Saul Bird Says: Relate! Communicate! Liberate!

Wanda Barnett, born in 1945, received her bachelor's degree at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in 1965, as class valedictorian, received a fellowship from the University of Michigan for graduate studies in English in the fall of that year and, in the spring of 1969, accepted a temporary lectureship at Hilberry University, a school in southern Ontario with an enrollment of about 5000 students. On September 9, 1969, she met Saul Bird; someone appeared in the doorway of her office at the university, rapping his knuckles loudly against the door. Wanda had been carrying a heavy box of books, which she set down at once.

"How do you do, my name is Saul Bird," he said. He shook hands briskly with her. His voice was wonderfully energetic; it filled the narrow room and bounced off the empty walls, surrounding her. Wanda introduced herself, still out of breath from carrying the books; she smiled shyly. She leaned forward attentively, listening to Saul Bird, trying to understand what he was saying. He talked theatrically, elegantly. His voice wound about her like fine ribbon. She found herself stooping slightly so that she might seem less obviously taller than he.

"What are your values? Your standards? Everything in you will be questioned, eroded here, every gesture of spontaneity--if you love teaching, if you love working with young people, you've certainly come to the wrong university. Are you a Canadian? Where are you from? Have you found an apartment? I can help you find one if you haven't."

"I have to look for an apartment today----"

"The economy is maniacal here. Are you a Canadian?"

"No, I'm from New York."

"Oh. New York." His voice went flat. He took time to light a cigarette and Wanda stared at him, bewildered. He had blond hair that was bunched and kinky about his face, like a cap; his face had looked young at first--the eyebrows that rose and fell dramatically, the expressive little mouth, the nose that twitched slightly with enthusiasm--but, really, it was the face of a 40-year-old, with fine, straight lines on the forehead and around the mouth. His complexion was both dark and pale--darkish pale, an olive hue, difficult to describe. He had a hot, busy, charming-face. "I'm from New York, too. I don't actually approve--I want to state this clearly--of this university's persistent policy of hiring Americans to fill positions that could be filled by Canadians, though I myself am an American, but I hope not contaminated by that country's madness. I am going to form a committee, incidentally, to investigate the depth of the Americanization of this university. Do you have a Ph.D.?"

"I'm writing my dissertation now," Wanda said quickly.

"On what?"

"Landor."

"Landor," he said flatly. The set of his face was now negative. He did not approve. Wanda nervously wiped her hands on her skirt. With one foot, Saul Bird turned a box of books around to read their titles. "All this is dead. Dried crap."

She stared at him in dismay.

His eyes darted quickly about her office. His profile was stern, prompt, oddly morose; the lines deepened about the small mouth. "These books. This office. The desk you've innocently inherited--from Jerry Renling, whom you will never meet, since they fired him last spring for taking too much interest in his students. All this is dead, finished. Where is your telephone?"

He turned back abruptly to her, as if impatient with her slowness. She came awake and said, "Here, it's here, let me move all this. ..." She tried to pick up another box of books, but the box gave way and some books fell onto the floor. She was very embarrassed. She cleared a space for him. He sat on the edge of her desk and dialed a number.

Wanda waited awkwardly. Should she leave her office while he telephoned? But he seemed to take no notice of her. His blond hair appeared to vibrate with electricity. On the bony ridge of his nose, his black-rimmed glasses were balanced as if by an act of fierce will.... Why was her heart pounding so absurdly? It was the abrasive charge of his voice--that demanding, investigative air--it put her in mind of men she had admired, public men she had known only from a distance, a meek participant in a crowd. Saul Bird had a delicate frame, but there was something powerful in the set of his shoulders and the precise, impatient way he dialed the telephone.

"Any messages there?" he said, without introducing himself. "What? Who? When will he call back?" He paused for a moment. Wanda brushed her short hair back nervously from her face. Was he talking to his wife? "We have four more signatures on the petition. Yes. I told you to forget about that. It's twelve-ten now; can you get down here at one and pick me up? Why not? There's someone here looking for an apartment----"

Wanda stared at him. At that moment, Saul Bird turned and smiled--fond, friendly, an intimate smile--or was she imagining it? He looked like a child in his dark turtleneck sweater and brown trousers. He wore sandals; the grimy straps looked gnawed. Wanda, in her stockings and new shoes, in her shapeless dress of dark cotton, felt foolishly tall in his sight: Why had she grown so tall?

When he hung up, he said, "My wife's coming. We'll find you an apartment."

"But I really don't----"

Someone appeared in the doorway, leaning in. "Saul?" He was a young man in a soiled trench coat.

"Come in, I've been waiting for you," Saul Bird said. He introduced Wanda to the young man. "Wanda, this is Morris Kaye in psychology, my friend 'K.' This is Wanda Barnett. Susannah and I are going to find her an apartment this afternoon."

"Something has come up. Can I talk to you?"

"Talk."

"But it's about--I mean----" The young man glanced nervously at Wanda. He was about 23, very tall, wearing a white T-shirt and shorts under his trench coat. His knees were pale beneath tufts of black hair. His face, dotted with small blemishes that were like cracked veins, had a strange glow, an almost luminous pallor. Wanda could feel his nervousness and shied away from meeting his eyes.

"We may as well introduce Wanda to the high style of this place," Saul Bird said. "I was given notice of nonrenewal for next year. Which is to say, I've been fired. Why do you look so surprised?"

Wanda had not known she looked surprised--but now her face twitched as if eager to show these men that she was surprised, yes. "But what? Why?"

"Because they're terrified of me," Saul Bird said with a cold smile.

