"Impossible," prompt Enderby said. "Long out of print. It's only important for your purpose that you know that Longbottom that is to say Whitelady actually existed-"
"But how do we know he did?" There were two very obdurate strains in this mixed Coast girl.
"Records," Enderby said. "Look it all up in the appropriate books. Use your library, that's what it's for. One cannot exaggerate the importance of er his contribution to the medium, as an influence that is, the influence of his rhythm is quite apparent in the earlier plays of er-"
"Mangold Smotherwild," the Kickapoo said, no longer sneeringly outside the creative process but almost sweatily in the middle of it. Enderby saw that he could always say that he had been trying out a new subject called Creative Literary History. They might even write articles about it: The Use of the Fictive Alternative World in the Teaching of Literature. Somebody called out: "Specimen."
"No trouble at all," Enderby said. "In the first scene of Give you good den good my masters you have a soliloquy by a minor character named Retchpork. It goes, as I remember, something like this:
"So the world ticks, aye, like to a tocking dock
On th' wall of naked else infinitude,
And I am hither come to lend an ear
To manners, modes and bawdries of this town
In hope to school myself in knavery.
Aye, 'tis a knavish world wherein the whore
And bawd and pickpurse, he of the quatertrey,
The coneycatcher, prigger, jack o' trumps
Do profit mightily while the studious lamp
Affords but little glimmer to the starved
And studious partisan of learning's lore.
Therefore, I say, am I come hither, aye,
To be enrolled in knavish roguery.
But soft, who's this? Aye, marry, by my troth,
A subject apt for working on. Good den,
My master, prithee what o'clock hast thou,
You I would say, and have not hast, forgive
Such rustical familiarity
From one unlearn'd in all the lore polite
Of streets, piazzas and the panoply
Of populous cities-
Something like that, anyway," Enderby said. "I could go on if you wished. But it's all a bit dull."
"If it's all a bit dull," the Irish one said, "why do we have to have it?"
"I thought you said he was influential," somebody else complained.
"Well, he was. Dully influential," the Kickapoo said.
"Dead at thirty-two," Enderby said, having checked with the blackboard data. "Dead in a duel or perhaps of the French pox or of a surfeit of pickled herrings and onions in vinegar with crushed peppercorns and sour ale or, of course, of the plague. It was a pretty bad year for the plague, I think, 1591." He saw Whitelady peering beseechingly at him, a white face from the shades, begging for a good epitaph. "He was nothing," Enderby said brutally, the face flinching as though from blows, "so you can forget about him. One of the unknown poets who never properly mastered their craft, spurned by the Muse." The whole luggage of Elizabethan drama was now, unfantasticated by fictional additions, neatly stacked before him. He knew what was in it and what wasn't. This Whitelady wasn't there. And yet, as the mowing face and haunted eyes, watching his, showed, in a sense he was. "The important thing," Enderby pronounced, "is to get yourself born. You're entitled to that. But you're not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen. How much do you think you're entitled to, you?" he asked the Kickapoo.
"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.