Read Online Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury - Free Book Online

it again this year. He wanted you to talk on poetic drama.’
    ‘Very well,’ said Treece, looking at the ears. ‘I’m quite prepared to do it.’
    ‘He also wondered if you knew of any . . . well, the phrase he used was “Big Name”, who’d come down and speak to them.’
    ‘Had he anyone in mind?’ asked Treece, swinging his leg idly.
    ‘Well, he wanted Eliot, or perhaps a Sitwell.’
    ‘We shall have to see,’ said Treece.
    Meanwhile, Mr Schenk had been trying to talk everyone into going to see the nude show at the variety theatre; he said that anyone who was interested in society or in our contemporary estimate of
the worth of man should go. ‘Yes, let’s, just for fun,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat; you knew this was her phrase. One or two of the ladies said they had to go and feed
people. ‘You must come,’ said Schenk. ‘We want to watch the expression on your faces.’ Butterfield was equally keen. ‘It’s not that I have a sociological
interest,’ he said. ‘I just
like
nude shows.’ ‘This is fun,’ said the woman in the flowerpot, as they drank down their glasses and off they all went. ‘If
only Mrs Rogers could have been here,’ said Treece. They went in cavalcade through the streets to the theatre and in the interval Treece kissed the woman in the flowerpot hat on each pretty
ear, just for fun. He found he was liking the provinces more and more; it was something less than London, but it was also itself.
    III
    Of all the problems that nibbled at Treece’s mind and brought him to anxiety, there were none sharper than his worries over status. The catechism began simply: what, in
this day and age, was the status of a professor in English society, and what rewards and what esteem may he expect? Secondly, and to add another dimension, what was the status of a professor
in
the humanities
, in England, in this day and age? Third, what, then, was the status of a professor in the humanities
at a small university in the provinces
, in England, in the present
age? It could not be denied that all the forms of social stratification, once solid, were liquefying in the torrid heat engendered by reforming zealots like himself. Treece had to admit that, if it
became a choice between being respected too much and not at all, he would, in spite of his liberal pretensions, rest easier in spirit under the former régime. And, to sum the matter up, what
emerged for Treece was that to be a professor, of the humanities, at a provincial university, in England, in the nineteen-fifties, was a fate whose rewards were all internal, for in the matter of
social status he was small enough beer. A man who had a fondness for human manners, the local manners of circles and groups that are formed by a traditional accretion of associations, he sought to
follow the given manners for himself, to live within them in no spirit of cheap emulation, but with the zest of one who believes that manners are an access to morals, and that manners pursued with
passion never atrophy. Such was the passion with which Treece queried whether it was proper for him to possess, as he did, a motorized bicycle; and a somewhat seedy late Victorian house; and an
account with the Post Office Savings Bank, because it was always useful to be able to go and draw out a few pounds, anywhere; and a National Health Service doctor, because you paid once to be ill,
anyway, and Treece was never ill enough, in the course, it seemed, of any given year, to make those weekly payments a fair bargain in his case; and pyjamas bought at Marks and Spencers, because
they seemed just as good as more distinguished garb, though perhaps less well-cut around the crotch; and paperback books, because you could possess more (though you had to go, always, to the
library to provide references for scholarly articles from the hardbound editions). On the other side of the coin, however, to point up that, even in the fluidity of the contemporary English