The Rebel Angels

"And an understanding of how to get a good academic appointment, and then tenure, and become a full professor without ever guessing what you're really full of, and then soar to a Distinguished Professor who can bully the President into giving you a whopping salary because otherwise you might slip away to Harvard? You don't mean that, Maria. That's some fool talking out of your past. You'd better corner whatever fool it is and tell him this: the kind of character you talk about is all rubbish. What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you – that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, "Doesn't he look peaceful?" It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old."

So – I had bounced him. "And have you found that child, Wee Jackie Parlabane?"

"I think so. And rather a battered baby he has proved to be. But do you believe what I've said?"

"Yes, I do. Hollier says the same thing, in a different way. He says that people don't by any means all live in what we call the present; the psychic structure of modern man lurches and yaws over a span of at least ten thousand years. And everybody knows that children are primitives."

"Have you ever known any primitives?"

Had I! This was a time to hold my tongue. So I nodded.

"What's Hollier really up to? Don't say paleo-psychology again. Tell me in terms a simple philosopher can understand."

"A philosopher? Hollier is rather like Heidegger, if you want a philosopher. He tries to recover the mentality of the earliest thinkers; but not just the great thinkers – the ordinary people, some of whom didn't hold precisely ordinary positions. Kings and priests, some of them, because they have left their mark on the history of the development of the mind, by tradition and custom and folk-belief. He just wants to find out. He wants to comprehend those earlier modes of thought without criticizing them. He's deep in the Middle Ages because they really are middle – between the far past, and the post-Renaissance thinking of today. So he can stand in the middle and look both ways. He hunts for fossil ideas, and tries to discover something about the way the mind has functioned from them."

I had ordered another bottle of Chianti, and Parlabane had drunk most of it, because two glasses is my limit. He had had four Stregas, as well, and another asphyxiating cigar, but drunks and stinks are no strangers to me. He had begun to talk loudly, and sometimes talked through a belch, raising his voice as if to quell the interruption from within.

"You know, when we were at Spook together I wouldn't have given a plugged nickel for Hollier's chances of being anything but a good, tenured professor. He's come on a lot."

"Yes, he's one of the Distinguished Professors you were sneering at. Not long ago, in a press interview, the President called him one of the ornaments of the university."

"Have mercy, God! Old Clem! A late-bloomer. And of course he's got you."

"I am his student. A good student, too."

"Balls! You're his soror mystica. A child could see it. Anyhow, that extremely gifted, all-desiring Wee Johnnie Parlabane can see it, long before it reaches the bleared eyes of the grown-ups. He encloses you. He engulfs you. You are completely wrapped up in him."

"Don't shout so. People are looking."

Now he was really shouting. " 'Don't shout, I can hear you perfectly. I have the Morley Phone which fits in the ear and cannot be seen. Ends deafness instantly.' – Do you remember that old advertisement? No, of course you don't; you know too much and you aren't old enough to remember anything." Now Parlabane squeaked in a falsetto: " 'Don't shout so; people are looking!' Who gives a damn, you stupid twat? Let 'em look! You love him. Worse you're subsumed in him, and he doesn't know it. Oh, shame on stupid Professor Hollier!"

But he does know it! Would I have let him take me on the sofa five months ago if I wasn't sure he knew I loved him? No! Don't ask that question. I can't be sure of the answer now.

The proprietor of The Rude Plenty was hovering. I gave him a beseeching glance, and he helped me get Parlabane to his feet and towards the door. The monk was as strong as a bull, and it was a tussle. Parlabane began to sing in a very loud and surprisingly melodious voice –