Letting Go (40 page)

Later, because it was four o’clock and because it was Monday, there was the usual meeting of the staff; so life is ordered in academe. I arrived early, chose a seat near the window, and made myself comfortable at the round meeting table. I had with me mimeographed copies of four student essays which had been handed out to us the Monday before; they were to have been graded and mulled over preparatory to today’s meeting. A quarterly examination was coming up, and the object of evaluating these essays was to make sure that we were all in agreement about standards of judgment. We lived forever on the edge of a deep abyss: there was a chance that one of us might give an A to an essay to which another of us had given a B. And, intoned our more pious members, it was the student who paid the penalty. But it was we who paid the penalty, these grading sessions being nothing less than the student’s last revenge on his teacher. If the phenomenon we all engaged in that afternoon were ever to be staged in the theater, I would suggest that a chorus of freshman be placed behind a gauze screen, visible to the audience but not to those playing the part of teachers; rhythmically, while the meeting progresses, the chorus is to chant
ha ha ha.

My colleagues drifted in, alone and in pairs. First—always first, with a clean pad of lined yellow paper and a cartridge-belt arrangement of sharpened pencils around his middle—Sam McDougall, a man whose dedication to the principles of grammar could actually cover you with sorrow. Sam had written a long work on the history of punctuation, and though he looked to be the world’s foremost authority on hayseed, he was in fact one of its foremost authorities on the semicolon and the dash. A year ago he had unearthed two comma faults in an article of mine in
American Studies
, and ever
since had chosen to sit next to me at staff meetings to show me the light.

After Sam came our young ladies: Peggy Moberly, everybody’s friend, plain and oval-faced, a girl who in certain sections of our land would probably be considered the prettiest in town; and Charleen Carlisle, with whom—a year and a half before—I had fallen in love for five minutes. She was tall, purple-eyed, and stunning in a haughty way, and the day the Dean had introduced the two of us I had thought he had said her
first
name was Carlisle. Flustered by her complacent beauty, I melted in the romance of her appellation. But she turned out to be called Charleen and was engaged to an intern at Billings, with whom she bowled twice a week.

Then entered Frank Tozier, about whose sexual persuasion I am to this day in doubt; and Walker Friedland, our glamour boy, who jumped up on desks in the classroom whenever he taught
Moby Dick.
Walker had made honest men of us all by marrying a student with a spectacular pair of legs. We had all hung around, yawning, waiting for her to swell up with Walker Jr., but a year had passed and now she was a slender sophomore, still locomoting herself with those legs, and Walker was probably swinging out over his class from the light fixture: he had gotten away with it. He was a peppy and amusing fellow, rumored to be our most popular member—though it was rumored that I was myself a little in contention, having been invited the previous year to partake of lunch once a week in the dining hall of one of the girls’ dormitories—“Mr. Wallach, do you really believe Thomas Wolfe is
over
written?” “Mr. Wallach, don’t
you
think Frannie is pregnant?” “Mr. Wallach, someone said that you said in class—” “Could you give a little talk to the girls, Mr. Wallach?”

There were two other bachelors engaged in this baleful competition: Larry Morgan, a petulant young fellow who sported a beret and a cane, and our madman, Bill Lake. Bill had been connected with the University of Chicago since before puberty; rumor had it that one day he had been seen slipping a note to Enrico Fermi—and from that it all began. In fact, Bill had been a Quiz Kid; I remember him from my own youth as the one with the noseful, who was always converting a hundred and sixty-four dollars and thirty-two cents into its equivalent in francs, marks, lire, and what have you. Now, wrapped in his red wool scarf, he stormed through the hallways leaking freshman compositions after him, bound for the sloppy smoky hell of his office, where it was his pleasure to reduce coeds
to tears because of their lifeless prose styles. Next came Bill’s buddy, Mona Meyerling, a bull-dyke, I’m afraid, but awfully sweet, though always a little too anxious, I thought, to give other people’s cars a push with her Morris Minor. She had been an officer in the WACs and still wore the shoes. In a way, she always struck me as our most solid member, which may reveal some secret as to my own sexuality, or lack thereof.

Trotting on the heels of Mona was Cyril Houghton, who had confided to me once that he had invented most of the footnotes in his dissertation, which nevertheless was reputed, by Cyril, to be the last word on the poet, Barnaby Googe. Also our New Critic, Victor Honingfeld, forever off to Breadloaf or the Indiana School of Letters, forever flashing at me rejection slips signed in John Crowe Ransom’s own hand. And our Old Critic—our tired critic—the victim (willing, I believe) of two opinionated wives and college politics, gentle Ben Harnap. Next was Swanson, a blond, wide-faced boy from Minnesota who had a blond, wide-faced wife from Minnesota. He had been hired at the same time as I, and obviously some kind of scale-balancing was supposed to be going on. Prior to her retirement, Edna Auerbach had referred to me as “a playboy in academic clothing,” and perhaps that helps to explain the presence of our silent, serious Lutheran.

Lastly, there was John Spigliano and my contribution to the staff, Paul Herz.

I do not see that there is much to be gained by chronicling all that was said that afternoon. Since it is already clear that I have neither great love nor admiration for certain of my colleagues, it might seem that I was taking the opportunity of recording their words to make them appear silly. Teaching is a noble profession with a noble history, and it may simply be that we are living through a slack time.

I was not really giving the meeting all my attention anyway. No sooner had I sat down at the table than Paul Herz sat down across from me. The sight of him stimulated my memory; I was reminded of my recent encounter with his family, and with his wife … And an idea came to me then that seemed the most daring and spectacular of my life. All through the afternoon (Paul across from me) I tried to dismiss it, and yet it hung on—and not at all because it made sense. Perhaps it hung on because I wanted something to hang on—to hang on
to
—that didn’t make sense. What I’d like to call my spirit, what I’d like to consider the most human part of me, was like
some vapor that I couldn’t get my hands on; it evaded all expression, it wouldn’t leap out and shape my life. I wished I could just
push
it a little, and perhaps it was in an attempt to push it that I deliberately thought to myself all through the long afternoon:
Run off with Libby. Run off and marry Libby.

