Dear Committee Members: A Novel (3 page)

Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)

October 17, 2009

(My all-inclusive calendar invites me to celebrate Diwali today)

Ken Doyle

Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Dear Ken—

Business first: I’m writing on behalf of a student—you remember students from our Seminar days, I’m sure—Darren Browles, who is currently putting the finishing touches on a powerhouse work of fiction: a debut novel, an excerpt from which, if I manage to knock some sense into his rocky skull, will be on your desk next week.

Accountant in a Bordello
is a shattering reinterpretation of “Bartleby” the main character, tight-lipped introvert Herman Crown, is an accountant at one of the biggest legal whorehouses in the state of Nevada, spending his days tallying expenses, passing up opportunities at wealth and advancement, eschewing friendships, and generally maintaining, amidst the titillating hubbub of his surroundings, a dispassionate isolation, an existential solitude. The prose—at one moment profoundly spare, the next moment rococo—is entirely his own; Ken, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. I
urged him to send you the entire manuscript (which, admittedly, should be trimmed, at five-hundred-plus pages), but Browles is cautious and will probably submit only the first several chapters. As his advisor, even I haven’t read the book straight through—Browles hands me a chunk, scuttles back to his hidey-hole to revise, then reappears with another. Ken: take him on. This is a book that—after a little light housework—should garner multiple bids at auction. And a healthy advance will allow Browles to trim and to work with a top-notch editor on the final version.

On the personal side: I’m sorry about the tone of the conversation we had last year.
Transfer of Affection
didn’t sell the way either of us had hoped (where did that pinhead in the
Inquirer
get off calling it an “embarrassment for both author and reviewer”?), but that was a blip, not a moratorium—and for you to hand the excerpt of my novel in progress to your assistant … Well, never mind. Water under the bridge and all that; I’m sure the twelve-year-old you assigned the task of evaluating my work did her utmost. In any case, I hope you won’t let the memory of any previous quibbles prevent you from recognizing a phenomenon like Browles, who, I believe, will soon be enjoying some literary solitude at Bentham.

You’ve heard that Eleanor A. is now Bentham’s director? Do you remember her throwing an apple core at me across the
Seminar table in HRH’s class? She was ill-disposed toward me even before I wrote and published
Stain
. Here’s hoping her directorial skills are better than her throwing arm.

Nostalgically, Jay

October 20, 2009

Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal

1. How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant?

Ms. Natal is a senior due to graduate in May of this coming year. I have known her for
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal

1. How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant?

I have known Ms. Natal for approximately eight weeks. She is a senior due to graduate in
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal

You have requested technological assistance regarding the submission of the above-named reference. Please describe the problem you are experiencing
.

The problem I am experiencing is that every time I hit the fucking return key or try to indent a
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal

the fucking return key or try to indent or god forbid fit a coherent sentence into your fucking

October 23, 2009

Student Services/Fellowship Office

14 Gilbert Hall

Attn: The Gentle Carole Samarkind, Associate Director Dear Carole:

This letter’s purpose is to provide the usual gratuitous language recommending a student, one Gunnar Lang, for a work-study fellowship. Lang—a sophomore with a mop of blond dreadlocks erupting from the top of his head like the yellow coils of an excess brain—tells me that he has applied, unsuccessfully, for this same golden opportunity three times and that this is his final attempt to satisfy our university’s endless requests for redundant documentation. He needs a minimum of eight to ten hours of work-study per week—preferably in the library rather than the slops of food service. Deny him the fellowship and he will undoubtedly turn his hand to something more lucrative, probably hawking illegal substances between the athletic facilities and the Pizza Barn.

I’ll go ahead and point out the obvious: Lang’s GPA is a respectable 3.4; he’s on track, academically, despite a shift from psychology to English; and a ten-minute conversation with the subject himself reveals that he has bona fide thoughts and knows how to apportion them into relatively
grammatical sentences. You should do yourself a favor and invent a reason to meet him. He’s charming in a saucy, loose-limbed way, and his hair—his parents did right to name him Gunnar—is a phenomenon unto itself that I suspect you’ll enjoy.

There: Lang has my stamp of approval and imprimatur. Now let me say how appreciative I am of the cordial professionalism you’ve reestablished between us. I’m sure you know how profoundly I regret that boneheaded e-mail in August, and of course I don’t blame you for cutting things off (though I wish you’d told me you’d be reclaiming the coffee machine, which was a gift, after all; I’m reminded of its absence every day by a circle of grime on the Formica).

Side note: I saw that you and Janet are both serving on the diversity committee.
*
Might that be … awkward? I do hope you won’t sit next to each other. Even six years after our divorce, Janet considers herself an expert on the subject of my many foibles, and she is often eager to share her questionable wisdom with others. Fair warning here, Carole: though smooth-spoken and polished, Janet is as cunning as a wolverine.

Back to business. Please get the work-study fellowship for Lang and put him in the library, or even here in the department. He needs to acquaint himself with the nineteenth century before I let him loose in Donna Lovejoy’s class.

Missing you (and missing my coffee), J.

*
I was barred from that committee myself; my filibuster last year (I argued that the arts are a form of diversity) was sadly characterized as “divisive.”

October 28, 2009

Payne University Medical School
*

Admissions Office

375 Newton Hall

Dear Committee Members, This letter recommends Vivian Zelles for admission to Payne University’s medical school. Ms. Zelles is an excellent student, as will be obvious from her scores and transcripts. The recipient of an undergraduate double degree in biochemistry and music (enhanced by a minor in English), she is currently pursuing a master’s in comparative literature while simultaneously composing a book-length novel/memoir, a coy mishmash of forms. She is a member of that rare breed whose feet are planted as firmly in the arts as in the sciences.

I have known Ms. Zelles for approximately nine months, in the context of two creative writing workshops. She is a fastidious and methodical stylist: one imagines her setting each word in place with a jeweler’s loupe. Her ultimate plan, in applying to med school, may be to join the ranks of physician-writers who, not content to leave the pursuit of literary success to the starving artist, complement their million-dollar medical salaries
with Random House contracts. (Move over, Gawande and Hosseini!) I recommend Ms. Zelles to you with all the usual accolades these letters are expected to provide.

Yours on the underfunded wing of the campus, Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Author

Provocateur

*
You must have more fun with the name over there than we do.

October 29, 2009

Janet Matthias … Fitger Payne University Law School—Admissions

17 Pitlinger Hall

Dear Law School Admissions Committee/Janet: This letter recommends Vivian Zelles to your esteemed body. Ms. Zelles is an excellent student as will be obvious from her scores and transcripts. She is applying for a residency at Bentham and to Payne’s medical school as well as the law school; whether this diffuse approach indicates a wide range of interests or some sort of chemical imbalance or illness, I haven’t a clue.

I have known Ms. Zelles for approximately nine months. She sat in on my undergraduate workshop last spring—boggling the minds of the younger students with irrelevant theoretical asides—and is currently enrolled in what may be the last graduate-level fiction class ever taught at Payne. (I’m sure you read my screed last month in the campus rag.) Her work is meticulous but not very interesting. Moment of truth: personally, I don’t care for Ms. Zelles, who may be ideally suited to law school. She is obviously brilliant, but I find her off-putting and a bit of a cipher. She has a mind like a bric-a-brac storehouse of facts: a surplus of content put to questionable use.

Janet: Your phone has been going straight to voice mail. Are you out of town? Please call. Eleanor has been stonewalling an advisee I’ve recommended to Bentham, and I wonder if she’s talked to you. Good god, it’s been twenty-two years since the Seminar. Yes, Reg admired my work. Yes, he helped me publish
Stain
and threw His Royal Weight behind the book. I didn’t ask him to prefer my writing to yours or Troy’s or Eleanor’s or Ken’s or even MTV’s. (Who’d have thunk MTV would marry a vet and turn into a shrink?) But Eleanor is still carving voodoo dolls in my likeness. Are we going to spend the rest of our days in the shadow of H. Reginald Hanf and the Seminar, those few (admittedly powerful) years ever dogging our steps?

Fretfully, your former spouse, Jay

P.S.: Thank you for
not
requiring that recommenders submit their letters via an online form. Though technically capable of e-mail, I remain leery, given the fiasco of my “reply all” message in August. (Carole says she is no longer angry, but—given that she requisitioned the coffee machine she bought for my birthday—it appears that her forgiveness is not yet complete.) Call me a Luddite, but I intend to resist for as long as possible the use of robotic fill-in-the-blank quantifiers for the intellectual attributes of human beings.

October 30, 2009

Theodore Boti, CEO

Department of English Dear Ted,

This letter endorses the work-study application of Gunnar Lang, sophomore, who after months of heroic effort has been duly vetted by the Student Services/Fellowship staff, his one-page résumé grinding its weary way through the system and arriving at last for review in our department with six pounds of red tape clinging to its hem. One wonders which would be more difficult: to secure a minimum-wage job as an English Department undergraduate gofer or to obtain a passport and security clearance through the Middle East. If we give Lang ten hours a week to run errands and let us know when the copier is broken (it is broken at present; perhaps Lang could be persuaded to shave his head and don a monk’s brown sackcloth and work as a scribe), he might have hope of making progress toward his degree.

By the by: I noticed in your departmental plan (I presume I’m the only person who has actually read the plan—you may as well have addressed it to me) that you intend to schedule two faculty meetings this year for the purpose of revising the department constitution. Two quick considerations here, Ted:
1. I wonder, during a time of fiscal, curricular, and architectural crisis, whether our top priority should be the pointless updating of a document no one will read; 2. Fair warning: As a body we tried, in a plenary/horror session when Sarah Lempert was chair, to revise the momentous founding document on which our department depends. We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon, two senior members of the faculty—true, one of them retired and left for rehab that same semester—abandoning the penultimate meeting in tears. (If you’d like to see it, I’ve been keeping a log of department meetings ranked according to level of trauma, with a 1 indicating mild contentiousness, a 3 signifying uncontrolled shouting, and a 5 leading to at least one nervous breakdown and/or immediate referral to the crisis center run by the Office of Mental Health.) I guarantee you: mention the word “constitution” and you’ll have a 911 situation on your hands.

Thinking positively, and at your service as always— Jay

P.S.: At the upcoming Assembly of Department Chairs meeting I hope you will raise the issue of hires for English and the defunding of our creative writing MA. The idea of graduate writing being defunded because of
expense
… Ted, faculty in Hutchinson Hall are decorating their million-dollar labs with
hadron colliders, while we’re told there’s no money for a functioning chalkboard and a table and chairs. If Donna Lovejoy is up to it (I understand she went home yesterday with a work-related lung infection), you may want to bring her to the meeting with you: she witnessed last year’s auto-da-fé and, given the recent sprinkler system malfunction in her office, will probably bring to the proceedings a sharpened perspective.

November 3, 2009

Anna Huston, Director Annie’s Nannies Child and Play Center

370 Shadow Pond Way

Cortland, MO 63459

Dear Ms. Huston,

I apologize for the delay in sending this recommendation. For more than two decades I have maintained an orderly record-keeping system regarding each and every one of my students, but I apparently misfiled the information on Shayla Newcome and had to get out the dowsing rod to find her. In response to your query: Ms. Newcome was my student six years ago. Having located the appropriate slim green record book in the lower left drawer of my desk, I note that she received a B in my Intermediate Fiction Writing class, having completed, if I am deciphering my own handwritten notes correctly, a short story intended to be a fictionalization of the pope’s childhood. Whether this indicates that Ms. Newcome is or is not to be entrusted with the precious lives of small children, I have no idea. At least she did not—as many of my undergraduates seem to enjoy doing—submit a vivid and celebratory depiction of murder and mayhem, complete with flesh-eating robots, werewolves, resurrections from the crypt, or some combination of the above. Students’ lives have been cheapened in
ways of which they remain blissfully clueless, because of so much TV.