The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

HISTORIANS HAVE GENERALLY ignored, or underplayed, this curious aberration in Dr. Wilson’s career, partly because there are few reliable records concerning the “defeat at Charleston” (as Woodrow Wilson would call it). So far as I am able to ascertain, Dr. Wilson began his speech to the Charleston alumni organization with his usual “authority” and “ease”; he knew to “loosen up” his Southern audience with a favorite anecdote about “three darkies” brought up to Princeton by their young masters, in the old days before the war, who were goggle-eyed by their first snow, which they believed to be falling cotton. (Allegedly, this anecdote roused “gales of laughter” in Dr. Wilson’s audience, of entirely gentlemen. That Dr. Wilson utilized his very humorous “Negro dialect” with many a rolling of his eyes and comical gestures, surely added to the hilarity.)

After this promising start, Dr. Wilson began a speech he could have recited in his sleep—(“And very often do, in fact!” as he joked to Mrs. Wilson)—titled “The University Man, the Christian, and the Patriot”—but after a few minutes he felt a tinge of apprehension, and even nausea; and his voice, ordinarily poised and well modulated, began to falter. The blame lay with the red-meat dinner he’d consumed, as a man among men; or with the sickly clouds of smoke from the gentlemen’s cigars and pipes, wafting through the ill-ventilated room. Continuing to speak, while feeling sweat break out on his forehead, Dr. Wilson felt a prick of terror as, glancing about the audience, he seemed to see at the very rear of the room the corpulent shirtfront, bland bald pate, and ruddy well-fed face of his nemesis Dean West!—his enemy seated amid rapt listeners with a pretense of being one of them.

“No. It can’t be. He would not dare follow me to Charleston—he would not.”

Yet, the well-practiced delivery for which the president of Princeton was known had become, it seemed, irrevocably jarred; like a lone railway car by cruel accident separated from its fellows, that eases onto the graveled roadway bed, and begins to speed, and rattles out of control, Dr. Wilson began to speak rapidly, often interrupting himself in mid-phrase.

The substance of his talk, as it has been reported, was confused: now, Dr. Wilson spoke in an impassioned voice of allies and enemies; now, of democracy and the threat from abroad—“As hundreds of thousands of enemies of Protestantism swarm to the shore of the New World, minds and spirits shackled by the despotism, intolerance, and rank superstition which governs in the dominions of the Pope of Rome, and which prevails in all of Catholic Europe.” From this, Dr. Wilson shifted abruptly to the familiar subject of Christian leadership and Christian followers: “For Jesus Christ is our model, Who knew Himself a ‘fisher of men’ and commanded that all who wished salvation should follow Him—yea, even unto battle.” Then, with no clear transition, Dr. Wilson murmured jestingly about the internecine battles at the university, which provoked restlessness in the audience, a flurry of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.