• • •

Susannah Aptheker Bird, born in 1929, earned doctoral degrees in both history and French from Columbia University. In the fall of 1958, she met and married Saul Bird. Their child, Philip, and Susannah's formidable book on Proust both appeared in 1959. The next year, Susannah taught at Brandeis, while Saul Bird taught at a small experimental college in California; the following year, they moved to Baton Rouge, where Susannah worked on her second book. When Saul Bird was dismissed from Louisiana State University, Susannah accepted an appointment at Smith College. The following year, however, she received a Frazer Foundation grant to complete her second book--The Radical Politics of Absurd Theater--and decided to take a year's leave from teaching. Saul Bird had been offered a last-minute appointment from a small Canadian university on the American border. The two of them flew up to Hilberry University to look it over: They noted the ordinary, soot-specked buildings, the torn-up campus, the two or three "modern" buildings under construction, the amiable, innocuous student faces. They noted the grayness of the sky, which was the same sky that arched over Buffalo, New York, and which was fragrant with gaseous odors and ominous, as if the particles of soot were somehow charged with energy, with electricity; not speaking, not needing to speak, the Birds felt a certain promise in the very dismalness of the setting, as if it were not yet in existence, hardly yet imagined.

They could bring it into existence.

On September ninth, after Saul Bird called, Susannah changed her clothes, taking off her pajama bottoms and putting on a pair of blue jeans. The pajama top looked like a shirt--it was striped green and white--so she did not bother to change it. "Get dressed, your father wants us to pick him up at the university," she said to the boy, Philip. "I'm not leaving you here alone."

"Why not?" the boy said cheerfully. "Think I'd kill myself or something?"

"To spite your father and me."

The boy snickered.

She drove to the university. Saul was standing with a small group--K and a few students, Doris and David and Homer, and a young woman whom Susannah did not recognize. Saul introduced them: "This is Wanda Barnett, who is anxious to get an apartment." Everyone piled into the car. Wanda, demure and homely, seemed not to know what to do with her hands. She squeezed in next to Susannah. She smiled shyly; Susannah did not smile at all.

That was at one o'clock. By five that afternoon, they had located an apartment--not exactly within walking distance of the university--but a fairly good apartment, just the same, though quite expensive. "Someone will have to wash these walls," Saul Bird declared to the manager. "You don't expect this young woman to sign a lease for such filth, do you? This city is still in the Nineteenth Century! Well, Wanda, are you pleased with this?"

He turned to face her. She was exhausted, her stomach upset from the day's activity. Anxious not to disappoint Saul Bird, she could only nod mutely. She felt how the others in the room--everyone except the child had come up--were waiting for her reaction, watching her keenly.

"Yes," she said shakily, "yes, it's perfect."

Saul Bird smiled. "I'm on my way to a private conference with Hubben, I must leave, but we want you to have dinner with us tonight. I might be stopping at T.W.'s apartment to see what they've heard. Wanda, you're not busy tonight?"

"I really can't----"

"Why not?" Saul Bird frowned. He put out his arms and a cigarette burned eloquently in his fingers. Wanda felt the others watching her, waiting. Susannah Bird stood with her arms folded over the striped, sporty shirt she wore.

"I have work to do of my own, and I can't intrude upon you," Wanda said miserably.

"Relax. You take yourself too seriously," Saul Bird said. "You must reassess yourself. You may be on the verge of a new life. You are in Canada, a country not free of bourgeois prostitution but relatively innocent, free, at any rate, of a foreign policy, a country that is a possibility. You grant me Canada's a possibility?"

Wanda glanced at the others. Saul Bird's wife had a thin, ravaged, shrewd face; it was set like stone, with patches of black hair like moss about it. A blank. K was staring at Wanda's shoes, as if waiting painfully for her response. The students--Homer McCrea and David Rose--eyed her suspiciously. Their young nostrils widened with the rapidity of their breathing. Clearly, they did not trust her. Both were very thin. Their faces were eaglelike and intense; in imitation of Saul Bird, perhaps, they wore turtleneck sweaters that emphasized their thinness, and blue jeans and sandals. Their feet were grimy. Their toes were in perpetual movement, wiggling, appearing to signal the unbearable tension of the moment. David Rose wore a floppy orange-felt hat that was pulled down upon his head; his untidy hair stuck out around it. Homer McCrea, hatless, had a head of black curly hair and wore several rings on his fingers.

Wanda thought: I must get away from these people.

But Saul Bird said swiftly, as if he had heard her thoughts, "Why are you so nervous, Wanda? You look very tired. You look a little sick. Your problem is obvious to me--you do not relax. Always your mind is working and always you're thinking, planning, you're on guard, you're about to put up your hands to shield your private parts from us--why must you be so private? Why are you so terrified?"

"I--I don't know what you----"

"Come, we must leave. Susannah will make us all stuffed breast of veal."

A wave of nausea rose in Wanda.

• • •

Erasmus Hubben, born in Toronto in 1930, completed his doctoral work in 1955 with an 800-page study called "The Classical Epistemological Relativism of Ernst Cassirer." Every summer, Hubben traveled in Europe and northern Africa; friends back in Canada received postcards scribbled over with his fine, enigmatic prose--sprinkled with exclamation points and generally self-critical, as if Hubben were embarrassed for himself. He was conscious of himself, always: Students could not quite understand his nervous jokes, the facial tics and twitches that were meant to undercut the gravity of his pronouncements, the kind of baggy shuffling dance he did when lecturing. His face, seen in repose, was rather sorrowful, the eyebrows scanty, accenting the hard bone of his brow, the nose long and pale as wax, the lips thin and colorless; in company, his face seemed to flesh out, to become muscular with the drama of conversation, the pupils of the eyes blackening, the lips moving rapidly, so that tiny flecks of saliva gathered in the corners of his mouth. He was a good, generous man, and the somewhat clownish look of his clothes (seedy, baggy trousers with fallen seats; coats with elbows worn thin; shoes splotched with old mud) was half deliberate, perhaps--while Hubben suggested to his colleagues, evasively and shyly, that they must play Monopoly with him sometime (he had invented a more complicated game of Monopoly), at the same time he waved away their pity for his loneliness by the jokes, the puns, the difficult allusions, the jolly cast of his face and dress alike...and he carried in his wallet the snapshot of a smiling, beefy young woman, which he took out often to show people as if to assure them that he had someone, yes, there was someone back in Toronto, someone existed somewhere who cared for Erasmus Hubben.

