Dear Committee Members: A Novel (13 page)

In an unguarded moment, Boti expressed surprise at what he termed our faculty’s “docile disengagement.” I informed him that we are like oxen accustomed to the yoke: our hides thick from insult and whippings, we have forgotten how to do anything other than trudge dully along.

Even more: Having spent his tenure-seeking years in the gleaming spaceship of Atwell Hall, Boti—like a wealthy traveler touring the slums—is suitably horrified by the state of our
building, with its intermittent water supply, semioperational light fixtures, mephitic odors, and corridors foggy with toxins. Yesterday, on the metal bookshelf in my office, I came across a cluster of insects—a beetle, two moths, a centipede, and several bluebottle flies—writhing together like dirgeful companions in their final death throes, presumably poisoned by vapors from the second floor. But never mind: I am sure our foreshortened life spans will be made worthwhile on the day when the economists, in their jewel-encrusted palanquins, are reinstalled in their palazzo over our heads. (Climbing the stairs and peering into their future home yesterday, I found that the double doors leading to their sanctuary are equipped with locks—presumably to prevent riffraff and English faculty from getting in.)

Enfin:
With mixed feelings (but what feelings aren’t mixed, when one is a professor of the humanities?), I put my shoulder to the wheel for Boti: give him two more years.

As for the rumor that, Boti unwilling (I assume you are tempting him with previously undiscovered funds), I might be counted among the eligible candidates to serve in his place—I consider it both ludicrous and unsound. Why? Because the upper echelons of the administration justifiably detest me; because my colleagues view me as a cantankerous pariah; and because, given my stance on several university-wide issues, I would consider the position a significant ethical and even spiritual
compromise—and I say that as an agnostic. Ergo: Assuming that the rumor isn’t a joke expressly devised for my humiliation, you may color me

Flattered but uninterested,

Jay

*
I recall your witticism at the provost’s reception last year: that as much as you detested my LORs, you found them more engaging than any of my novels, which you dismissed as “ponderous.”

May 3, 2010

Ted Boti, Chair Dear Ted,

You have asked me—for the third time this year—to submit a letter of recommendation for Franklin Kentrell, applicant/supplicant for the Citrella Service Award.

You requested that I leave out “all extraneous information,” limiting myself to statements associated with my endorsement of Kentrell’s (self-)nomination.

Thank you for this opportunity to express so thoroughly my feelings on this crucial subject.

Elliptically, Jay

P.S.: I assume you’re demurring on the reappointment for chair in order to bargain for something. Might the Overlords be persuaded to fork over the faculty lines they promised to give us three years ago?

May 5, 2010

Ken Doyle

Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency and Hemorrhoid Excision Center

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Dear Ken,

Do you know what you’ve unleashed, making a six-figure sale for Vivian Zelles? Every student novelist I’ve ever known—along with a few I’ve never met—is tracking me down to remind me of the halfhearted praise I once bestowed on his or her work. The ones who still live here in town are dropping by with their cherubic infants and jars of homemade jam. Some of them, I suspect, haven’t written so much as a greeting card for years, but the news of Vivian’s sale is like blood in the water, and now, fins sparkling, into the shallows they come.

I’m sure the bold and the brash will contact you directly, but if you’re curious about who’s been vetted, the only two I can safely vouch for at this moment are Eileen Tolentino and Carlos DaFoy. I won’t bother to describe their work—you obviously make your own decisions—except to say that Tolentino’s prose will be more palatable if you can get her to quit with the obsessive renditions of bodily functions; and DaFoy (a restless,
bearded man with the tics and gesticulations of a hopping spider) ought to admit to himself that he’s a writer of historical romance and start collecting his checks. You’ll see if there’s anything you can do for them. As for the others: I don’t like homemade jam.

Ken, in your e-mail from last week you asked how Browles was doing. I assumed the question was pro forma (or a further opportunity for you to rub salt in the wound)—until yesterday evening when Janet called to tell me what I now conclude you already knew: that HRH gave an interview. His first in nine years. Not to
The New York Times
, thank god, or
The Paris Review
, but to
Avenue A
, an online journal, circulation five thousand. “I think you should read it,” Janet said. She sent me the link.

“Still Writing After All These Years: A Conversation with H. Reginald Hanf.” And what is Hanf, who has given almost no interviews in the past forty years, writing?
A Melville novel
. “ ‘I am interested in the conflation of contemporary and classic works,’ Hanf says. ‘And in the problem of “Bartleby” in particular.’ ” Is he fucking kidding? He lifted that phrase from Browles’s proposal. I don’t know if Browles reads
Avenue A
—I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in the last few weeks—but some jackass will probably send him the link. Good god, Ken: HRH isn’t going to write a “Bartleby” novel; a perusal of the interview immediately suggests that he’s living on pabulum and stewed prunes, but because somebody showed up with a tape recorder (probably
the day after he got the excerpt I sent him), he started regurgitating passages from Browles’s book like a witless parrot.
But Browles doesn’t know that
. He’ll imagine Reg to be the potentate of old, the predictor of literary fortunes, and reading that interview is going to crush him. Do you remember HRH telling Janet that her writing was “sterile” and unproductive? She would kill me for telling you this, Ken, but that comment haunted her for years—it was like a venomous seed planted inside her, to the extent that when she couldn’t get pregnant (she wanted children; I recognized myself as a poor candidate to be anyone’s father), she felt he’d cursed her or created a weakness in her by issuing his verdict aloud. Years later when she found out about my affair (brief, unsatisfying, pointless), she was angry not only because of the betrayal but because of what she called my collusion with Reg. She claimed I had never disputed his diagnosis in regard to her work, that I was Reg’s acolyte, his garden gnome, eager to believe in his pronouncements because of his preference for
Stain
, and in exchange for his favoritism—inspired mainly by prurience, she said—I was willing to sit back and see my friends and my classmates dismissed and degraded, ignored. She said I had bought into the idea, instilled in her by HRH, that she was a lesser writer than I was, and that she would never write anything good.

