
game in town’, then catastrophic consequences will befall us individually
and collectively. The notion of fear is ‘constructed’—it is not something
that is a natural occurrence.
At a national level, the spectre of fear is constructed that our econ-
omy will ‘tank’ if we don’t outrank universities in other countries on
international league tables, such as ‘the academic rankings of world uni-
versities (ARWUs, formerly known as the Shanghai Jiao Tong Index)—
they will steal a competitive edge from us, and we will be the poorer for
it; at the level of individual universities, the fear is perpetrated that fail-
ure to grab a large share of the best students or the most coveted com-
petitive research grants, will somehow diminish the university; at the
level of individual academics, the fear is promulgated that unless they
participate fully in this game of greed, not only will their university be
punished, but their careers, promotion prospects, and even their jobs will
be in jeopardy—this is also used to hold a range of managerialist prac-
tices in place (see Zipin 2006); and at the level of students, the fear is
conveyed that unless they make the right choice and get admitted into
a high-ranking university, and then out-compete their fellow students in
the grade–performance exchange game, then their prospects of getting a
job will be doomed. Fear, fear, fear!!!
Davis (2011) provides some interesting insights into how the spectre
of fear is infused into the neoliberal ideology and management practices
of a public university. In the first of three incidents, she examined how she
was silenced and her activities as a faculty member domesticated and tamed
(in what had previously been an activist university committed to advanc-
ing civil rights), by threats that unless she desisted from forms of activ-
ist teaching, she risked losing her job. In the second incident, her failed
attempt to introduce a Global Black Studies programme, in the face of a
demonstrable lack of support from the university, were portrayed by her
managers as tantamount to actions that impugned the marketability of the
university. The third incident pertained to a partnership her university was
urged to enter into with a prestigious private university, which resulted in
herself, her colleagues, and students, being ‘sold out’ and sold off to the
 WHAT THEN IS MY PERSPECTIVE IN THIS BOOK? 15

more powerful and prestigious partner in a number of quite demeaning

ways—giving them an unequivocal lesson of where they sat in the hierar-
chy of private/corporate-public values. Davis’ (2011) conclusion is espe-
cially sobering and informative of what was occurring, and how:

These events, both the experience and re-examining them … created a tre-
mendous degree of personal discomfort and a dilemma. Experiencing the
anxiety associated with fear of retribution – real or perceived – meant that I
was for the most part, unable to fully enjoy my nascent entrée in the acad-
emy. I became overly concerned with how I would be judged and if that
judgment was negative, then what would be the outcome. I negotiated
these fears in relative silence not wanting to appear irrational. I also faced
the dilemma of ‘going public’ with the same sort of trepidation one might
have telling family secrets. It was not that the College was an inherently
bad institution, but rather that it was caught up in the matrix of a particu-
lar political moment…Neoliberalism and its impact then, is not something
that is borne out in the lives of others. It is borne out in the everyday work
experiences of academics…. (p. 65)

What is clearly occurring here, according to Zipin (2006) [and here I

am deeply indebted to Zipin for drawing his insightful interpretations
to my attention], is not that university managers are necessarily setting
out to ‘purposefully’ engage in bullying, but rather that their tactics
are buried in an ‘organizational logic’ and workplace practices, that are
designed to ‘limit academic autonomy and agency’ (p. 30). When chal-
lenged about this kind of behaviour, Zipin (2006) invokes Saunders
(2006), who argues that managers are able to deftly hide behind ‘pas-
sages [they quote] from their university’s workplace grievance policy and
procedures’ (Saunders 2006, p. 15). Saunders (2006), however is far
less generous, and is scathing in his assessment of institutional bullying,
masquerading in Australian universities as management practices, when
he concludes that: ‘Since the 1990s to be an academic in Australia is to
some extent…a living lie…[M]anagerialism in Australia’s tertiary educa-
tion system today doesn’t simply foster bullying, but it is bullying… (p.
17 emphasis in original).
These matters are part of the much larger issue of how some coun-
tries have taken on the neoliberalization of their universities more vig-
orously than others—and Australia and New Zealand have been world
leaders in this regard (Heath and Burdon 2013; Thornton 2012; Shore
and Davidson 2014).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dusty answer
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Dusty answer

Author: Rosamond Lehmann

Release date: January 6, 2024 [eBook #72642]

Language: English

Original publication: NYC: Henry Holt and Company, 1927

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUSTY

ANSWER ***
 DUSTY ANSWER

DUSTY ANSWER
By
Rosamond Lehmann

‘Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!’

