I
We are, for the purposes of this story, in the courthouse square of a very small Middle Western town. It is a hot, sunny afternoon in the September of an old, tumultuous year, 1971. In the centre of the square stands the courthouse itself, a Victorian building of no distinction, with defensive cannon at every corner. In front of the courthouse stands a statue, of a soldier, his rifle in a negative position, a Henry Fleming who has been perpetuated as he ducks out of the Civil War. On the copper roof of the building, gone green, a row of pigeons stands, depositing, in some vague evolutionary gesture, quantities of new guano on top of the old guano. From a corner of the square there enters the one Greyhound bus of the day, which comes down from the state capital, two hundred miles to the north, where they keep all the money and the records of accurate time. The bus has aluminium sides, green glareproof windows, and a lavatory; it circles the square, slows, and stops at the depot, a telephone booth outside Lee’s Diner. The driver, J. L. Gruner, safe, reliable, courteous, levers open the door; steps unfold; down the steps there descends, into the literal level of reality, in a brown suit, carrying a mackintosh on one arm, his hair long, his face lightly bearded, hot, but in good order, a person, a young English person named William Honeywell. His feet touch the board sidewalk, crisp with pigeon dung. He does not look around, or move far. Instead he stands close to the aluminium flank of the bus, which coughs diesel fumes at him, for the engine is still running, as J. L. Gruner gets down and unlocks the flaps under which this William’s luggage is concealed. J. L. Gruner has been William’s guide and conductor for most of the day, virtually ever since that early morning hour when William arrived, on the Boeing 727, after a transatlantic and then a transcontinental flight, in what pleases to call itself America. It is J. L. Gruner who took William’s ticket as he stood in the bleak bus station, amid the lockers and the bums, in the state capital, two hundred miles to the north; it is J. L. Gruner who, his face reassuringly reflected in the driving mirror, has driven him for four hours over rough concrete highways that flipped rhythmically under the tyres, unravelled straight ahead into the haze, flashing him past fields containing withered corn-stalks and rooting hogs, past sorghum mills and Burmah shave signs, past the Wishy Washy and the Dreme-Ez Motel, to deposit him on this wooden sidewalk, here. ‘Okay, pal, which is it?’ asks J. L. Gruner. William points out his big Antler suitcase, his little boxed typewriter, with their new airline labels; Gruner puts them out onto the sidewalk. ‘Thank you,’ says William. ‘Or righty,’ says Gruner, then he climbs back into the bus and, from the operator’s seat, clangs shut the big aluminium, or rather aluminum, for we are there not here, door. The diesel engine whirs; the bus moves, circles the square again, finds an exit, and takes off into the great American steppeland.
William stands, beside his luggage, on the pigeon dung, in the dust, in his brown suit, holding his mackintosh. He is there, here. This is his beginning. He sniffs the smell, tastes the air, of the town. It has a faded, dusty note, as if generations of farmhands have shaken out their coveralls in the little square. Around it are two-storey buildings in wood and brick. There is a J. C. Penney, a Woolworth, a Floresheim Shoe, a McDonald Hamburger, a gas station with a sign saying ‘We really are very friendly’ and no people, and seven parking meters. A big dog lopes down the gutter. A cat comes out of J. C. Penney. A person laughs somewhere in Lee’s Diner. Somewhere out there Nixon is President. The marquee of the tiny movie house advertises I Was a Teenage Embalmer. The Pentagon Papers have appeared in the New York Times. A sign on the novelty store says ‘Worms’. They are having a war in Vietnam. They are having a sale on hoes at J. C. Penney. William goes on standing; he is here, such as it is. Somewhere in this town, if it is the right town and not the wrong town, there is a state university; the university has many students and a library containing the papers of many famous writers, none of whom have ever lived here. At that university, if it is here, and not there, William will teach Freshman Composition, a course in existential awareness and the accurate use of the comma. But is it here? On the steps of the courthouse, in the sunlight, a row of elderly farmers in faded denim coveralls sits; they have been there all the time, watching William unblinkingly. William, one eye on his luggage left on the sidewalk, moves, crosses over to them. They inspect him as he comes: the suit, the mackintosh, the longish red hair. William stops before them; he says, to the oldest and so presumably the wisest, ‘Excuse me, please.’ ‘What’s that, boy?’ asks the man, spitting into the dust. ‘Do you know,’ asks William, looking around, a mystification on his face, ‘where I can find the university?’ The man screws his eyes, thinks for a moment, spits again, and says: ‘Didn’t know it was lost, son.’ His eyes glaze, cackles come from the others, and the courthouse pigeons drop dung around the outer edges of the encounter, plainspeaking America triumphing over fancy Europe.