It was striking to realize that we were getting divorced at least in part because of something that had happened in a classroom two decades before—and even more striking, once the papers
were signed, to admit to myself that, as vehement and strident as Janet was (and still is), I missed her. I have missed her terribly every day and have told her so (proclaiming my continued affection inadvertently once, in a public e-mail), but she claims she is healthier without me and remains unmoved.

Tolentino and DaFoy will send you their packets of prose next week. I was happy to hear that you got a nice arrangement for Troy at Folkstone. A bright spot in the fecund gloom of spring …

Drearily,

JTF

May 11, 2010

Student Services/Fellowship Office Carole “The Charitable” Samarkind, Associate Director

14 Gilbert Hall

Carole—

You probably heard that I’ve been thoroughly scolded
*
for the LOR I wrote as a part of your application to Shepardville; once again, I’m sorry, I’m putting my ankles and wrists in the stocks and sending you a bushel of overripe tomatoes by campus post—you will find me publicly repenting of my sins on the quad. Does it alleviate your anger at all when I try to explain that my motives were good? If you’d applied to a school that deserved you, I would have written something more appropriately laudatory and banal.

Carole, I do hope you’ll forgive me because I am in desperate need of a favor. I have one remaining graduate student, Darren Browles, the last of his kind, whose funding possibilities have gone up in flames. Rather than tucking his tail between his legs
and leaving campus, he’s been living on borrowed cigarettes and the castoffs from business school catered lunches; I suspect he sleeps and showers at the gym.

I recommended Browles to Bentham (Eleanor), which spurned him, and to Ken Doyle, my agent, who is so busy making millions off a comp lit student whose book I placed in his hairy hands that he can’t devote even a few modest hours to this more demanding (i.e., less profitable) project. I even wrote to Zander Hesseldine and his kinky coterie about a summer RAship, but I got no response; they are probably busy packing their bags for Camp Foucault.

Worst of all—I hesitate to confess it—I sent a portion of Browles’s manuscript-in-progress to my former advisor (I’ve told you about HRH) and it turns out he’s babbling nonsense in a nursing home, having managed to emerge from the miasma of senescence long enough to spout the twisted and mistaken idea that he and not Browles is composing a novel based on Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”. Yes, I know, confidentiality! But in a moment of infirmity or nostalgia I was searching for wisdom and for the benefit of HRH’s connections … The possibility of Browles’s success appears to be receding over a distant horizon, but if he could get some summer funding and finally complete the damned book, he might still have a shot.

You have your fingers on the pulse of student finance over there in Gilbert; may I send Browles over? He’s not in terrific shape
right now, frankly—I’ll give him a talking to about getting a haircut and changing his clothes—but when he doesn’t feel the world is out to destroy him, he presents fairly well. I would so appreciate it, Carole. In the absence of other hidden pockets of funding, perhaps you could hire him to work in the office?

With a bow and an audible scraping noise, Jay

*
Janet was fully inflated with umbrage on your behalf, and I understand she wrote you a letter supplanting mine. Rest assured: despite the discomfitures of last fall, you can trust her. Yes, she’s prickly, but she is also principled and well connected, and if you’re determined to escape this World of Payne, she’s well equipped to help you do so.

May 17, 2010

Dean Philip Hinckler College of Arts and Sciences

1 MacNeil Hall

Dear Dean Hinckler,

I have been tapped, once again and for reasons that defy human understanding, to write a letter—during the final crisis-ridden week of the semester—on behalf of my colleague Franklin Kentrell, who has nominated himself for chair of the university curriculum committee. Given your own recent, crucial work on the selection of dirges for the all-campus picnic, you may not have had time to grasp or appreciate the nature of Kentrell’s contributions. He is, to put it mildly, insane. If you must allow him to self-nominate his way into a position of authority, please god let it be the faculty senate. There, his eccentricities, though they may thrive and increase, will at least be harmless. The faculty senate, our own Tower of Babel, has not reached a decision of any import for a dozen years.

By the by: word on the street is that our sociological friend, Ted Boti, despite various carrots dangled before him, will soon refuse to continue as chair. Rumors about his health have been circulating; through the pebbled glass of his office door, where one can observe him scratching the psoriatic tufts of hair on
his head, he looks troubled and wan. A recommendation: next time you enlist someone from an outside department to step in and rule us, you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units—Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him-or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive.

As for Kentrell: he is one of the reasons no one wants to come near us. My suggestion to you: invent a committee for him—something Kafkaesque that requires years of fusty administrative investigation—and tell him that the difficult work he’ll be putting in, until retirement, will free him from all other service, forever, amen.

Confident that my colleagues will join me in welcoming Kentrell’s involvement in this distant and hypothetical realm, I remain Yours in tender servitude, Jay Fitger

May 20, 2010

USDA Forest Service c/o Thomas Schaffler Mailstop 1111

1400 Independence Avenue SW