The Book of Air and Shadows

catastrophe he went through, but still…and this doesn’t answer the original question at all. Why, if he needed funding, did he not come to me?”
    “Are you particularly wealthy?” I asked.
    “Oh, not at all, but I do have some assets, some property, some inherited things. I suppose at a pinch I could have raised a hundred or so without descending into absolute beggary. Would you say he would have needed much more than that?”
    “If you’re talking about a hundred thousand pounds, then no. We have no indication that what he got was more than about twenty thousand dollars from the Russians.”
    “Good Lord! Then it makes even less sense. Why didn’t he come to me?”
    I said, “Perhaps he was embarrassed because of the scandal,” and mentioned that Mickey Haas had asked the same question. As soon as the name was out I was surprised to see a sour expression appear on March’s refined face.
    “Well, of course he wouldn’t have approached Haas,” he said. “Haas hated him.”
    “What! How can you say that?” I objected. “They were friends. Mickey was one of the few people in academia who stuck up for him when the fake quarto scandal broke. He gave him a place to work at Columbia when no one else would look at him.”
    “I take it Haas is a particular friend of yours,” said March.
    “Yes, he is. He’s my oldest friend and one of the most decent and generous people I know. Why did Andrew imagine that Mickey hated him?”
    “It had nothing to do with imagination,” snapped March. “Look here, twenty odd years ago, Haas produced a book on Shakespeare’s women, female characters in the plays, that is, the point of which was that thinking about Shakespeare as an original genius simply reinforced the toxic individualism of bourgeois culture. I believe he said that
Macbeth
was really all about the three witches, and a load of similar twaddle. Andrew was asked to review it for the
Times Literary Supplement
and gave it the mighty bollocking it deserved, not only poking holes in its logic and scholarship, but also implying that Haas knew better, on the evidence of his own earlier writing, and that he had produced this farrago merely to curry favor with the Marxists and feminists and whatnot who control, I am informed, all hiring at American universities. Not that I know a thing about it myself, barely passed my A-levels in the damned stuff, just a simple biologist really. Amazing that Andrew and I got on so well together; absence of rivalry perhaps, two halves making a whole. He used to read me bits in the evenings. Well, it was a great scandal, outraged letters back and forth to the
TLS
, screeds in the little journals, and I recall thinking at the time how happy I was to be in a business where you have actual data. It blew over, as these things always do, and when Andrew lost his reputation because of that awful little man, Haas was there with a stout defense, and later a job offer. As I recall, neither of us mentioned the earlier dogfight. We assumed that it had been forgotten, simply part of the usual give-and-take of academic debate. But it hadn’t been. Almost as soon as Andrew arrived in New York, Haas began to torment him. At first it was just sly digs, little things that could have been confused with some kind of bumptious American humor, but then it grew worse, petty acts of tyranny…”
    “Such as?”
    “Oh, he was promised a Shakespeare seminar, and some graduate courses, but instead he was given freshman composition sections, rather like a brain surgeon being asked to tidy up the wards, mop up the blood, and empty the pans. When he complained of this outrageous treatment, Haas told him he was lucky to have anything at all, he was lucky not to be on the dole, or selling watches on the street. Andrew called and told me about this gruesome business, and of course I demanded that he tell Haas what he could do with his bloody appointment and come straight home. But that he would not do. I think he felt it was a kind of expiation for his scholarly sin. And…you know I see that this will sound odd, as if Andrew were descending into some hell of paranoia, but he told me that he believed Haas was tormenting him in more underhanded ways as well. His salary cheques would go missing. Little items would vanish from his briefcase, from his room. Someone changed the lock on his office door. One day he came to work and found all his things in the hall. He’d had his office moved without notice.