The Professor and Other Writings (42 page)

I put the Professor-sorrow to intellectual use. When the moment came to choose an area for my Ph.D. work, I decided to specialize in eighteenth-century British literature. It seemed a good way of getting far, far away from her. No more linguistics, no more ye olde bloody folksongs. Yet that said, even with my Swift-identification, it was also a somewhat peculiar choice. (The alternative was to have been Gertrude Stein.) The scholarly subfield in question was then pretty reactionary and male dominated; few female students were ever drawn to it. Many of the age's canonical works remained spectacularly resistant to the new interpretive methods (Marxist, post-Structuralist, and yes,
yawn
, feminist) then the coming rage among American academics. But since I needed a break from women and felt disinclined to jump on any more bandwagons, the pull the period exerted on me was great.

The attraction no doubt also reflected the emotional contradictions I still struggled with. At first—during my official mourning
period over the Professor—I identified mainly with the more dismal aspects of the period. I had taken a course on eighteenth-century fiction and had been stunned by the bleak, disaster-ridden novels of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. The stark psychological worlds described therein—harsh, harrowing, inhuman at times—seemed to evoke something of my own psychic life. The heroes and heroines in these books—Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, Clarissa—were as marooned and beset as I felt myself to be. They were cut off from love and companionship and locked in a ruthless Hobbesian battle just to survive.

The professor who taught the class, a man I hadn't encountered before, pursued these difficult themes quietly but profoundly. He was learned and intense and suffered, or so one sensed, from a sort of melancholia akin to one's own. Some long-term acquaintance with the baleful. In day-to-day life he was as shy, introverted, and conversationally awkward as the Professor had been smooth-tongued, outgoing, and flamboyant. Yet I found his reticence immensely calming. We were alike, I felt, in our unease—our inability to cheerlead. We were both stuttering through life. Yet halting though our conversations could sometimes be, they also hummed with a quirky and unpredictable intellectual excitement. Caught up in the moment, the stutterers forgot to stutter. (In this way I owe him everything.) He became my thesis adviser and I ended up writing my dissertation on Richardson's
Clarissa
(1749)—a massive, morally ambiguous, relentlessly tragic epistolary novel about an intelligent young woman who is tricked, seduced, and harried to death by a charming amoral rake. Gosh, I wonder what made me choose
that
for a subject.

It took longer for me to acknowledge the more amusing and playful aspects of my chosen period—though in the long run these were more significant, psychologically speaking, than anything else. However morbid my fixation on magnificent monster-works like
Clarissa
, a kind of basic Enlightenment optimism—not to mention some tiny
motes of Johnsonian common sense—were also starting to take hold in me. For one thing, like a sort of baby-
philosophe
, I was on the way to making my own radical break with Credulity and Superstition: all the spells and symbols and matriarchal gobbledygook that I'd been in love with—well, since my barmy Phoebe days. (Not really that long before.) The little incense box filled with yarrow stalks—crucial for consulting the I Ching—somehow found its way into the trash pile one morning. The Great Mother, once so alluring, took early retirement and moved back to California. I stopped yammering on in seminars about Hermes Trismegistus and the Fairies Under the Hill. I liked the clear-cut sound—still do—of an Age of Reason. It was time to start thinking straight. And with the access of at least a
little
more mental clarity, a certain Voltairean gaiety kept threatening to break in, too. That Cock Lane Ghost? Just a very funny
hoax.

Above all, reading the classic works of satire, lampoon, and burlesque was a tonic. Consoling indeed the realization that some illusions were
meant
to be shattered; that a clear comic light might be cast on the chaotic devil-murk of human emotions. Pathos could be turned to Bathos, and enlightenment unfold through wit, send-up, insouciance. Nothing was sacred, one found; even the grandest and most imposing monuments might be defaced. We were all rolling around in the muck like the Dunces anyway; one might as well get used to it. The way of the world demanded laughter as well as tears. One had to stoop to conquer. And in its highest form, I surmised, such rococo lightness and drollery could in fact be a pathway into something more profound. In the loveliest, most philosophical examples of eighteenth-century wit—Pope's
The Rape of the Lock,
Watteau's paintings, Samuel Johnson's burnished utterances, Mozart's operas, and indeed, at century's end, six modest and miraculous novels by Jane Austen—one felt it: a deep moral seriousness humming away at the core, along with the steady flow of beauty, intelligence, delight.

No: I didn't realize it at the time, but along with friendly counsel,
such studies would eventually help me begin to exorcize that unholy mixture of conceit and insecurity—glum legacy of childhood convulsions—which had made me so susceptible to the Professor. Instead of merely confirming—like some of my intellectual fads of yore—a sense of isolation, my new interest in comedy suggested a way out of danger: an escape, of sorts, from the lonely and damaging egotism of adolescence. For master-satirists like Pope and Johnson and Austen, I realized, did not simply ridicule pretension and folly in others, even if that was what people hostile to such burlesque sometimes said. That if you lampooned something you must be setting yourself up as superior to it. That you were arrogant, epicene. Pretending to some higher authority. Yet the very greatest satire, I came to think—the kind that lives forever—ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn't take yourself
that
seriously. You were part of it. All the Lilliputian preening and pomposity was, at bottom, one's own.