Sense … nonsense—how one judges it is unimportant. It simply seemed like the next step. At least, I began to think, the next step someone else might have taken.

When I came out of the meeting, I stood in the doorway of Cobb Hall a moment, expelling from my lungs the stale fumes of the afternoon. I watched the last few windows blacken, one by one, in the laboratories and classrooms that faced out onto the quadrangle. It was nearly six, and the white tennis courts had a simple geometric grace under the dark sky. The Gothic archways attested to the serious purpose of the place and made me want to believe that we were all better people than one would suppose from the argument we had just had. Just before our session had ended, there had been a short, fierce combat between two of our members. Paul Herz had given an A-minus to a paper John Spigliano had marked D. It was the first time since his arrival that Paul had spoken up, and, provoked by John, he had unfortunately lost his temper. On the way out, Ben Harnap had said to me, shaking his head, “Well, your friend’s one of those angry young men, all right,” while Paul had simply charged by all of us, not saying good night. Earlier John had referred with little reverence to Paul as “a creative writer,” and Paul finally had hit the table and said that John Spigliano must hate literature—otherwise why would he want to strangle it so? “At least there’s a little
life
in this essay,” Paul had said, his fury riding out of him at last, leaving him a little crumpled-looking in his chair. “The presence of life, or liveliness,” John had replied, “by which I take it you mean a few turned phrases, may be a winning quality in the daily newspaper, but I don’t know if it’s what we’re trying to teach students in this course.” “What
are
we trying to teach them?” “We’re not educating their souls,” said John; to which Paul replied, loudly,
“Why not?”
Just before the end of the meeting—just before I had spoken my piece—John had said to all of us, charmingly almost, “We take up style in the last quarter, and perhaps Paul could lead the discussion for us then. If we have a creative writer on the staff, I certainly
hope we’ll be able to take advantage of his specialty.” Paul Herz had mumbled as an answer, “I wasn’t talking about style.”

There had been nothing elevated about the exchange, and during it the rest of us had remained silent. Two opposite natures had met and collided before us, and so quickly had it happened that I did not even know what to think or to do. In fact, at the very moment it broke out, my mind had been spinning and spinning in its own direction. I was hearing Libby speak. She was telling me again what she had told me that afternoon a week before, just prior to our entering Brooks. She was saying that Paul was happier, and so she was happier too. Her husband was able to write through the afternoon (when staff meetings didn’t intervene), and when she got in from work at five-fifteen, she found that he had set the water to boil for the vegetables and seasoned the meat. Eyes swelling with tears, she had told me that a change had taken place in Paul; ever since Reading and her stay in the hospital, he had been both a doctor and a servant to her. In the mornings he rose and squeezed orange juice and brought it to her bed. He walked with her to the I. C. station, and home again on the evenings when she had a class downtown. Order, said Libby, method, plan, accomplishment—all this gave meaning now to their days. There was this and there was that, but whether there was passion, whether there was pleasure and love, she had not made entirely clear. What was clear was simply that after our visit to Brooks, what had once existed between us seemed to exist again. As for the impassioned plea that I visit Paul’s parents, and my decision to do so, what else was that but a last-ditch effort at hiding from the truth?

Marry Libby?
I asked myself, while across the table it seemed as though her husband had just launched a campaign to lose his job. It was at this point that Peggy Moberly had nervously raised her hand and said that perhaps Paul and John were both right; she proposed that the student be given two grades, one for content, another for form. Victor Honingfeld instantly rose in his chair to say that he did not see how anybody could fail to understand that content-and-form, like good-and-evil, were one. Mona Meyerling, mother and father to us all, said that she for one did value liveliness, and felt it should influence the grade, but that she was not really certain that this particular paper was that lively—to give the student an A would perhaps only encourage him in his grammatical abuses. Most everyone had a go at the paper by then—as the tension in the room decreased
—except Bill Lake, whose temperament and history made him a kind of open city in our midst, someone who need enter no battles. And except for me.

Sam McDougall, who had come out strongly for Spigliano—and had that personal interest in my grammatical education—now turned in his seat and looked in my direction. Paul was looking at me too; so was John. I opened my mouth, and after making a rather long-winded and dull introductory statement, I wound up hearing myself say that though I had originally given the paper a C, I thought that what Paul had said made a good deal of sense. I said I didn’t mind a dozen misspellings (“Thirteen,” Sam whispered to me, as he watched my ship drift out to sea) or that the dash was overused. I reminded everyone of
Tristram Shandy.
I said I disagreed with John in not finding the structure quite so primitive as he had argued it to be. I wanted to change my mark, I added, pointing to the board where the grades were tallied; I would come up to a B or a B-plus. “Actually,” I heard Charleen Carlisle say, a moment later, “I’d come up to a B.” And Swanson, with a look of great seriousness on his face, said he might see his way clear to a B-minus. At this point John stepped in to quiet the revolt, while beside me, his face drained of blood, Sam McDougall was suffering one of the crises of his life. Shortly thereafter—John having made his final reference to Paul as a creative writer—the meeting disbanded.

In my office, a few minutes later, while snow fell outside the window, I sat down at the desk with my coat on and removed the paper from my briefcase. Mona Meyerling poked her head into my cubicle to ask if my car was stuck. I said no, and she went off, leaving me to read the essay a second time. When I had finished it I knew it was no better than a C, just as I had known it at the meeting.