George Meredith.

NEW YORK
Henry Holt and Company
1927

To
George Rylands

COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

FIRST PRINTED IN AMERICA

SEPTEMBER, 1927.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.
 PART ONE

W HEN Judith was eighteen, she saw that the house next door, empty for
years, was getting ready again. Gardeners mowed and mowed, and
rolled and rolled the tennis-court; and planted tulips and forget-me-
nots in the stone urns that bordered the lawn at the river’s edge. The ivy’s
long fingers were torn away from the windows, and the solid grey stone
front made prim and trim. When the blinds went up and the familiar oval
mirror-backs once more stared from the bedroom windows it seemed as if
the long time of emptiness had never been, and that the next-door children
must still be there with their grandmother,—mysterious and thrilling
children who came and went, and were all cousins except two who were
brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who dropped over the
peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations to tea and hide-and-
seek.
But in truth all was different now. The grandmother had died soon after
she heard Charlie was killed. He had been her favourite, her darling one. He
had, astoundingly, married the girl Mariella when they were both nineteen,
and he just going to the front. He had been killed directly, and some months
afterwards Mariella had had a baby.
Mariella was twenty-two years old now, Charlie’s widow with a child
Charlie had begotten. It seemed fantastic when you looked back and
remembered them both. The grandmother had left the house to Mariella,
and she was coming back to live there and have a gay time now that the war
was well over and Charlie (so you supposed) forgotten.
Would Mariella remember Judith next door, and how they used to share
a governess and do the same lessons in spite of Mariella’s four years’
seniority? Miss Pim wrote: ‘Judith is an exceptionally clever child,
especially about essays and botany. She laps up knowledge as a kitten laps
milk’. The letter had been left on Mamma’s desk: unforgettable, shameful,
triumphant day.
 Mariella on the other hand—how she used to sit with her clear light eyes
blank, and her polite cool little treble saying: ‘Yes, Miss Pim,’ ‘No, Miss
Pim,’—and never be interested and never understand! She wrote like a
child of six. She would not progress. And yet, as Miss Pim said, Mariella
was by no means what you’d call a stupid girl.... By no means a stupid girl:
thrilling to Judith. Apart from the thrill which her own queerness gave, she
had upon her the reflected glory of the four boy-cousins who came for the
holidays,—Julian, Charlie, Martin and Roddy.
Now they were all grown up. Would they come back when Mariella
came? And would they remember Judith at all, and be glad to see her again?
She knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so
achingly as herself: people never did remember her so hard as she
remembered them,—their faces especially. In earliest childhood it was plain
that nobody else realized the wonder, the portentous mystery of faces. Some
patterns were so pure, so clear and lovely you could go on looking at them
for ever. Charlie’s and Marietta’s were like that. It was odd that the same
bits of face shaped and arranged a little differently gave such deplorable
results. Julian was the ugly one. And sometimes the ugliest faces did things
that were suddenly lovely. Julian’s did. You dared not take eyes off a
stranger’s face for fear of missing a change in it.
‘My dear! How your funny little girl stares. She makes me quite
uncomfortable.’
‘Don’t worry, my dear. She doesn’t even see you. Always in the clouds.’
The stupids went on stupidly chattering. They little knew about faces.
They little knew what a fearful thing could happen to a familiar face—Miss
Pim’s for instance—surprised off its guard and broken up utterly into
grossness, withered into hatred or cunning; or what a mystery it was to see a
face day after day and find it always strange and surprising. Roddy’s was
that sort, though at first it had seemed quite dull and flat. It had some secret
in it.
At night in bed she invented faces, putting the pieces together till
suddenly there they were!—quite clear. They had names and vague sorts of
bodies and lived independent lives inside her head. Often they turned out to
have a likeness to Roddy. The truth was, Judith thought now, Roddy’s was a
dream rather than a real face. She felt she had never seen it as it actually
was, but always with that overstressed significance, that haunting quality of
curiousness which a face in a dream bears.
Queer Roddy must be twenty-one now; and Martin twenty; and Julian
twenty-four at least; and beautiful Charlie would have been Mariella’s age
if such an incredible thing had not happened to him. They would not want
anything to do with her. They would be grown up and smart, with friends
from London; and she still had her hair down and wore black cotton
stockings, and blushed wildly, hopelessly, eternally, when addressed in
public. It would be appalling to meet them again, remembering so much
they had certainly forgotten. She would be tongue-tied.
In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer
intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly,
explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining enchanted
shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they had become well-nigh
fantastic creatures. Presumably they had realised long ago that Charlie was
dead. When they came back again, without him, she would have to believe
it too. To see them again would be a deep wrenching sort of hurt. If only it
could be supposed it would hurt them too!... But Charlie had of course been
dead for years; and of course they did not know what it was to want to
know and understand and absorb people to such a degree that it was a fever.
Or if they did, it was not upon her, trifling female creature, that they applied
their endeavours. Even Martin, the stupid and ever-devoted, had felt, for a
certainty, no mysterious excitement about her.
When she looked backwards and thought about each of them separately,
there were only a few odd poignant trivialities of actual fact to remember.
Mariella’s hair was cut short like a boy’s. It came over her forehead in a
fringe, and beneath it her lucid mermaid’s eyes looked out in a blind
transparent stare, as if she were dazzled. Her skin was milk-white, her lips a
small pink bow, her neck very long on sloping shoulders, her body tall and
graceful with thin snakey long limbs. Her face was without expression,
composed and cool-looking. The only change it ever suffered was the
perfect upward lift of the lips when they smiled their limited smile. Her
voice was a small high flute, with few inflections, monotonous but soft and
sweet-tempered. She spoke little. She was remote and unruffled, coolly
friendly. She never told you things.
 She had a great Dane and she went about alone with him for choice, her
arm round his neck. One day he was sick and started groaning, and his
stomach swelled and he went into the thickest part of the laurel bushes and
died of poison in half an hour. Mariella came from a French lesson in time
to receive his dying look. She thought he reproached her, and her head,
fainting in anguish, fell over his, and she said to him: ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
She lay beside him and would not move. The gardener buried him in the
evening and she lay on the grave, pale, extinguished and silent. When
Judith went home to supper she was still lying there. Nobody saw her cry,
and no one ever heard her speak of him again.
She was the one who always picked up naked baby-birds, and worms
and frogs and caterpillars. She had a toad which she loved, and she wanted
to keep a pet snake. One day she brought one home from the long-grass
meadow; but Miss Pim had a faint turn and the grandmother instructed
Julian to kill it in the back yard.
Charlie dared her to go three times running through the field with the
bull in it, and she did. Charlie wouldn’t. She could walk without a tremor
on the bit of the roof that made everyone else feel watery inside; and she
delighted in thunderstorms. Her hair crackled with electricity, and if she put
her fingers on you you felt a tiny tingling of shock. She was elated and
terrifying, standing at the window and smiling among all the flashes and
thunder-cracks.
Julian was the one she seemed to like best; but you never knew. She
moved among them all with detached undemanding good-humour.
Sometimes Judith thought Mariella despised her.
But she was kind too: she made funny jokes to cheer you up after tears.
Once Judith heard them whisper: ‘Let’s all run away from Judy’—and they
all did. They climbed up the poplar tree at the bottom of the garden and
made noises out of it at her, when she came by, pretending not to be looking
for them.
She went away and cried under the nursery sofa, hoping to die there
before discovery. The darkness had a thick dusty acrid smell, and breathing
was difficult. After hours, there were steps in the room; and then Mariella
lifted the sofa frill and looked in.
‘Judy, come out. There’s chocolate biscuits for tea.’
With a fresh burst of tears, Judith came.
 ‘Oo! You do look cry-ey.’ She was dismayed. ‘Shall I try to make you
laugh?’
Mariella unbuttoned her frock, stepped out of it and danced grotesquely
in her holland knickers. Judith began to giggle and sob at the same time.
‘I’m the fat man,’ said Mariella.
She blew out her cheeks, stuffed a cushion in her knickers and strutted
coarsely. That was irresistible. You had to squeal with laughter. After that
the others came in rather quietly and were very polite, not looking till her
face had stopped being blotched and covering her hiccups with cheerful
conversation. And after tea they asked her to choose the game. So
everything was all right.
It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All
the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up into
itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay
flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin
ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours
of decay.
When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp
and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and drops of
wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them. They were
beautiful and mysterious like the evening.
The happiness was a swelling pressure in the head and chest, too
exciting to bear. Going home under the willows in the little connecting
pathway between the two gardens Judith suddenly made up some poetry.