Obviously, even with such private revelations, a person like the Professor would hardly remain exempt from criticism—her behavior had been far from impeccable. But one definitely had to look a bit askance at oneself, too. At one's juvenile delusions of grandeur. At that painful, buffoonish susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion. The shocking neediness. (How indeed had this last gotten so bad? Little did I know I would spend the next thirty years in search of
that
particular Loch Ness Monster.) And once begun, the self-debunking process—otherwise known as self-examination—would have to go on…well…pretty much for the duration. Now, in my fifties, I'm at a point where I know (okay,…
sort of
know) that I'm far from perfect. I'm willing to accept that in the love-and-kindness department in particular, I may be—at best—only five or six inches high. Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnagians. I'll cop to it: in order to play the harpsichord I have to run back and forth on the keys.
Madly. Panting with the effort. If a giant decided to micturate upon me I would be swept away at once, like a tsunami victim, or a daddy-long-legs that gets sucked down the drain when you start running the bathwater. I've been shrunk down so many times in the moral Rinsomatic I've gotten very tiny indeed. Homunculus-sized. Yet even so, I still feel impelled to wonder: Is there some very, very, very embarrassing self-knowledge stuff I'm
still
missing? Maybe other people can see it, glaringly: I'm really only
two
inches high. Or worse: only an
eighth
of an inch high. A measly
sixteenth.
Maybe I am even—eeek—
microscopic
.

Draconian judgments about other people can as a result be difficult to make. (Though not always, of course.) One gets waylaid by second thoughts, an unhappy consciousness of one's own follies and failings. In the early 1980s, just before I left Harvard for my new university job in California (I'd spent three years on a Harvard post-doc after finishing my Ph.D.) I visited my shrink of the time, the one who had taken up after Malka, for what I thought would be a poignant farewell. Said shrink was European, in her late seventies—Old World, reserved, and intellectually formidable. She had been a colleague of Anna Freud, and though now tiny, arthritic, and white-haired, remained a distinguished and imposing figure. All except, that is, for a bizarre, rainbow-colored set of plastic pop beads she always wore, somewhat incongruously, around her neck. I thought her an excellent psychiatrist despite her disinclination to smile or be nice to me. Once I asked her, fairly plaintively, if she thought I would ever escape from whatever Slough of Despond I was then currently wallowing in. She responded with a too-long stare; then stared a bit more; then said she
didn't know.
I got so mad at her for being honest I started to feel better at once.

And no doubt some of her mental associations were peculiar, notably regarding female homosexuality. I spent two years in therapy with her and yet something about the idiosyncrasies of my case re
peatedly reminded her, it seemed, of a woman she had once analyzed whose preferred sex act involved being diapered and suckled by her female lover. I would object strenuously whenever my shrink mentioned this infantile lady: surely she didn't think I was like
that.
Yet again and again—each time forgetting that she'd ever mentioned her before, or indeed that I had ever complained—my psychiatrist would roll out Diaper Lady and playmate for our joint contemplation. Hard to forget the comical look of consternation that would appear on her face whenever she did so; or her oft-repeated expressions of wonderment—all the more memorable for being delivered in her weirdly-accented English:
Dey vore dia-peuhs! Dia-peuhs! Dey akchually vore dia-peuhs!

Anyhoo, it's malignant. At our last session I was speculating on what my new life in California would be like—how I was leaving the nest, growing up, etc. etc. Partly by way of valedictory flattery, I suppose, I'd also said something about how far I thought I'd come in my conversations with her.
You have been so helpful; I will never forget
. Now, this psychiatrist had heard the story of the Professor numerous times—indeed, had once responded to some gory retelling of it, musingly, with one of her most pitiless pieces of moral commentary:
Vat a lot uff kvooked people dere are….
Yet even so, I didn't see what was coming. I had made the mistake of asking her, rather too blithely, I'm afraid, what sort of person she thought I might become in my new role of college professor. As usual, she gazed at me for several seconds in silence, then replied, in a weary tone,
Vell, you know dat Pwuffessor who vas your luffer, den she abuse you? Vell, I tink you vill be a Pwuffessor and you vill meet a girl and do just da same.

Now not everyone may find this comment amusing. But to me it's as droll as the business about the diapers, though I know the joke's on me. Was this prophecy correct? Well…[discreet throat-clearing]:

Yes, one
was
the Professor; she
was
the Student. Which is to say such indeed
was
the off-kilter nature of one's first relationship in the new place. But other things were not the same. D. and I were almost the same age (just shading into our thirties); she had an advanced degree in another field when she entered the English program. We met during my very first teaching term. She was in my first graduate seminar that fall; we would get together about six months later. I played no role, ever again, in her academic work. We did not conceal our connection and colleagues and friends seemed to accept it, most very warmly. There were several parallel situations in the department at that time involving both gay and heterosexual couples. The social atmosphere was so much lighter. (It being a new day and the West Coast, the department had, among things, six “out” gay male professors.) Our relationship lasted for five years; D. and I lived together for four of them. I got tenure in the meantime; she finished her Ph.D. shortly after we broke up.

I leave it to the reader to judge whether by getting thus involved, I did
just da same as the Pwuffessor.
At the time I joined the faculty, my new university (like my old one) had no explicit policy regulating professor-student sexual relationships. True, certain attitudes prevailed. Pretty much everybody seemed to think that sexual relationships between instructors and undergraduates were a Terrible Idea. (Whether actual behavior reflected this virtuous sentiment, of course, was another matter.) While no doubt awkward and to be discouraged, romantic relationships with graduate students were felt to be intrinsically more ambiguous. Impossible—if at times just barely—to impugn outright. More likely to be “consensual.” Age difference often not so extreme. Even
with
age difference (the gay guys particularly liked this one)—think of the Platonic conception of erotic pedagogy. Beautiful epigones, etc. Propriety still demanded, obviously, that certain hygienic protocols be maintained: whenever such a couple formed, it was considered the professor's
ethical obligation to inform the department chair and exempt himself or herself from any supervisory role over the student in question.

Nowadays, of course, everything has been codified—more rigidly at some places than others. On the issue of “consensual” relationships between teachers and students, the sexual harassment policy currently in effect at my own university has this to say: