Extreme Magic Read Free Page A

of the teachers and students came from that region. A glance at the roster showed a global scattering of names which were American, not international; the Kowalskis and Swobodas were Poles and Czechs from Hamtramck in Detroit, the Ragnhilds and Solveigs from Minnesota, and so on. Alone in the catalogue until the advent of Mr. Pines, the name of Hans Weil—philologist and onetime professor of Linguistik at Bonn—represented a Europe not once, twice, or further removed.
    With Hans Weil’s arrival in 1945, there had also come to Pittston the first of certain changes brought by the war. Like so many other scholars in the days of Hitler, Weil had been passed from hand to libertarian hand like a florin stamped “Freedom”—whisked, in his case, to London, via Holland, in 1939, and from London to Rochester, New York, in 1942, after which he was presumed to be on his own. In 1945, at his own behest, or rather at that of his wife, whose sister and brother-in-law, helped by the Weils to America, now had a flourishing but immovable dry-goods shop in Lansing, he had come to nearby Pitt as provisional candidate for a newly established chair in the humanities, and had remained there ever since. There was small need for philology at Pitt, most of whose students were on their way to being music teachers, social workers or ministers, and Weil, lacking new-world versatility, did not find it easy to “double” in related courses. Nevertheless, he had no fears for his job.
    On this fine fall morning of the new term, as Weil walked across campus at his short, duck-footed pace, the beret that he wore for his baldness emphasizing Raphael curves of cheek which softened the fact that he was almost as old as the century, and—as he would blithely have admitted—as profane, he well knew that his value to Pitt went subtly beyond its being able to mutter behind him that he had recently refused an offer from Yale. Thirty years ago, he was thinking, if by some unlikely chance he had landed at Pittston, he might at least have had to grow a beard, and, under the old tradition that all German professors were a kind of nursery-uncle emissary from the land of sugared postcards and cuckoo clocks, might also have had to submit to being called “Dr. Hans,” or “Papa Weil.” But as things were, he was not even under any particular necessity of writing those little monographs that sometimes brought him an Eastern offer. For, since the war, the GI Bill, and an engineering endowment from one of the big labor unions in Detroit, although Pitt’s lawns were still clear of cigarette butts and its brains still Protestantly clear of fumes, a complexity had entered its air. Through the windows of the music department’s practice rooms, once so liturgically pure with Bach and Buxtehude, he could now hear Bartók, Khatchaturian and even Sauter-Finnegan squawking under official sanction. Opposite, in Knox Hall, although there were still two strong classes in scriptural exegesis and one on missions, called “The Protestant Evangel,” a visiting divine from Union Theological was treating of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr and Buber in a course called “Quest”—and all four of these classes were embarrassingly near a group of acolytes studying guided missiles, on the grant from the C.I.O.
    For “comparative” thinking—the modern disease, the modern burden—had come to Pittston. And as Hans Weil walked down the main street, on his way for a word with Mrs. Mabie, the wife of the art historian in whose house Mr. Pines, the exchange fellow, was to be quartered, he knew that he owed his tenure to it. He had begun by being Pitt’s “refugee professor,” and, with certain accretions of prestige and affection, he would end that way. He had merely to wear his beret, pay attention in his own classes in Anglo-Saxon, stubbornly drink his forbidden wines at dinner in full sight of whatever of the faculty, and on their insufflated bosoms abide. He was their prideful little