Hazell, the ghost in the study
@cinnamonsweater @skicio-zeezee @nevertwain I thought I would just expand on some of these thoughts on chapter two and that ellipse, and some of Laurie’s weirdness around Ralph which doesn’t seem explainable purely as ‘he fancies him and doesn’t want to admit it’. I am always struck by the way the study scene is never discussed by Ralph and Laurie in the book. I see the whole ‘Sorry Dearie’ discussions as a kind of substitute for Ralph asking him outright about it. And I wonder if the evisceration on the staircase is partly a substitute for the moment that Laurie actually connects with his feelings about it seven years on in the light of new information.
If we start with the second car journey around the downs, Ralph is the first to bring up Hazell:
"Now, Spud, come. You ought to know better than that by this time, with a couple of stripes up too. If you're talking about school, as I suppose you are, I can see of course that you had it all rather sprung on you at the time.....But don't tell me it never occurred to you later, when you were a prefect yourself for instance, that people who abuse a position of trust have to be got rid of. At least, I should hope it did."
Laurie is still desperate to give him the benefit of doubt and Ralph is having none of it.
"I suppose you could make out some sort of case for me as an individual. But for a pillar of the institution, the only possible justification was never to get found out. I deserved the sack for my judgement of character if for nothing else."
This is the point at which Laurie muses on the theme of seven years being the period of time when every cell in the body is replaced, etc. His first thought is to place the study scene in a distant past that has no connection with the present. But he can’t do it.
Ralph then talks about Hazell, using the impersonal ‘one’ instead of ‘I’:
"Of course, if you took him up at all and seemed sympathetic, he used to play down the idiocy and let his intelligence be glimpsed; not obviously, just so that one felt he'd been given a bit of confidence.”
Then Ralph says:
“I used to look round, and try to decide whether there was anyone I could feel as sure about as I did about myself."
We get no reaction from Laurie, but if he took that in on any level, surely his mind must have been reeling. Then Laurie responds to Ralph disparaging comments about ‘the network’ by pointing out that that’s how they met again. Ralph’s final verdict is that:
“I'd been trying to work up what I was into a kind of religion. I thought I could make out that way. He made me see it as just a part of what he was."
And Laurie goes into a paroxysm of inarticulate emotion:
He was very much moved, too much to narrow his feelings down to any one point of the story or to think at all. What he wanted to express was an absolute assent and sympathy which included everything.
At this point, any anger or disapproval Laurie might have felt is buried deep.
Later, though, in Ralph’s room, he has the ‘moment’ in the dark, triggered solely by that most primitive of the senses, smell, and it transports him back to Ralph’s study and that particular memory, erasing a whole year of having had that study himself when he became head boy.
His perceptions, to everything else so dull, were full of this special feeling of the room, and, growing out of it, an intense awareness of Ralph standing close and silent beside him, not in serge and braid but in grey flannel; it seemed to him that he could even feel the cloth again. It all took him suddenly and with bewildering force: his next immediate reaction was a panic fear of having somehow betrayed himself. He had a dim impression that Ralph had made some movement and that this must mean he had noticed something.
It's not entirely clear what the panic is about and in some ways it doesn’t matter. He feels vulnerable in some way, as though his feelings have been laid bare, and he panics. It is a shocking and negative emotion triggered by a sense that bypasses his conscious mind.
Now, if we go back to the study scene, we can imagine Laurie running through it, and starting to process this new information. There are some uncomfortable parallels with Hazell.
Ralph starts out in typical teacher mode, using every disciplinary trick in the book, with a rather obsessive focus on Laurie’s mental capacity. He accuses him of ‘dangerous lunacy’ and asks him if he has ‘got softening of the brain’ Then he says:
"Have you gone completely crazy? Who the hell do you think you are, standing here when a prefect sends for you and asking me questions about what I'm going to do? You need to see a doctor, I should think."
Then we have some more heavy sarcasm, but finally everything grinds to a halt. That’s when we get the first smile. Something shifts in Ralph’s behaviour, and in Laurie’s perceptions. Suddenly it’s a ‘man to man’ talk, but with the new-found knowledge that Ralph was actually in a sexual relationship with Hazell, it could start to feel a little bit like something else.
Slowly a perverse and charming smile, unfamiliar to Laurie, lifted the ends of his mouth. "Your spontaneous reactions are going to land you in a lot of trouble, if you don't look out."
Laurie starts talking about Jeepers being a dirty old man and Ralph starts asking him what he knows about it. Then he hands him the Plato. Then we get this line, eerily reminiscent of his comments on Hazell being a ‘clever little boy’.
"I've been watching you," Lanyon said, "for a long time. You're on the way to being something, and I don't know what, not for certain. So I'm not going to interfere with it." "I don't know," said Laurie slowly. "I feel as if you had already."
Then another smile from Ralph, and the confession. He tells Laurie it would mean too much.
And finally, the ellipse.
We don’t have Ralph’s point of view, which I think is a deliberate choice. And I’m not suggesting that Laurie goes through a conscious process here either. But I do think that after that conversation on the second car journey, having taken the queer party more or less in his stride, something quite deep is going on for him. It would explain his extreme hypervigilance over Ralph’s proximity, his weirdness in the hospital chapel scene and that weird sense of ‘constriction, almost of panic’ that he has when Ralph suggests moving in together. And he starts to wonder if Ralph is making it up about seeing him in Hamlet.
The sense I get from all this is that the brief glimpse he gets of Ralph’s point of view of the Hazell incident has made him wonder about the true nature of that conversation in the study, the content of which he had secretly treasured for seven long years, and it makes him doubt Ralph’s motives. He is slowly starting to realise that by giving him the Phaedrus, he was asking him to do something he hadn’t done. As the final letter says,
We always agreed that right, left, or centre, it is still necessary to make out as a human being. I haven't done it but you will.
And very shortly, Laurie will meet Bunny, the man who has never encountered Ralph’s straight look, the man who appears to be ‘getting away with murder......’