He came to Hilberry University in 1967, having resigned from another university for reasons of health. He taught logic, but his real love was poetry, and he had arranged for a private printing of a book of his poems. They were always short, often ending with queries.

Actual adversariesare not as prominent as quiveringspeculations

When you think of me, my dear,do you think ofanything?

He took teaching very seriously. He liked students, though he did not understand them; he liked their energy, their youth, their foreignness. During his first year at Hilberry, he prepared for as many as 20 hours for a single lecture. But his teaching was not successful. He could not understand why. So he worked harder on his lectures, taking notes by hand so as not to disturb the family he lived with. (He boarded with a colleague and his family.) Late in the winter of 1968, a student named David Rose came to see him. This student did not attend class very often and he was receiving a failing grade, but when he sat in class with his arms folded, his face taut and contemptuous beneath a floppy orange-felt hat, he impressed Hubben as a superior young man. Wasn't that probably a sign of superiority, his contempt? Erasmus Hubben shook hands with him, delighted that a student should seek him out, and made a joke about not seeing him very often. David Rose smiled slowly, as if not getting the joke. He was very thin and intense. "Dr. Hubben," he said, "I have been designated to approach you with this question--would you like your class liberated?" Hubben was leaning forward with an attentive smile--liberated? "Yes. Your course is obviously a failure. Your subject is not entirely hopeless, but you are unable to make it relevant. Your teaching methods are dead, dried up, finished. Of course, as a human being, you have potential," the boy said. Hubben blinked. He could not believe what he was hearing. The boy went on to explain that a certain professor in English, Saul Bird, was conducting experimental classes and that the other Hilberry professors would do well to learn from him before it was too late. Saul--everyone called him Saul--did not teach classes formally at all; he had "liberated" his students; he met with them at his apartment or in the coffee shop or elsewhere, usually at night; his students read and did anything they wanted, and some skipped all sessions, since in any case, they were going to be allowed to grade themselves at the end of the year. "The old-fashioned grading system," David Rose said angrily, "is only imperialistic sadism!"

Hubben stared at the boy. He had been hearing about Saul Bird for a long time, and he had seen the man at a distance--hurrying across campus, usually dressed badly, with a few students running along with him--but he had never spoken to him. Something about Saul Bird's intense, urbane, theatrical manner had frightened Hubben off. And then there was the matter of his being a Jew, his being from New York.... Hubben's family was a little prejudiced, and though Hubben himself was free of such nonsense, he did not exactly seek out people like Saul Bird. So he told David Rose, with a gracious smile, that he would be delighted to talk with "Saul" sometime. He hoped he wasn't too old to learn how to teach! David Rose did not catch this joke but gravely and politely nodded. "Yes, the whole university better learn. It better learn from Saul or go under," he said.

Soon, Hubben began to hear of little else except Saul Bird. Bird had been fired and would fulfill only the next year's contract. His department--English--and the dean of arts and sciences had voted to dismiss him. Now, it seemed that many of Hubben's students were also "Saul's" students. They sat together in the classroom, when they came to class, their arms folded, their eyes beady and undefeated, though Hubben's finely wrought lectures obviously bored them. David Rose had enrolled for another course, still wearing his orange hat; a girl named Doris had joined him, perhaps his girlfriend--Doris, all angles and jutting lines, very thin, with stringy blonde hair and sweaters pulled down to her bony hips as if they were men's sweaters, her voice sometimes rising in a sarcastic whine that startled the other students, "Professor Hubben, doesn't this entirely contradict what you said the other day?" Another boy, Homer McCrea, had black curly hair and a dramatic manner that put Hubben in mind of Saul Bird. Sometimes he took notes all period long (were these lecture notes going to be used against him?--Hubben wondered), sometimes he sat with his arms folded, his expression distant and critical. Hubben began to talk faster and faster, he spiced up his lectures with ironic little jokes of the sort that superior students would appreciate, but nothing worked--nothing worked.

Saul Bird came to see him the first (continued on page 247)Saul Bird Says(continued from page 96) week in September, striding into his office. "I'm Saul Bird. I would like your signature on a petition," he said. Hubben spent many minutes reading the petition, examining its syntax, to give himself time to think. Saul Bird's presence in this small room upset him. The man was very close, physically close to Hubben--and Hubben could not stand to be touched--and he was very real. He kept leaning over Hubben's shoulder to point out things in the petition. "That is the central issue. That will break someone's back," Saul Bird said.

Hubben, rattled, could not make much sense of the petition except that it seemed to support excellence in teaching and the need for dedication to students and for experimentation to prevent "the death of the humanities." Hubben could not see that it had much to do with the case of Saul Bird at all. But he said, not meeting Saul Bird's stare, "I really must decline. I'm afraid I don't sign things."

"You what?"

"I'm afraid I don't----"

"You refuse to involve yourself?" Saul Bird said sharply.

Hubben sat staring at the petition. He read it over again. Would this awful man not go away?

"I think you'll reconsider if you study my case," Saul Bird said. "Most of the faculty is going to support me, once the injustice of the case is aired. Here is my own file--read it tonight and tell me what your response is." And he gave Hubben a manila folder of Xeroxed memos, outlines, programs, personal letters from students in praise of Saul Bird, dating back to March of the year that Saul Bird had signed a contract with Hilberry. Hubben sat dizzily looking through these things. He had his own work to do.... What sense could he make of all this?

