The Howls of Ivy

...disappear in the gloom—an even more unpleasant version of the ending of Point Counter Point, with a polluted river replacing a bathtub...

...An assumption that people are what they seem and words mean what they say is, no doubt, altogether too cozy...

...Cranton is a take-off on the exurbanite community...

...Reviewed by Robert E. Cosgrove Instructor, Flint Community College There is a vaudeville gag which brings a comedian on stage with an object he identifies as an 11-foot pole, handy for use on people you wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole...

...Waithe would like to see him as a kind of Fisher King who has gained a sterile power rather than a potent benevolence...

...Cranton itself was founded on a filled-in marsh, and the once-sparkling waters of the Cranton River are now foul with industrial wastes...

...If he is simply a structural convenience for the author, the ingenuity with which the objects of satire are presented is very thin...

...But if it is a Swifitian satire on The Idea of a University, it needs more invention and less invective...

...Indeed, since Waithe is unable to define what he thinks he perceives, the reader may hope, now and again, for a slam-bang Dr...

...Aldridge may be very angry, or just a roaring boy out on a binge, carving his initials on everyone he meets —one is often dazzled by his flash and glitter—but, as with many virtuoso displays, enough is enough...

...The novel has two purposes...

...If he is to be interesting as a character, we may wonder why he does not leave Cranton, what there is about him and his world that is so sealed off...

...However, in the foreground, time is the present and place is the party...

...the problem is to show Waithe as credible, though haunted by his sense of his own illusoriness, and to show Cranton as probable at all...

...John Aldridge has his 10-foot pole extended by an extra 12 inches of stiletto, and handles this instrument so dexterously that he is never reduced to polishing off the untouchables in his novel with the butt end...

...An unlikely weapon, but this is an unusual satire on academic life...

...While so engaged she met Richard Waithe, the "point-of-view" character of the novel, and "their acquaintance had been consummated to the accompaniment of the shelling of Cherbourg—an activity which she likened, between moans, to the siege of Troy...

...If it is a particular chamber of horrors, those that like horrors can pay their money and scare themselves silly...

...The party is given in honor of Dorothy Murchison at the conclusion of a series of lectures she has delivered at Cranton...

...Actually Waithe, whose name suggests a lisped composite of "wraith" and "waste," has no point of view himself...

...If the novel should prove to be a roman a clef, most of us can be glad we were not invited to the party...

...Buchanan is not to be disposed of in a cliche...

...But not everyone, everywhere, all the time...

...The two purposes are to be made congruent in the character of Waithe...

...But he must know why Buchanan, failure as husband and poet, existing to torture people and literature in a constant charade, wields absolute power in his department...

...Where Aldridge deals in cliches he disguises them with amazing display of the hyperbole of vituperation...

...But the satire is superficial...

...The kind of game one plays at such faculty parties is obvious enough, though it's a life-or-death matter for careers...

...Possibly, within hallowed walls, neurotics and plain old-fashioned scoundrels may rise to great place, and, moreover, do solid scholarly work...

...but this is a passing vulgarity, and nowhere else, I think, do classes and students intrude...

...Occasionally they may not be sure whether they are grieved by the absence of love and generosity or merely nicked in their self-esteem...

...There is no reason to doubt Aldridge's sincerity...

...He knows that Buchanan is tyrannical, gross, suave, erudite and predatory...

...It is something to call faculty wives "a gaggle of harpies in heat...

...Their lives are bounded by the faculty party...

...But Waithe is rather a bore, and the ingenuity of the voyeur is rather childish...

...One character excuses himself, as he leaves two colleagues to the alarming enjoyment of each other, with the comment that he has an eight o'clock class...

...Is this Waithe's opinion of himself in general, or his opinion when he is fairly high at a party...

...For Waithe, the polarities of experience are "the pristine Edenic condition" and the cliche...

...But one wants to know how the horrors came into existence...

...The novel begins with the entry of Waithe, a faculty member, into the room where the party is well-advanced, at the moment when Arthur Keith Buchanan, a faculty czar, has emitted "a gigantic howl...

...In between there are a series of character dissections, with enough narrative to locate some of the people in time...

...The novel ends with Waithe observing Buchanan and a faculty wife who are paddling in an all too obviously polluted river...

...We may cull a little treasury of insult from it and be grateful for Aldridge's magnificent gifts in that line...

...And some assistant professors, anyhow, may sometimes feel that The University has no more than the bare and shivering virtues of Madison Avenue and Hollywood—a comforting, woolly cliche...

...But it is really there, and although Waithe may try to relate it to The Great Gatsby, he has not invented it...

...Caligari ending...

...The appalling poet and novelists in residence are really there also, and the responsibility for their creation cannot be shuffled off on Waithe...

...Waithe, trying to find the mousetrap to ensnare this king without a conscience, introduces him to Dorothy Murchison at the beginning of the lecture series...

...The Party at Cranton deals with faculty members, presumably of the Department of English, of Cranton University...

...The trick becomes more obvious in the excoriation of the town and the university...

...The closing of the trap is almost the climax of the party, but only Dorothy is caught in the trap, Buchanan is still a mystery and Waithe is left once more with literary cliches...

...Why are "deep" and "paranoid" so nearly synonyms...

...Waithe has most of his appalling colleagues pegged but until he can account for Buchanan he cannot assess himself...

...The trick in the novel—and it seems to me to be a trick—is to establish Waithe as the character who prescribes our angle of vision on the activities of Buchanan and of those others who are presented as vicious and are said to be clever...

...But he is disappointed, and Buchanan and one Sylvia (what is she...

...He is not naive...

...But Waithe cannot bear that literature should imitate life or that life should imitate literature—and possibly regrets lost innocence, possibly that he has no other terms to juggle...

...The novel sometimes reads like an anthology of invective...

...First, it follows Waithe's attempts to define for himself the reality, the actuality, of Buchanan...

...Is it his creator's opinion of him...

...Anyone can invent horrors, even sophisticated ones...

...Whatever he perceives is immediately rejected as derived—"that whole scrappy complex of cliche and patched-up histrionic clothing for which, whether in novels or in life, Waithe had a deep, almost paranoid contempt...

...She is a classics scholar, a nymphomaniac and a World War II heroine decorated by the French Government for cloak-and-dagger activity behind enemy lines...

...Second, the book makes a whirling attack on what appears to be the underworld of intellect: any department of any language and literature in any university...

...The book opens, he enters the room and steps into the circle of the damned where he starts on his own revolution...

...However, the range of targets includes the faculty tyrant, the pecking order, the dispensing of fellowships, artists in residence, Southern Fugitives, high-brow quarterlies, faculty wives, politics of advancement and conventional hobbies of drink and fornication...