Stupid funny serious Martin had red cheeks and brown eyes and dirty
knees. His legs were very hairy for his age. He had an extremely kind
nature. He was the one they always teased and scored off. Charlie used to
say: ‘Let’s think of a sell for Martin,’ and when he had been sold, as he
always was, they danced in front of him shouting: ‘Sold again! Sold again!’
He never minded. Sometimes it was Judith who thought of the best sells,
which made her proud. She was very cruel to him, but he remained faithful
and loving, and occasionally sent her chaotic sheets of dirt and ink from
school, signing them: ‘Yrs truly, M. Fyfe.’
He loved Roddy too,—patiently, maternally. Sometimes they went about
each with an arm round the other’s neck; and they always chose each other
first in picking sides. Judith always prayed Charlie would pick her first, and
sometimes he did, but not always.
Martin had coagulated toffee in one pocket and hairy acid drops in the
other. He was always eating something. When there was nothing else he ate
raw onions and stank to Heaven.
He was the best of them all at running and chucking, and his muscle was
his fondest care and pride. What he liked best was to take Roddy or Judith
in the canoe and go bird’s nesting up the creek. Roddy did not tease him
about Judith—Roddy never cared what other people did enough to tease
them about it—but the others were apt to, so he was rather ashamed, and
spoke roughly and pushed her in public; and only showed he loved her
when they were alone together.
Once there was hide-and-seek and Charlie was he. Martin asked Judith
to hide with him. They lay in the orchard, under the hay-stack, with their
cheeks pressed into the warm sweet-smelling turf. Judith watched the
insects labouring over blades of grass; and Martin watched her.
‘Charlie’s a long time coming,’ said Judith.
‘I don’t think so. Lie still.’
Judith dropped back, rolled over and surveyed him out of the corner of
an eye. His face seen so near looked funny and rough and enormous; and
she laughed. He said:
‘The grass is wet. Sit on my chest.’
She sat on his hard chest and moved up and down as he breathed. He
said:
‘I say, which do you like best of us all?’
‘Oh, Charlie.... But I like you too.’
‘But not as much as Charlie?’
‘Oh no, not as much as Charlie.’
‘Couldn’t you like me as much?’
‘I don’t think so. I like him better than anyone.’
He sighed. She felt a little sorry for him and said:
‘But I like you next best,’ adding to herself, ‘I don’t think’—a sop to
God, who was always listening. For it was an untruth. Roddy came next,
then Julian, and then Martin. He was so boring and faithful, always
following her round and smelling slightly of perspiration and dirt, and so
entirely under her thumb that he almost had no part in the mysterious
thrillingness of the children next door. She had to think of him in his
detached aspects, running faster than anyone else, or diving for things at the
bottom of the river before he became part of it: or else she had to remember
him with Roddy’s arm flung over his shoulder. That gave him a glamour. It
was thrilling to think of being friends with a person—especially with Roddy
—to that extent. It was no use praying that Charlie would be willing to walk
about like that with her. He would never dream of it.
Charlie was beautiful as a prince. He was fair and tall with long bright
golden hair that he tossed back from his forehead, and a pale clear skin. He
had a lovely straight white nose, and a girl’s mouth with full lips slightly
apart, and a jutting cleft chin. He kept his shirt collar unbuttoned, and the
base of his throat showed white as a snowdrop. His knees were very white
too. Judith thought of him night and day. At night she pretended he was in
bed beside her; she told him stories and sang him to sleep: and he said he
liked her better than anyone else and would marry her when they grew up.
He went to sleep with a moonbeam across his brow and she watched over
him till morning. He fell into awful dangers and she rescued him; he had
accidents and she carried him for miles soothing his groans. He was ill and
she nursed him, holding his hand through the worst of the delirium.
He called out: ‘Judith! Judith! Why don’t you come?’ and she answered:
‘I am here, darling,’ and he opened his eyes and recognised her and
whispered, ‘Stay with me,’ and fell into a peaceful refreshing sleep. And the
doctor said, ‘We had all given him up; but your love has pulled him
through.’
Then she fell ill herself, worn out with watching and anxiety. Charlie
came to her and with tears implored her to live that he might show his
gratitude. Sometimes she did; but sometimes she died; and Charlie
dedicated his ruined life to her, tending her grave and weeping daily. From
the bottom of the grave she looked up and saw him pale and grief-stricken,
planting violets.
Nothing in the least like that ever really happened in spite of prayers. He
was quite indifferent.
Once she spent the night next door because Mamma and Papa were
away and Nurse’s mother was going at last. It seemed too exciting to be
true, but it happened. The grandmother said she was Mariella’s little guest,
so Mariella showed her the visitors’ lavatory. Charlie met her coming out of
it, and passed by politely, pretending not to notice. It was a great pity. She
had hoped to appear noble in all her works to him. There was no chance
now. It nearly made the visit a failure.
They had a midnight feast of caramels and banana mess which Julian
knew how to make because he was at Eton; and next morning Charlie did
not come to breakfast and Julian said he had been sick in the night and gone
to Grannie. He was always the one to be sick after things. They went up to
see him, and he was in bed with a basin beside him, flushed and very cross.
He turned to the wall and told them to get out. He spoke to the grandmother
in a whining baby voice and would not let her leave him. Julian muttered
that he was a spoilt sugar-baby and they all went away again. So the visit
was quite a failure. Judith went home pondering.
But next time she saw him he was so beautiful and lordly she had to go
on worshipping. Secretly she recognised his faults, but it was no use: she
had to worship him.
Once they turned out all the lights and played hide and seek. The
darkness in the hall was like crouching enormous black velvet animals.
Suddenly Charlie whispered: ‘Come on, let’s look together;’ and his damp
hand sought hers and clutched it, and she knew he was afraid of the dark.
He pretended he was brave and she the frightened one, but he trembled and
would not let go her hand. It was wonderful, touching and protecting him in
the dark: it made the blackness lose its terrors. When the lights went on
again he was inclined to swagger. But Julian looked at him with his sharp
jeering look. He knew.
Julian and Charlie had terrible quarrels. Julian was always quite quiet:
only his eyes and tongue snapped and bit. He was dreadfully sarcastic. The
quiet things he said lashed and tortured Charlie to screaming frenzies; and
he would give a little dry bit of laugh now and then as he observed the
boiling up of his brother. Once they fought with croquet mallets on the
lawn, and even Mariella was alarmed. And once Charlie picked up an open
penknife and flung it. Julian held his hand up. The knife was stuck in the
palm. He looked at it heavily, and a haggard sick horror crept over his face
and he fainted with a bang on the floor. Everybody thought he was dead.
But the grandmother said ‘Nonsense’ when Martin went to her and
announced the fatality; and she was right. After she had revived and
bandaged him, poor trembling Charlie was sent in to apologise. Later all the
others went in, full of awe and reverence, and everybody was rather
embarrassed. Charlie was a trifle hysterical and turned somersaults and
threw himself about, making noises in his throat. Everybody giggled a lot
with the relief, and Julian was very gentle and modest on the sofa. After
that Julian and Charlie were better friends and sometimes called each other
‘Old chap.’
Once at a children’s gymkhana that somebody had, Charlie fell down;
and when he saw a trickle of blood on his knee he went white and began to
whimper. He never could bear blood. Some of the gymkhana children
looked mocking and whispered, and Julian came along and told them to
shut up, very fiercely. Then he patted Charlie on the back and said: ‘Buck
up, old chap,’ and put an arm round him and took him up to the house to be
bandaged. Judith watched them going away, pressed close to each other, the
backs of their heads and their thin childish shoulders looking lonely and
pathetic. She thought suddenly: ‘They’ve no Mother and Father;’ and her
throat ached.
Charlie sometimes told you things. Once, after one of the quarrels,
chucking pebbles into the river, he said:
‘It’s pretty rotten Julian and me always quarreling.’
‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’
‘Oh, I dare say it’s just as much mine.’
Magnanimous Charlie.
‘Oh no, he’s so beastly to you. I think he’s a horrid boy.’
‘Rot! What do you know about it?’ he said indignantly. ‘He’s ripping
and he’s jolly clever too. Much cleverer than me. He thinks I’m an awful
ass.’
‘Oh, you’re not.’
‘Well he thinks so,’ he said gloomily. ‘I expect I am.’
It was terrible to see him so depressed.
‘I don’t think so, Charlie.’ Then fearfully plunging: ‘I wish you were my
brother.’
He hurled a pebble, watched it strike the water, got up to go and said
charmingly:
 ‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’
And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He
was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but
always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart. She
cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it!...’ Yet at the same time there
was the melting glow because he had after all said it.
Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said:
‘D’you see what this is?’
‘A pin.’
‘Guess where I found it.’
‘In the seat of your chair.’
The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively:
‘In my pudding at school.’
‘Oh!’
‘I nearly swallowed it.’
‘Oh!’
‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’
He stared at her.
‘Oh, Charlie!...’
‘You can keep it if you like.’
He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed....
She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it. “The pin that nearly
killed C.F.” with the date; and laid it away in the washstand drawer with her
will and a bit of uncut turquoise, and some shells, and a piece of bark from
the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After that she was a good deal
encouraged to hope he might marry her.
Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike—clear, bloodlessly cool;
and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But
Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed
quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him,
and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle
likeness.
Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian
remembered tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they
had only heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the
other could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them.
They were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas
carols his voice was heart-breakingly sweet and he looked like the little
choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live,—which made Judith anxious.
The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to Judith,
just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his dear father.
The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes
in the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on
the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his eyes
tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute, then jerk
away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other people. He never
shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you thought he was just
beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well and knew why she said:
‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection. Later still you varied hating
him with almost loving him.
Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He
did not always take notice of her, of course, being at Eton, and she much
younger; but when he did, he was always kindly—even interested; so that it
seemed unjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.
He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was
a relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind too
angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and poking
restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same, insistently
holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his company was
quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more intelligent, more
interesting than they were, and he would not let them alone till he had
discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.
But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person
withdrew. He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good,
repelling where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He
loved instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so
anxious to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was
very tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot
of instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make
her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing but
that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself had a
great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had contemptuous
ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and he said ‘God’
in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice. Sometimes she
understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the explanation, and
sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so pleased and
enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony searching for the
right, the perfect words in which to express himself, and if he was satisfied
at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved words passionately: he
invented very good ones. Also he made the most screamingly funny
monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt cheerful. Generally however,
he was morose when they were all together, and went away alone, looking
as if he despised and distrusted them. Judith discovered he did not really
prefer to be alone: he liked one other person, a listener. It made him light up
impetuously and talk and talk. The others thought him conceited, and he
was; yet all the time he was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive,
less overbearing than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at
others; and he never forgave a person who laughed at him.
He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many
herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely shocked.
Once the grandmother said:
‘Who broke the punt pole?’
And they all said:
‘I didn’t.’
Then she said patiently:
‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with
his desire to conceal nothing cried joyfully: ‘I did.’—adding almost with
disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was quite
painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.
Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.
Sometimes he invented dreams, pretending he had really dreamt them.
Judith always guessed when the dreams were untruths, though often they
were very clever and absurd, just like real dreams. She made up dreams too,
so he could not deceive her. She knew the recipe for the game; and that, try
as you would, some betraying touch was bound to creep in.
 In the same way he could not deceive her about the adventures he had
had, the queer people he had met, plausible as they were. Made-up people
were real enough, but only in their own worlds, which were each as
different from the world your body lived in as the people who made them
were different from each other. The others always believed him when they
bothered to listen; they had not the imagination to find him out. Judith as a
fellow artist was forced to judge his lies intellectually, in spite of moral
indignation.
He was rather mean about sweets. Often he bought a bagful of acid
drops, and after handing them round once went away and finished them by
himself. Sometimes when Judith was with him he sucked away and never
once said: ‘Have one.’ But another time he bought her eightpence worth all
to herself and took her for a beetle walk. He adored beetles. He knew their
names in Latin, and exactly how many thousand eggs a minute they laid
and what they ate, and where and how long they lived. Coming back he put
his arm round her and she was proud, though she wished he were Charlie.
He read a lot and sometimes he was secretive about it. He stayed in the
bath room whole afternoons reading dictionaries or the Arabian Nights.
He was the only one who was said to know for certain how babies were
born. When the others aired their theories he laughed in a superior way.
Then one day after they had all been persuading him he said, surly and
brief: ‘Well, haven’t you noticed animals, idiots?’ And after they had
consulted amongst themselves a bit they all thought they understood, except
Martin, and Marietta had to explain to him.
Julian played the piano better than Charlie; he played so that it was
impossible not to listen. But he was not, as Charlie was, a pure vessel for
receiving music and pouring it forth again. Judith thought Charlie
undoubtedly lapped up music as a kitten lapped milk.
Julian said privately that he intended to write an opera. It was too
thrilling for words. He had already composed a lovely thing called ‘Spring’
with trills, and an imitation of a cuckoo recurring in it. It was wonderful,—
exactly like a real cuckoo. Another composition was called ‘The Dance of
the Stag-Beetles.’ That was very funny. You simply saw the stag-beetles
lumping solemnly round. It made everybody laugh—even the grandmother.
Then Roddy invented a dance for it which was as funny as the music; and it
became a regular thing to be done on rainy days. Julian himself preferred
‘Spring.’ He said it was a bigger thing altogether.

Roddy was the queerest little boy. He was the most unreal and thrilling
of all because he was there so rarely. His parents were not dead like Julian’s
and Charlie’s, or abroad like Martin’s or divorced and disgraced like
Mariella’s. (Mariella’s mother had run away with a Russian Pole, whatever
that was, when Mariella was a baby; and after that her father ... there Nurse
had broken off impressively and tilted an imaginary bottle to her lips when
she was whispering about it to the housemaid.)
Roddy’s parents lived in London and allowed him to come on a week’s
visit once every holiday. Roddy scarcely ever spoke. He had a pale, flat
secret face and yellow-brown eyes with a twinkling light remote at the back
of them. He had a ruffled dark shining head and a queer smile that you
watched for because it was not like anyone else’s. His lip lifted suddenly off
his white teeth and then turned down at the corners in a bitter-sweet way.
When you saw it you said ‘Ah!’ to yourself, with a little pang, and stared,—
it was so queer. He had a trick of spreading out his hands and looking at
them,—brown broad hands with long crooked fingers that were magical
when they held a pencil and could draw anything. He had another trick of
rubbing his eyes with his fist like a baby, and that made you say ‘Ah!’ too,
with a melting, quick sort of pang, wanting to touch him. His eyes fluttered
in a strong light: they were weak and set so far apart that, with their upward
sweep, they seemed to go round the corners and, seen in profile, to be set in
his head like a funny bird’s. He reminded you of something fabulous—a
Chinese fairy-story. He was thin and odd and graceful; and there was a
suggestion about him of secret animals that go about by night.
Once Judith saw a hawthorn hedge in winter, shining darkly with recent
rain. Deep in the heart of its strong maze of twigs moved a shadowy bird
pecking, darting silently about in its small mysterious confined loneliness
after a glowing berry or two. Suddenly Judith thought of Roddy. It was
ridiculous of course, but there it was: the suggestion came of itself with the
same queer pull of surprise and tenderness. A noiseless, intent creature
moving alone among small brilliancies in a profound maze: there was—oh,
what was there that was all of Roddy in that?