On September ninth, he was to meet with Saul Bird at four in the afternoon, but the hour came and went. He was immensely relieved. He prepared to go home, thinking of how much better it was to stay away from people, really. No close relationships. No intimate ties. Of course, he liked to "chat" with people--particularly about intellectual subjects--and he enjoyed the simple-minded family dinners in the Kramer household, where he boarded. He liked students at a distance. Women made him extremely nervous. His female students were as colorful as partridges and as unpredictable--so many sudden flutterings, the darting of eyes and hands! The young men in his classes were fine human beings, but, up close, the heat of their breath was disturbing. Better to keep people at a distance.... And as Hubben thought this clearly to himself, the telephone rang and Doris Marsdell announced that Saul Bird was on his way. "But he's an hour late and I'm going home," Hubben protested.

"You hadn't better go home," the girl said.

"What?" said Hubben. "What did you say, Miss Marsdell?"

"This is a matter of extreme importance, more to you than to Saul. You hadn't better go home." Shaken, Hubben looked around his dingy, cluttered office as if seeking help--but he was alone. The girl went on quickly, "Saul is a genius, a saint. You people all know that! You're jealous of him! You want to destroy him, because you're jealous, you're terrified of a real genius in your midst!"

"Miss Marsdell," Hubben said, "are you joking? You must be joking."

"I don't joke," the girl said and hung up.

When Saul Bird arrived 15 minutes later, he was in an excellent mood. He shook hands briskly, lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of Hubben's desk. "Did you read my file? Are you convinced of the injustice of this university?"

Hubben was extremely warm. "I'm not sure----"

"Most of your colleagues in philosophy are going to sign in my behalf," Saul Bird said. "What is your decision?"

"I wasn't aware that most of them were----"

"Of course not. People are afraid to talk openly of these matters."

"I still don't think----"

"My wife wants you to have dinner with us tonight. We'll talk about this quietly, sanely. Intelligent discourse between humanists is the only means of bringing about a revolution--until the need for violence is more obvious, I mean," Saul Bird said with a smile.

"Violence?" Hubben stared. He felt something in his blood warming, opening, coming to life in arrogant protestation against himself, his own demands. He was very warm. Saul Bird, perched on the edge of his desk, eyed him through glasses that looked as if they might slightly magnify the images that came through them.

"People like you," Saul Bird said softly, "have been allowed to live through books for too long. That's been your salvation--dust and the droppings of tradition--but all that is ending, as you know. You'll change. You'll be changed. My wife would like you to come to dinner. You're rooming with the Kramers, aren't you? Old Harold Kramer and his 'ethics of Christianity' seminar?"

Hubben wanted to protest that Kramer was only 46.

"People like Kramer, according to the students, are hopeless. They must go under. People like you--and a very few others--are possibilities. The students do admit certain possibilities. They are very wise, these twenty-year-olds, extraordinarily wise. The future belongs to them, of course. You are not anti-student, are you?"

"Of course not, but----"

"Telephone Kramer's wife and tell her you're eating out tonight," Saul Bird said.

Hubben hesitated. Then something in him surrendered: Really, it would not harm him to have dinner with the Birds. He was curious about them, after all. And then, it could not. be denied that Saul Bird was a fascinating man. His face was shrewd, peaked, oddly appealing. He was obviously very intelligent--his students had not exaggerated. Hubben had heard, of course, that Saul Bird had been fired for incompetence and "gross misconduct." He did not teach his classes, evidently. He did not assign any examinations or papers and his students were allowed to grade themselves. But in the man's presence, these charges faded, they did not seem quite relevant.... Hubben made up his mind. He would spend the evening with the Birds. Wasn't it a part of the rich recklessness of life, to explore all possibilities?

And so it all began.

• • •

The group met informally at Saul Bird's apartment, at first two or three times a week, then every evening. Wanda went as often as she could--she had to work hard on her class preparations and on her dissertation, she was often exhausted, a little sick to her stomach and doubtful of her subject (Landor, Saul Bird had said flatly)--but still she showed up, shy and clumsy about this new part of her life. Saul Bird and his group were so passionate! They were so wise! They asked her bluntly how she could devote her intelligence to the analysis of a medieval writer when the world about her was so rotten. It was based on hypocrisy and exploitation, couldn't she see? The world was a nightmarish joke, unfunny. Nothing was funny. It was a fact of this life, Saul Bird lectured to his circle, that nothing was funny.

And he would stare openly at Erasmus Hubben, whose nervous jokes had annoyed the circle at first.

Hubben was transformed gradually. How had he been blind for so long? His students told him that half the faculty was going to be fired, hounded out, shamed out of existence, if Saul Bird was not rehired. When Saul Bird was rehired, however, he would not be gratefully silent but would head a committee of activist faculty and students to expose the hypocrisy of the rest of the faculty. Their findings would be published. Would he, Erasmus, like to contribute anything to help with printing costs? As the fall semester went on, Hubben turned up at Saul Bird's more and more often, he stayed later, he became quite dependent upon these nightly meetings. How was it possible that he had known so little about himself? about his own stultifying life? He began to speak wildly, parodying his own professorial manner, and the saliva flew from his lips. He believed that Saul Bird listened closely to him. The very air of Saul Bird's crowded little apartment was exhilarating to Hubben; he and the two other faculty members who showed up regularly began to feel younger, to dress in an untidy, zestful, youthful manner. Hubben gained a new respect for Morris Kaye, whom he had never taken seriously. And a new lecturer, a young woman named Wanda, attracted Hubben's eye: Vague in her speech, flat-chested, her eyes watery with emotion or shyness, she did not upset Hubben at all and she seemed to admire his speeches.

On the walls of the apartment there were many posters and photographs, and those that caught Hubben's eye most often were of blazing human beings--Buddhist monks and nuns, and a Czechoslovakian university student. A human being in flames! Maniacal flames leaping up from an oddly rigid, erect human being, sitting cross-legged in a street! It was unimaginable. But it had happened, it had been photographed. Hubben had the idea as the weeks passed that only so dramatic an act, so irreparable an act, would impress Saul Bird.

When Wanda could not go to the apartment, she thought about the group and could not concentrate on her work. What were they talking about? They usually talked for hours--sometimes quietly, sometimes noisily. The air would be heavy with smoke. Everyone except Wanda smoked; even Saul Bird's little boy showed up, smoking. (The Birds did not exactly live together. Susannah had an apartment on the top floor of a building and Saul had a smaller apartment on the second floor, in the rear.) The little boy, Philip, would come down to visit and stand behind his father's chair, watching everyone. He was a fascinating child, Wanda thought. She feared children, usually, but Philip did not seem to be a child; he was dwarfish rather than small, wise and almost wooden, with thick kinky hair a little darker than his father's and his father's cool, intelligent face. He would not attend public schools and the Birds supported him. (Some kind of legal case was going on over this.) He said little, unlike other children Wanda had known, and she was very pleased one day when the Birds asked her to take Philip out to get a pair of shoes. She took him on the bus. He was silent except for one remark: "Don't fall in love with my father, please."

Wanda laughed hysterically.

She began to lie awake at night, thinking about Saul Bird. He often looked directly at her, pointedly at her. He often nodded in support of her remarks. If only they could talk alone!--but the apartment was always crowded with students who were staying overnight, some of them even bringing their sleeping bags along. The young man with the orange hat, David Rose, had moved out of his parents' house and Saul Bird had gladly agreed to house him, for nothing. The telephone was always ringing. Susannah sometimes showed up around midnight, silent and dark. She reminded Wanda of a crow. But the woman was brilliant, her book on Proust was brilliant. Wanda despaired of such brilliance herself. Susannah had a deft, witchlike, whimsical style, her small face sometimes breaking into a darting, razorish smile that was really charming. And her wit frightened everyone--"If my husband could function normally, he would function normally," she said once, winking. And Hubben was always there. He sent out for pizzas and chop suey and hamburgers. K--"I am a character out of Kafka, pure essence," he declared--was always there. And the students, always the students. They seemed to live on air, disdaining Hubben's offers of food. They did not need food. They lived on the hours of intense, intoxicating dialog:

Saul Bird: What conclusions have you come to?

Doris: That I was an infant. I was enslaved.

Saul Bird: And what now?

Doris: Now I am totally free.

Saul Bird: You're exaggerating to gain our respect.

Doris: No, I'm free. I'm free. I detest my parents and everything they stand for--I'm free of them--I am my own woman, entirely!

During the day, Hubben began to notice that his colleagues at the university were jealous of him. They were probably curious about the renewed interest in his notoriously difficult subject, logic. How strange that young people should begin to hang around Erasmus Hubben's office! Hubben spent hours "chatting" with them. I must get closer. I must wake up to reality, he thought. His colleagues were not only jealous of his popularity but fearful of it. He began closing his office door and opening it only to Saul Bird's circle. He took around Saul Bird's petition and tried to argue people into signing it. When Kramer would not sign it, Hubben became extremely angry and moved out of the Kramer home and into a cheap riverfront hotel. He told the Kramers that their attitude toward Saul Bird was disgusting. They were sick people, he could not live under the same roof with such sick, selfish people! Kramer, a professor of ethics, an old-fashioned Catholic layman, was brought to tears by Hubben's accusations. But Hubben would not move back. He would not compromise with his new ideals.

I have friends now. I have real friends, he thought 50 times a day, in amazement. He doodled little poems, smiling at their cryptic ingenuity--

One savage kiss is worth a thousand savage syllogisms--

and showed them to Saul Bird, who shrugged his shoulders. Though he was a professor of English, Saul had not much interest in poetry. He argued that the meaning of life was action, involvement with other human beings; the trappings of the past were finished--books, lectures, classrooms, buildings, academic status! He, Saul Bird, was being fired only because he represented the future. The establishment feared the future. In a proclamation sent to the local newspaper, calling for an investigation of the financial holdings of the university's board of governors, he stated: "Because it is my duty to liberate the students of this university, I am being fired. Because people like myself--and we are numerous in Canada and the United States--are loyal to our students and not to the establishment, we are being persecuted. But we are going to fight back."

"We certainly are going to fight back!" Hubben cried.

He hurried about the university with a wild, happy look. He felt so much younger! Though living in the White Hawk Hotel did not agree with him, he felt much younger these days; it was mysterious. He and the young lecturer Wanda Barnett often sought each other out at the university to discuss the change in their lives. At first, they were shy; then, guessing at their common experiences, they began to talk quite openly. "I was always lonely. I was always left out. I was always the tallest girl in my class," Wanda said, gulping for breath.

Hubben, feeling a kind of confused, sparkling gratitude for this woman's honesty, admitted that he, too, had been lonely, isolated, overly intelligent, a kind of freak. "And I was selfish, so selfish! I inherited from my father--a pious old fraud!--an absolute indifference to moral and political commitment. I skipped a stage in the natural evolution of mankind! But thanks to Saul----"

"Yes, thanks to Saul----" Wanda said at once.

Just before the break at Christmas, the university's Appeals Committee turned down the Saul Bird case.

"And now we must get serious," Saul Bird said to the circle.

They began to talk of tactics. They talked of faculty resignations, of the denunciation of the university by its student population; guardedly, at first, they talked of demonstrations and breakage and bombings. They would certainly occupy the humanities building and only violent police action could get them out--maybe not even that, if they were armed. They could stay in the building for weeks and force the university's administration to rehire Saul Bird. As they spoke, they became more excited, more certain of themselves. The blazing suicides on Saul Bird's walls were luminous, as if in sympathy with their cause.

How could one live in such a rotten society? Why not destroy it with violence?

The telephone was always ringing. Sometimes Wanda answered, sometimes one of the girl students; if Saul Bird nodded, they handed the receiver to him; if he shook his head, they made excuses for him. He was not always available to everyone. This pleased them immensely, his belonging to them. When they did not talk directly of forcing the administration to rehire him, they talked about him, about his effect on their lives. They were frank and solemn. A first-year arts student, a girl, clasped her hands before her and said breathlessly, "Saul has changed me. No cell in me is the same."

K, enormously moved, sat on the floor and confessed, "He revolutionized my concept of reality. It's like that corny Gestalt of George Washington's face--once it's pointed out to you, you can't see anything else. Not lines and squiggles but only Washington's face. That is fate."

But sometimes, very late at night, the discussions became more intimate. It was in January that Saul Bird turned to Hubben, who had been unusually noisy that evening, and said, "You assure us you've been transformed. But I doubt it. I doubt that you are ready yet to face the truth about yourself."

"The truth?"

"The truth. Will you tell us?"

It was so late--around four in the morning--that only about 12 students remained, as well as Wanda, K and a recent convert, a peppy, bearded sociology lecturer. The air was suddenly quite tense. Everyone looked at Hubben, who tugged at the collar of his rumpled shirt.

"I don't know what you mean, Saul," he said.

"Of course you know what I mean."

"That I'm prejudiced? Against certain races...or creeds...?"

Saul Bird was silent.

"I admit to a slight primitive fear...an entirely irrational fear of people different from myself. It's Toronto instinct! Good old Anglo-Saxon stock!" Hubben laughed.

"We know all that," David Rose said coldly.

"How do you know that? Did you--did you know that?" Hubben said. He looked around the room. Wanda Barnett was watching him, her face drawn with the late hour. K's look was slightly glazed. "But I like all human beings personally, as--as human beings. Today I was chatting in the lounge with Franklin Ambrose, and it never occurred to me, not once, that he was a--that he was a Negro----"

Hubben looked miserably at Saul Bird.

"Franklin Ambrose is not a Negro," said Saul Bird shrewdly.

Everyone barked with laughter. It was true: Frank Ambrose, a black man of 30, whose Ph.D. was from Harvard, who dressed expensively and whose clipped high style was much appreciated by his female students, was not really a "Negro" at all.

"What about Jews, Erasmus?" Doris Marsdell said suddenly.

"Jews? I don't think about Jews. I have no feelings one way or another. I do not think about people as Jews--or non-Jews----"

"Tell us more," another student said with a snicker.

"Yes, tell us."

"Tell us about your most intimate instinct," Saul Bird said. He leaned forward to stare down at Hubben, who was sitting on the floor. "What is the truth about your feeling for me?"

"Extreme admiration----"

"Come, come. I think we all know. You might as well admit it."

"Admit what?"

"Your inclinations."

"But what--what are my inclinations?"

"Your obsession."

Hubben stared. "What do you mean?"

"Tell us."

"But what--what do you mean?"

"Your desire for me," Saul Bird said.

"I don't----"

"Your homosexual desire for me," Saul Bird said flatly.

Hubben sat without moving.

"Well?" said Saul Bird. "Why are you so silent?"

"I don't--I don't----" Hubben wiped his forehead with both hands. He could not bear the gaze of Saul Bird, but there was nowhere else to look. And then, suddenly, he heard his own voice saying, "Yes, I admit it. It's true."

Saul Bird lifted his hands in a gesture that matched the lifting of his eyebrows. "Of course it's true," he said.

The discussion leaped at once to another topic: tactics for the occupation of the humanities building. Hubben took part vociferously in this discussion. He stayed very late, until only he and a few students remained, and Saul Bird said curtly, "I forgot to tell you that Susannah and I are flying to New York this morning. Will you all go home, so that I can get some sleep?"

"You're going away?" everyone said.

A weekend without Saul Bird was a lonely weekend. Hubben did not leave the White Hawk Hotel; Wanda, staying up in Susannah's apartment in order to take care of Philip, hoped for a telephone call. While the child read books on mathematical puzzles, or stared for long periods of time out the window, Wanda tried to prepare her Chaucer lectures. But she could not concentrate: She kept thinking of Saul Bird.

Who could resist Saul Bird?

The White Hawk Hotel was very noisy and its odors were of festivity and rot. Hubben, unable to sleep, telephoned members of the Saul Bird circle during the night, chatting and joking with them, his words tumbling out, saliva forming in the corners of his mouth. Sometimes he himself did not know what he was saying. After talking an hour and a half with K about the proper wording of their letters of resignation, he caught himself up short and asked, startled, "Why did you call me? Has anything happened?"

The next Monday, on his way to class, he overheard two students laughing behind him. He whirled around; the boys stared at him, their faces hardening. No students of his. He did not know them.

But perhaps they knew him?

Getting his mail in the departmental office, he noticed that the secretary--a young woman with stacked blonde hair--was eying him strangely. He glanced down at himself--frayed trouser cuffs, unbuckled overshoes. She was so absurdly overdressed that she must sneer at an intellectual like him, in self-defense. She must.

And yet, perhaps she had heard...?

He went over to the English department to see Wanda, but she stammered an apology: "A student is coming to see me right now. About the special edition of the paper."

"The special edition? Can't I stay and listen?"

"Not right now," Wanda said, confused.

Hubben had donated $500 for a special edition of the student newspaper, which was going to feature an interview with "Saul Bird: Teacher Extraordinary."

He walked quickly back to his office and closed the door. His head pounded. He covered his face with his hands and wept.

Saul Bird....

Saul Bird returned in three days and the activities of the circle were resumed. It was necessary to begin plans for the occupation of the humanities building in earnest. They must be prepared for violence. Now the telephone was ringing more than ever: The local newspaper wanted an interview to run alongside an interview with the president of the university; a professor in civil engineering, of all fields, wanted Saul Bird to come to dinner, because it was "time we all communicated"; the head of Saul's department wanted an explanation of all this intrigue; David Rose's father called todemand angrily what was happening to his son; long-distance calls came in from Toronto, in response to a full-page advertisement Hubben had paid for in the Toronto Globe and Mail, headlined "Why is Hilberry University Persecuting a Man Named Saul Bird?"

Wanda walked through a cold sleeting rain to watch a television interview show at the home of the Episcopal chaplain, Father Mott, a young, balding man who was Saul Bird's newest disciple. The show was a local production, rather amateurish, but Saul Bird spoke clearly and strongly and made an excellent impression. Wanda stared, transfixed, at his image on the screen. It was impossible to tell how short he was! He talked for 15 minutes in his urbane, imploring voice: "It must be smashed so that it can live! Those of us who are prepared to smash it are feared, especially by our own generation; but this fear is hopeless, it will stop nothing--the future will come, it will be heard! We may have to destroy higher education in both Canada and the United States in order to save our young people!"

"Dr. Bird," said the interviewer, "may I ask a more personal question? We've been hearing about a possible occupation of one of the university's buildings. Is there any basis to this threat?"

"Absolutely not," said Saul Bird.

The occupation had been planned for the following Tuesday, the second week in February. Wanda, who had been staying up almost every night, got so nervous that she could not sit still. She could not even stay in her office for long. She imagined that people were staring at her. The older faculty members, unsympathetic to Saul Bird, in some cases hating Saul Bird, began to look at her in a most unpleasant way. In the faculty lounge, Wanda believed that they laughed at her because she came in so rushed, her short hair untidy about her face, her books clumsily cradled in her arms. She blushed miserably.

February was dim and cold and few students showed up at her morning classes. Inspired by Saul Bird, she had announced that all students enrolled in her sections would be allowed to grade themselves at the end of the year. Saul Bird had predicted a renewed enthusiasm on the students' part, but in fact, the students were disappearing; what had gone wrong? Didn't they understand her devotion to them? She was so nervous that she had to hurry to the women's rest room before classes, fearing nausea. Sometimes she did throw up. And then, shaken, pale, distraught, she hurried across the windy quadrangle to her classroom, arriving five minutes late, her glasses steamed over.

As the date of the occupation approached, she became even more nervous. She could not sleep. If she telephoned Saul Bird, it often happened that someone else answered--it sounded like Doris Marsdell--and said loftily, "Saul is not available at the moment!" If she telephoned Susannah, the phone went unanswered. Erasmus Hubben, at his hotel, would snatch up his telephone receiver and say hello in so panicked a voice that Wanda could not identify herself. So the two of them would sit, listening to each other's frightened breathing, until they both hung up.

She kept thinking and rethinking about the past several months. Her mind raced and would not let her sleep. For some reason, she kept glancing at her wrist watch. What was wrong? What was happening? She caught a bad cold waiting for a bus to take her to Saul Bird's apartment and could not get rid of it. When she met other faculty members in the halls, she stammered and looked away. She could not concentrate on her dissertation. That could wait; it had nothing to do with real life. But people were looking at her oddly. When she hurried into the coffee shop to sit with K and a few students, it seemed that even these people glanced oddly at her. But it was Erasmus Hubben they were analyzing. "People just want to discredit his ad in the Toronto Globe and Mail!" Doris Marsdell said sourly. She had a very thin, grainy face, rubbed too raw and drawn with exhaustion; her blonde hair hung in strands. When she waved her arms excitedly, she did not smell good. "Sanity and insanity, Saul says, are bourgeois distinctions we don't need to observe. It's all crap! If society tries to say that Erasmus is unbalanced, that is their distinction and not ours. Society wants to categorize us in order to get power over us! Sheer primitive imperialist power!"

• • •

The occupation began on February tenth, at 10:30 P.M. Saul Bird's supporters--about 40 students and 8 faculty members and the wiry little Episcopal chaplain--approached the humanities building with their sleeping bags, helmets, goggles and food, but the campus police must have been tipped off, because they were waiting. These police--about five of them--blocked the entrance to the building and asked for identification cards.

Erasmus Hubben pushed his way through the shivering little group. "Are you the Gestapo?" he cried. "The thought police? What is your identification?" A few of the students began shoving forward. They broke past the campus police--who were middle-aged, portly men in uniforms that looked like costumes--and ran into the building. "Fascists! Gestapo!" Hubben cried. His long dark overcoat was unbuttoned and swung open. Wanda, whose throat was very sore, wondered if she should not try to calm Erasmus. But something about the rigidity of his neck and head frightened her. "I dare you to arrest me! I dare you to use your guns on me! I am an associate professor employed by this university, I am a Canadian citizen, I will use all the powers of my station and my intellect to expose you!" he cried. The students inside the building were now holding the doors shut against the police, but this prevented the other students from getting in. The policemen moved slowly, like men in a dream. Erasmus was pulling at one of them, a plump, catfaced, frightened man in his mid-50s, and was shouting, "Are we threatened with being fired, indeed? Are these loyal students threatened with expulsion? Indeed, indeed? And who will fire us and who will expel us when this university is burned to the ground and its corrupt administration put to public shame?"

"Somebody put a gag on him!" one of the students muttered.

Then something happened that Wanda did not see. Did Erasmus shove the policeman or did the policeman shove Erasmus? Did Erasmus truly spit in the man's face, as some claimed gleefully, or did the policeman just slip accidentally on the steps? People began to shout. The policeman had fallen and Erasmus was trying to kick him. Someone pulled at his arm. Hubben screamed, "Let me at him! They are trying to castrate us! All my life, they have tried to castrate me!" He took off his overcoat and threw it behind him and it caught poor Father Mott in the face. Before anyone could stop him, Erasmus tore off his shirt and began undoing his trousers. Wanda could not believe her eyes--she saw Erasmus Hubben pull down his trousers and step out of them! And then, eluding everyone, he ran along the side of the building, through the bushes, in his underclothes.

"Get him, get him!" people cried. A few students tried to head him off, but he turned suddenly and charged right into them. He was screaming. Wanda, confused, stood on the steps and could not think what to do--then two young girls ran right into her, uttering high, shrill, giggling little screams. They were from her Chaucer class. They ran right into her and she slipped on the icy steps and fell. She could not get up. Someone's foot crashed onto her hand. About her head were feet and knees; everyone was shouting. Someone stumbled backward and fell onto Wanda, knocking her face down against the step, and she felt a violent pain in her mouth.

She began to weep helplessly.

• • •

Saul Bird, who had thought it best to stay away from the occupation, telephoned Wanda at three o'clock in the morning. He spoke rapidly and angrily. "Come over here at once, please. Susannah and I are driving to Chicago in an hour and we need you to sit with Philip. I know all about what happened--spare me the details, please."

"But poor Erasmus----"

"How soon can you get here?"

"Right away," Wanda said. Her mouth was swollen--one of her teeth was loose and would probably have to be pulled. But she got dressed and called a taxi and ran up the steps into Saul Bird's apartment building. In the foyer, a few students were waiting. Doris Marsdell cried, "What are you doing? Is he letting you come up to see him?" Her eyes were pink and her voice hysterical. "Did anything happen? Is he still alive? He didn't attempt suicide, did he?"

"He asked me to take care of Philip for a few days," Wanda said.

"You? He asked you?" Doris cried in dismay.

Susannah answered the door. She was wearing a yellow-tweed pants suit and hoop earrings; her mouth was a dark, heavy pink. "Come in, come in!" she said cheerfully. The telephone was ringing. Saul Bird, knotting a necktie, appeared on the run. "Don't answer that telephone!" he said to Susannah. The boy, Philip, stood in his pajamas at a window, his back to the room. Everywhere there were suitcases and clothes. Wanda tried to cover her swollen mouth with her hand, ashamed of looking so ugly. But Saul Bird did not seem to look at her. He was rummaging through some clothes. "Wanda, we'll contact you in a few days. We're on our way out of this hellhole," he said curtly.

She helped them carry their suitcases down to the car.

Then, for three days, she stayed in the apartment and "watched" Philip. She fingered her loose tooth, which was very painful; she wept, knotting a handkerchief in her fingers. She could not shake loose her cold. "Do you think--do you think your father will ever recover from this?" she asked, staring at the little boy.

He spent most of his time reading and doodling mathematical puzzles. When he laughed, it was without humor, a short, breathy bark.

Saul Bird did not telephone until the following Saturday, and then he had little to say. "Put Philip on the Chicago flight at noon. Give him the keys to both apartments."

"But aren't you coming back?"

"Never," said Saul Bird.

"But what about your teaching? Your students?" Wanda cried.

"I've had it at Hilberry University," Saul Bird said.

She was paralyzed.

Preparing Philip for the trip, she walked about in a kind of daze. She kept saying, "But your father must return. He must fight them. He must insist upon justice." Philip did not pay much attention to her. A cigarette in the center of his pursed lips, he combed his thick hair carefully, preening in the mirror. He was a squat, stocky and yet attractive child--like his father, his face wooden and theatrical at once, a sickly olive hue. Wanda stared at him. He was all she had now, her last link with Saul Bird. "Do you think he's desperate? Will he be hospitalized like poor Erasmus Hubben? What will happen?"

"Nothing," said Philip.

"What do you mean?"

"He has found another job, probably."

"What? How do you know?" Wanda cried.

"This has happened before," said Philip.

In the taxi to the airport, she began to weep desperately. She kept touching the child's hands, his arms. "But what will happen to us...to me...? The year is almost gone. I have nothing to show for it. I resigned from the university and I cannot, I absolutely cannot ask to be rehired like the others.... I cannot degrade myself! And my dissertation, all that is dead, dried up, all that belongs to the past! What will happen to me? Will your father never come back, will I never see him again?"

"My father," said Philip coldly, "has no particular interest in women."

Wanda hiccuped with laughter. "I didn't mean----"

"He makes no secret of it. I've heard him talk about it dozens of times," Philip said. "He was present at my birth. Both he and my mother wanted this. He watched me born...me being born...he watched all that blood, my mother's insides coming out...all that blood. ..." The child was dreamy now, no longer abrasive and haughty; he stared past Wanda's face as if he were staring into a mystery. His voice took on a softened, almost bell-like tone. "Oh, my father is very articulate about that experience.... Seeing that mess, he said, made him impotent forever. Ask him. He'd love to tell you about it."

"I don't believe it," Wanda whispered.

"Then don't believe it."

She waited until his flight was called and walked with him to the gate. She kept touching his hands, his arms, even his bushy dark-blond hair. He pulled away from her, scowling; then, taking pity on her, staring with sudden interest at her bluish, swollen lip, he reached out to shake hands. It was a formal handshake, a farewell.

"But what will I do with the rest of my life?" Wanda cried.

The child shook his head. "You are such an obvious woman," he said flatly.