"As much as I can get."
"And that's a good answer," Enderby said, meaning it, meaning it more than they, in their present stage of growth, could possibly mean it. He suddenly felt a tearful love and compassion for these poor orphans, manipulated by brutal statesmen and the makers of tooth-eroding sweet poisonous drinks and (his face blotted temporarily out that of anguished Whitelady) the bearded southern colonel who made it a virtue to lick chicken fat off your fingers. Schmaltz and Chutzpah. The names swam in, as from the Book of Deuteronomy. Who were they? Lawyers? He said: "Life is sensation, which includes thought, and the sensation of having sensation, which ought to take care of all your stupid worries about identity. Christ, Whitelady has identity. But what he doesn't have and what he never had is the sensation of having sensations. Better and cleverer people than we are can be invented." He saw how wrong he was about perennius acre. "But what can't be invented is," he said, directly addressing the couple who had come in late, "what you two were doing outside in the corridor."
The boy grew very red but the girl smirked.
"The touch of the skin of a young girl's breast. A lush-capped plush-kept sloe-"
"You got that the wrong way around," the Kickapoo said.
"Yes, yes," Enderby said, tired. And then, in utter depression, he saw who Whitelady was. He winked at him with his right eye and Whitelady simultaneously winked back with his left.
FIVE
After the lesson on Whitelady (lose sensation, he kept thinking, and I become a fictional character) Enderby walked with care, aware of a sensation of lightness in his left breast as though his heart (not the real one, the one of non-clinical traditional lore) had been removed. So sensation could lie, so whither did that lead you? His feet led him through a halfhearted student demonstration against or for the dismissal of somebody, a brave girl stripping in protest, giving blue breasts to the February post-meridian chill, to the long low building which was the English Department. Outside the office he shared with Assistant Professor Zeitgeist or some such name, there were black girl students evidently waiting for Professor Zeitgeist and beguiling their wait with loud manic music on a transistor radio. Enderby mildly said:
"Do switch that thing off, please. I have some work to do."
"Well, you goan work someplace else, man."
"This is, after all, my office," Enderby smiled, feeling palpitations drumming up. "This is, after all, the English Department of a University." And then: "Shut that bloody thing off."
"You goan fuck yoself, man."
"You ain't nuttin but shiiit, man."
Abdication. What did one do now-slap the black bitches? Remember the long servitude of their people and bow humbly? One of them was doing a little rutting on-the-spot dance to the noise. Enderby slapped the black bitch on the puss. No, he did not. He durst not. It would be on the front pages tomorrow. There would be a row in the United Nations. He would be knifed by the men they slept with. He said, smiling, rage boiling up to inner excoriation: "Abdication of authority. Is that expression in your primer of Black English?"
"Pip pip old boy," said the non-jigging one with very fair mock-British intonation. "And all that sort of rot, man."
"You go fuck yo own ass, man. You ain't nuttin but shiiiiit."
Enderby had another weapon, not much used by him these days. He gathered all available wind and vented it from a square mouth.
Rarkberfvrishtkrahnbrrryburlgrong.
The effort nearly killed him. He staggered into his office, saw mail on his desk, took it, and staggered out. The black girls, very ineptly, tried to give, in glee, his noise back to him. But their sense of body rhythm prevailed, turning it to oral tom-tom music. The radio took four seconds off from discoursing garbage of one sort to advertise garbage of another-male voice in terminal orgasm yelling sweet sweet sweet O Pan piercing sweet. Enderby went into the little lounge, empty save for shouting notices and a bearded man who looked knowingly at him. He opened his letters, chiefly injunctions to join things (BIOFEEDBACK BRETHREN GERONTOPHILIACS ANONYMOUS ROCK FOR CHRIST OUR SATAN THE THANATOLOGY MONTHLY), coming at length to a newspaper clipping sent, apparently out of enmity, by his publisher in London. It was from the Daily Window and was one of the regular hardhitting noholdsbarred nononsense manofthepeople responsibilityofagreatnationalorgan addresses to the reader written by a staffman named Belvedere Fellows, whose jowled fierce picture led, like a brave over-age platoon officer, the heavy type of his heading. Enderby read: SINK THE DEUTSCHLAND! Enderby read:
My readers know I am a man that faces facts. My readers know that I will sit through any amount of filthy film rubbish in order to report back fairly and squarely to my readers about the dangers their children face in a medium that increasingly, in the name of the so-called Permissive Society, is giving itself over to nudity, sex, obscenity and pornography.
Well, I went to see The Wreck of the Deutschland and confess that I had to rush to the rails long before the end. I was scuppered. Here all decent standards have finally gone Kaput. Here is the old heave-ho with a vengeance.
But enough has been said already about the appalling scenes of Nazi rape and the blasphemous nudity. We know the culprits: their ears are deafened to the appeals of decency by the crackle of the banknotes they are now so busily counting. There are certain quiet scoundrels whose names do not reach the public eye with the same tawdry glamour. Behind the film image lies the idea, lies the writer, skulking behind cigarette smoke and whisky in his ivory tower.
I say now that they must take their share of the blame. I have not read the book which the film is based on, nor would I want to. I noted grimly however that there were no copies the other day in my local library. My readers will be horrified however to learn that he is a Roman Catholic priest. This is what the liberalism of that great and good man Pope John has been perverted into.
I call now, equivocally and pragmatically, for a closer eye to be kept on the filth that increasingly these days masquerades as literature and even as poetry. The vocation of poet has traditionally been permitted to excuse too much-the lechery of Dylan Thomas and the drunken bravoing of Brendan Behan as well as the aesthetic perversions of Oscar Wilde. Is the final excuse now to be sought in the so-called priestly vocation? Perhaps Father Enderby of the Society of Jesus would like to reply. I have no doubt he would find an attentive congregation.
Enderby looked up. The bearded man was still looking knowingly at him. He said something. Enderby said: "I beg your pardon?"
"I said: how are things in Jolly Old?"
Enderby could think of absolutely no reply. The two looked at each other fixedly for a long time, and the bearded man's jaw dropped progressively as if he were silently demonstrating an escalier of front vowels. Then Enderby sighed, got up, and went out to seek his Creative Writing class. Like a homer he tapped his way with his swordstick through the dirty cold and student knots to a building named for the inventor of a variety of canned soups, Warhall or somebody. On the second floor, to which he clomb with slow care, he found them, all ten, in a hot room with a long disfigured conference table. The Tietjens girl was there, drowned and sweatered. She had apparently told them everything, for they looked strangely at him. He sat down at the top or bottom of the table and pulled their work out of his inside pocket. He saw that he had given Ms. Tietjens a D, so he ballpointed it into a rather arty A. The rest shall remain as they are. Then he tapped his lower denture with the pen, plastic to plastic: tck tck, tcktck tck, TCK. He looked at his students, a mostly very untidy lot. They looked at him, lounging, smoking, taking afternoon beverages. He said: