Free The Professor of Truth by James Robertson

“recurring” or “unchanging”: the annual cycle of birth, death and rebirth in nature is often referred to, plants and animals are carefully observed, as too is the work of humans that goes with the turn of the seasons—ploughing,planting, reaping. Another theme focuses on the way men and women of his time were of the land while the land, at least in its wilder aspects, retained its independence from them and kept its own timescale, dwarfing the timescale of a human life. Each of his novels suggests that knowledge is gathered only slowly, with the passing of years, and that even then no single person, not even if he or she should live to a great age, can ever acquire complete knowledge. Dibald, ironically, tried to articulate this when very young, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, and then the war came.
    There are obvious reasons why all this, from a completely forgotten writer, might appeal to a man like myself, a man in my position. I do not need to rehearse them, but in addition I like the fact that Dibald expressed no interest in literary movements or theories, but wrote in a consistently unpretentious style about unremarkable lives, before his own (for the time) unremarkable death. He was one of the also-rans of that generation, or of any generation. “Showed promise, largely unfulfilled,” his literary obituary might have read.
    Too many people write books, in my view. Far, far too many people write novels. Libraries and second-hand bookshops are stuffed with their outpourings. What I find attractive about Dibald is the total absence of signs of arrogance or ambition. He seems just to be having a stab at writing down his take on life, disguising it as fiction. All novelists do that of course—do it bravely, or arrogantly or stupidly, or well or badly—and in most cases within a few months of publication, or five years later, or perhaps five years after death, nobody gives a damn what their “take” was and nobody isreading their books. But here was I, nearly a century on, reading David Dibald, reading him and liking him and thinking that he was pretty good, and that if he hadn’t been killed so young he might well have become famous.
    Fame isn’t the point, though. Survival, is that it? No, because none of what anyone writes or thinks or feels or believes, none of it survives for long. You survive only through your children, and I have no child and Dibald’s daughter donated her father’s papers to the University probably knowing that if she didn’t they’d be chucked on a bonfire or into a skip when
she
died. She saved her father, but for what? To be read by a lecturer who doesn’t think literature has anything to say, but who nevertheless goes on, year after year, telling his students that it does.
    And now I am supposed to be writing a book about Dibald. A publisher has expressed interest—more interest, in fact, than I have in my subject. I know, at bottom, that I don’t want to tell the world about David Dibald. Dibald is mine, a calm, solitary backwater in which I can drift undisturbed. If I actually write the monograph, I will only have to find somewhere else to drift. I might even have to confront that feeling which increasingly threatens to overwhelm me, that my work, my life as an academic, the very stuff of my learning, all those hours and days and years of reading, the thousands of books I have devoured—literature, in its entirety—all of it is utter futility and a complete waste of time.
    Perhaps one day I will have the courage to say that, out loud or in black and white on paper, and have done with the whole bloody charade.

6
    OU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED,” NILSEN said. “Sure you do. You’ve been outspoken about it. It’s your honestly held, reasonably argued opinion that there was a miscarriage of justice. That a man was found guilty of something he didn’t do. And behind that, you’ve said, there was subterfuge, suppressed evidence, political pressure,