Novels of Academe
Taking yourself too seriously is an occupational hazard of teaching. That's not surprising -- teachers have near absolute authority in the classroom, often with little oversight or supervision, especially at the higher levels; and an effective classroom presence requires projecting confidence, knowledge, and authority. The situation lends itself to dramatic and comic possibilities. Many good academic novels are written by professors, English professors in particular, and abound in allusion. Jane Austen specialist Morris Zapp in David Lodge's Changing Places, for example, names his children Elizabeth and Darcy. I missed that one until Lodge hit me over the head, but then was ready for Janet Dempster, heroine of George Eliot's Janet's Repentance. One uptight genius in the story talks himself out of a promotion by admitting he's never read Hamlet, because he thought it bought him some points at a dinner party.
One of the most gratifying for those with some classical background (like us Catholic school graduates) is Donna Tartt's The Secret History, about a coterie of classics students in a small liberal arts college in Vermont (the earlier Secret History was written by Procopius in the sixth century to expose the wickedness of the emperor Justinian). They follow their highly unorthodox Professor Julian into a sophisticated pagan critique of Christianity worthy of, well, Julian the Apostate. Almost every page contains references to Patroclus's funeral pyre and the like, and it seems natural because the professor aspires to immerse his students in a classical point of view so very difficult to retrieve scores of generations later, no matter how much our own civilization derives from it. You knew Julian was making progress when one of his students took up a Latin translation of Paradise Lost, disdaining the original. Tartt is not slow developing the trouble that level of foolishness can lead to. Math teachers like me will appreciate her Math professor who gave long multi-page finals to which the correct answer was 'yes'. The novel is written first person by a young man, one of the student survivors, with notable gender realism.
A classic of this genre is Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, first published in 1954. Regarded by many at first as a nihilist diatribe, the novel remains greatly amusing (and quite tame) as it tracks the adventures of academic entrepreneur Jim Dixon navigating the lunatics who happen to be his colleagues (you'll have to guess whether Jim gets the girl, the job, and the money).
Indeed, Richard Russo's estimable professor in Straight Man, Henry Devereaux, writes a column in the local paper called Lucky Hank (the paper is the Daily Mirror, affectionately known as the Rear View). This is the kind of novel my mother never let me read when eating, afraid I'd choke to death while laughing. At one point Hank finds himself reluctantly spying from above on his department as it seals his fate, having manfully pried himself away from looking down a young colleague's blouse.
Another recent entry, Francine Prose's Blue Angel, concerns a failing English professor at another small liberal arts college, a man whose very good opinion of himself is increasingly out of whack with his accomplishments. Professor Swenson gets balled up in a sexual harassment charge resulting from an obsession familiar to viewers of the Marlene Dietrich movie Blue Angel, circa 1930. The publishers pitch Swenson as a martyr to the excesses of political correctness on campus, judging by the blurbs on the book. I saw him as a self-important loser, tragic perhaps as he proceeds to systematically destroy himself, but very much his own victim and a downright cultural vandal as he pleads for comparison to Anna Karenina.
Prose invokes the forgiving and tolerant Chekhov, fugue-like, at several critical junctures (though Chekhov's love ran more to the beaten-down and voiceless than the self-important). As always, Chekhov was there first with "a certain Honored Professor Nikolai Stepanovich", the dying old medical professor in A Dull Story who, even as he loses his faculties, has the strength to express his undying love for the University and its traditions and above all, for his students. I will never understand how a twenty-nine year old man (Chekhov's age when he wrote this story) could so succinctly capture the core truths of teaching and the university, of life, disintegration and death.
Mike Bertrand
August 15, 2003