William, standing there, knows himself. He is not a naïf. He has read widely in literature and profited emotionally from the experience. He has taken all the lesser drugs, has had two mistresses, and assisted one of them through a neurotic abortion. He has travelled as far as Turkey, has a good graduate student knowledge of structuralism; he has been hit by a policeman with a truncheon at a political demonstration in London, been in a sit-in, and written two pop songs. He has not been to America before, but has been Americanized, by cultural artefacts and universal modernization, and he knows it by image and by instinct. He has read America in many books. He has a part-written thesis in his luggage, on the disjunctive city in contemporary American fiction, and he has libertarian intentions. He has even come here hoping to find a little bit more of himself, to extend his being beyond its present circumscriptions and circumference. He has existential expectations, based on self-knowledge and sex. But he knows he is resident in a very old story: only I myself am novel, he thinks, the experience is not. Nixon is President. There are the Pentagon Papers. The Vietnam war, against which he has protested, goes on. There are black ghettos, poverty programmes, corruptions and conspiracies; actuality is continually outdoing our talents. History is moving apace, and is everywhere; the simple literary redemptions are hard to sustain. He wants more, deserves more, than a replay of old fictions, a plain and simple reality. ‘Great, thanks,’ he says, and walks back across the street to his lonely baggage on the sidewalk. But what, he thinks, next?
‘Hey,’ shouts one of the other farmers, pointing down the street. About half a block down, in front of Sears Roebuck, there is a cab, with a sign on the side saying ‘Schuler Taxi’; it was not there before. The driver sits inside and watches William unmovingly; he watches as he carries his heavy bag and his little case, the mackintosh over the shoulder, down the sidewalk. He watches, through the mirror, as William opens the rear door and lifts the luggage inside. ‘Baggage goes in the trunk,’ he says, when William is finished. ‘In the boot?’ asks William. ‘In the trunk,’ says the man. It is an ancient terminological game they are playing, thinks William, as he heaves out the bag and puts it in the binominal place, the rehearsal, a million times in, of a traditional, weary encounter; the lousy part is it also strains the back. ‘Whar to?’ asks the man, when William is back in the cab. William hands him the slip of paper that has been sent to him, back in England, stating his dormitory reservation, exhausted with dialogue. The man starts the cab, tours the square, strikes out into the hinterland. They pass the Astoria Motel, which advertises two for the price of one, and through a residential section where housewives sit on frame porches in mail-order sportswear. ‘Whar ya frum, boy?’ asks the man. Now there are stone houses with Greek letters over the doors, and young men lying outside them in Ford Mustangs, with their feet over the side. ‘England,’ says William. There are Victorian semi-churches, covered in red ivy, a large football stadium, a television mast. ‘England, huh? Hoity toity,’ says the man. There is a long low building outside which students in sweatshirts are throwing a frisbee in great arcs. ‘Five dollars,’ says the man, ‘You’ll like it here better.’ ‘Will I?’ says William, finding currency. ‘Good.’ ‘One time we had a mayor of Chicago punched your King George right in the snoot,’ says the cabbie. ‘You did?’ asks William. ‘That’s history, that’s an accurate fact,’ says the man, staring incredulously at the quarter William has pressed into his palm as a tip, ‘You can look it up in all them books you guys has gotten in that library.’ ‘I will,’ says William, collecting up his luggage. A frisbee whizzes past his ear. ‘Some of those fraternity boys,’ say the cabbie, admiringly, ‘they lay eight, ten girls a week. They get prizes for it.’ ‘Well earned, no doubt,’ says William. ‘Don’t forget now,’ says the cabbie, ‘It’s better here, so if you don’t like it go back where you came from.’
‘Ting,’ says a voice, as William, carrying his bags, pushes open the door of the graduate dormitory and walks into the hall, ‘Ting.’ ‘I’ve just arrived from England, fresh to teach Freshman Composition, and I have a room booked here,’ says William to a small oriental student in a collegiate sweater, who sits in a small wooden armchair in a cubicle, reading Lemon and Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. ‘Ting,’ says the student, getting up and shaking his hand. There is a metal bunk bed, an armchair, a small desk, and a lamp on a snaky spiral support, which looks capable of wrapping itself around the arm as you write under its light (a minor symbol, a serpent for the American Eden), in the first-floor room this student leads him to. ‘Fine, thanks,’ says William. ‘Ting,’ says the student. William begins to unpack: his clothes, his medicines, his teaching notes, his small flute, his part-thesis, the leather toilet-case given him, with tears at Heathrow, by the girl with the abortion. He sits on the bed. There is a knock at the door. ‘Ting,’ says the oriental student, ‘I take you to where we eat.’ But it is evening now: the sun has suddenly withdrawn, leaving a faint chill, and William has been awake for a ridiculous number of hours. He has culture-shock, jet-lag, a coffee hangover, the plasticized remnant of an airline meal knotted in his stomach. He says he will sleep. He finds a bathroom, with no doors on the stalls, and an Arab sitting on one of the bowls. He urinates, returns to his room, undresses, gets into the iron bed. There are a few brief, disorienting images in his head – of a girl in a caftan who sat across the aisle in the jet, of a man in the bus depot in the state capital who asked for a quarter and then, hearing his accent, raised it to fifty cents – such as travellers have to make them feel lonely; but they are purged by unconsciousness, and he is asleep, his red hair on an American pillow.
It is much later, in the middle of the American night, when he wakens to a curious noise. He gets up and, in Winceyette pyjamas, goes to the window. The landscape suddenly judders and explodes; the rural plain which stretches beyond the window is lit by a bright green glare. In it, white barns flash into existence, then expire. A torrential rain is falling. Blackness resumes. ‘Cling, cling,’ goes a noise. There is a strange hooting and a roaring. The noise, mobile, comes closer. On the right of the blank composition a slowly gyrating, long beam of light appears, its shifting angle casting itself first towards William, then away again. Another green flash lights up the fast-running sky; William realizes that this is abstract realism he is in, and he sees that the shrieking torch is his first American train. It grinds near; it says ‘Cling, cling’; it passes hard by the dormitory. As it does so, a bolt snaps down and catches a power sub-station, mounted fecklessly on a pole across the street. It explodes with a flash and a roar. There is a scream, as of pleasure. In the flash, William has seen a human figure. On the grass below his window it stands, a fat naked girl, her legs wide apart, pushing up her loose large breasts to take onto them the impact of the rain. There is a knock at the door. ‘Ting,’ says a voice. ‘Cling cling,’ says the train. ‘Who?’ says William. ‘You,’ says a voice. ‘What is it?’ asks William. ‘A visit,’ says the voice. William goes and opens the door. The little oriental who met him stands there, in shortie pyjamas. ‘Bill Ting, your counsellor,’ he says. ‘You must close lindow. Water coming through floor into my loom downstair.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ says William. ‘Also, offplint of article for loo to lead. For English opinion. Source, Victorian Studies.’ Another pleasured scream shrills from outside. ‘Who wrote it?’ asks William. ‘Ting,’ says Ting, ‘On Charlotte Blontë.’ ‘Look, I’ll read it tomorrow,’ says William, putting the offplint on his desk, ‘Goodnight.’ He goes back to the window, to shut it. It is entire black outside, too black to see the girl: the storm is subsiding. ‘Okay, America,’ says William to the dark world beyond the fly-screen, ‘we’ll let you know.’
William stands in a puddle and closes the window; but the truth is that, despite himself, he is at last impressed. He knows himself under the agency of divine comedians of a somewhat different stamp from those whose work he has always known, new gods with a fancier taste in apocalyptics, quite like those of the modern critics he reads. He is here. What will he do? He will teach freshmen composition, demonstrate the orderly economy of language, the complexities of langue and parole, cleanse the tools of speech and thought. He will teach wisdom, taste, cultural awareness. ‘Ring,’ goes the telephone. ‘Ting,’ says a voice down the wire. ‘Lain still come in.’ ‘Leave me alone,’ says William. He stands in the dark, thinking of the girl with the abortion, dark-haired, a little fat, someone he is not sure whether to remember or forget. It is an imperfect image: a photograph into which the light has been let. He stands in the puddle, he feels in a muddle. Somewhere below the typewriter clatters. He gets into bed, he puts down his head. The typewriter reaches the end of a line: ‘Ping,’ it says. He starts to weep, he goes to sleep.
II
‘You seem to be a well set-up, morally earnest young man,’ says Fardiman, ‘The sort of person who takes literature seriously, and teaches it good. So why worry?’ Outside the window, on the grass, blue jays screech offensively. A man with a leaf-collecting machine comes by under the trees, collecting a faint harvest from the first of the fall. Two dogs copulate over by the Business Building. It is a bright fall day; William can see all this from the screened wooden window of the office in Humanities Hall he shares with five other graduate assistants. He has a large desk by the window, a desk with inkstains in the drawers and a large, high-backed, swivel chair. William is grieving. He has been teaching now for just over a week, and has met all his classes, twice, in the Chemistry Building, his hands dangling loosely in the pedagogic sink, or absent-mindedly turning on the gas-taps, as he stares outward at the massive ethnic mix of the faces before him. Overcoming timidity, if not terror, he has begun work; he has told them where his office is, writing a map on the board so they can all find him, and where the library is, and where they are; he has asked them to write for him the first theme on the official schedule, on the demanding topic of ‘My Home Town’. Now these themes have come in, deposited in a pocket outside his office door; he is marking them now. Fardiman sits at the next desk, writing a report for the graduate seminar on Milton he is taking; he keeps a copy of the Kama Sutra on his desk and a jar of apple cake on the bookcase. William is chewing apple cake as he reads. ‘I am,’ says William, turning to Fardiman, ‘I’m a devotee of Leavis, though I disapprove of his culturally right-wing position, and also his interpretation of Women In Love. I’m also into semiotics, and I’m somewhat influenced by Frank Kermode.’ ‘I was reading his What’s the Sense of an Ending?’ says Fardiman, ‘It stirred me in the gut. It gives me faith in my own clerkly scepticism. Now that’s what you could use some of, right now.’ ‘I’ve read and digested Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel school,’ says William, ‘I’m into Adorno and Horkheimer and revisionist Marxist esthetics. I’m interested in alternative education. I’ve got a part to play. But, Fardiman, what’s it all got to do with essays about “My Home Town”?’ ‘It’s all phenomenological discourse,’ says Fardiman, ‘Writing degree about twenty below. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, not usually in that order, but this it shares with most modern literature. It adds up to the cumulative fund of words in the universe; and, William, we want those words right.’ William groans; he pushes the theme he has been reading across onto Fardiman’s desk, which, in the cramped space, is up against his own. The theme begins: ‘The people which lives in my home town is good folks, bad folks, rich folks, poor folks, white and some black, go to church and not go to church, and many other things.’
Fardiman puts down his apple cake and, picking up a red pen, he looks at the theme. While he reads, William swivels his chair and stares again through the screened window. Blue jays screech. The leaf-collector with the leaf-collector collects the leaves. The dogs are separate and distinct. Along the pathway between Humanities and Business, so ironically juxtapered, as if by some cynically literary architect, a procession begins. The bells have rung in the classrooms and the students pour along the paths, in bright clothes, the girls making cradles of their arms to carry their textbooks and notecases in. Some of the students, a distinctive group, the girls without bras, the men with long hair and Afros, go by with anti-war placards; there is a political demonstration that day. William has a sense of his pointless little face staring through the dark grilled screens at what they are doing. But he is here to read what they have written, which seems to bear no resemblance to what they are doing, to have no connection with these minds and bodies. ‘It’s not a great start,’ says Fardiman, putting down the theme, ‘But how would you have started it?’ ‘It’s not my home town,’ says William, ‘There are all kinds of ways to start a piece about a town, if you want to start one.’ ‘Talk to him,’ says Fardiman, ‘Try to get him to do it more personally. But there’s real potential here.’ ‘There is?’ asks William, staring at Fardiman. ‘Sure there is. This kid is a comma artist. I know it doesn’t sound much, with the world the way it is, and Tel Quel the way it is, but those are real good commas.’ William looks at Fardiman, who has marched on the Pentagon, and reads Illich, and will refuse to be drafted; and he sees no light. ‘Don’t be anxious,’ says Fardiman, ‘It’s your task to take these self-satisfied, super-sensual oafs and lead them, through the study of sentences, into becoming mature, questioning, critical, politically alert individuals like ourselves.’ ‘With better hang-ups,’ says William. ‘Right,’ says Fardiman. ‘Alternatively, I guess, you could move, yourself, in the other direction, and have fun.’
William looks out of the window. The trees on campus start to turn brown, orange, and maroon, in a brilliant fall display. The air grows colder. The leaf-collector collects many a leaf. William puts on thicker clothes, and goes out to the few student bars that serve the specially diluted beer that will protect them. He goes to the McDonald Hamburger stand, and to graduate student parties to smoke pot, and to political meetings. He writes letters home to the girl with the abortion, and washes his clothes in the laundry down in the basement of the graduate dormitory, shown the way by Ting. He eats Fardiman’s apple cake and grades many themes. He stands behind his desk in the Chemistry Building, three days a week, and tells his students about Carnaby Street and the Portobello Road. He goes to the Teaching Round Table, where all the graduate assistants sit around a square table and discuss their problems, about grading themes, about flunking students who might be drafted, about why are we here, about the falling jobs market. Sensing an over-devotion to diurnal reality among his students, even the politically active ones, he tries to find his way to truth by perplexing them with complexity of fictions, reading them Nabokov, Coover, Barthelme, asking why writers write like that. ‘Finks,’ says one student, Miss Armfelt, an energetic little girl who interrupts his classes by asking him about their relevance, abusing Nixon, talking about the Third World, speaking for Women’s Rights, condemning the conformity of the course, the uselessness of education, the corruption of grades, ‘Escapers.’ William likes his students, more than he likes most of his colleagues; the trouble is he is unsure how close he should get to them. Taking one or two of the co-eds on dates, he feels a vague inhibition, a guilt: the start of a professional conscience. He does not touch them; they stare at him. Once he asks Miss Armfelt, but she tells him dates are a fake ritual, part of the heterosexual conformity she repudiates. For safety’s sake, then, William redirects his emotional ambitions; he has an affair with a graduate girl, also teaching freshmen composition. Strangely, it seems that some diminution of sexual attractiveness is an entry qualification for graduate school. Miss Daubernethy is not like the co-eds; she is tough and fairly charmless, a dark girl with a mole on her cheek, whom he meets in the basement of the dormitory, while observing one night the whirl of his socks and undershorts as they spin behind the thick bubble of glass, and to whom he makes all unwit tingly, an obscene suggestion: for he asks, as they stand drinking Coke together, on the wet floor in the windowless room, smelling of washing powder and drying clothes, whether she could possibly sew a button on his shirt. ‘Christ,’ says Miss Daubernethy, staring at him in anger, ‘I’m not a homemaker. I’m a graduate student. I’m not a woman, pal. I’m a person.’ ‘Of course, right,’ says William, ‘I believe in all that. I wasn’t trying to rôle-type you, honestly. I’d have asked anybody.’ ‘Oh, sure. Anybody who’s historically supposed to be seen around with a needle,’ the girl said, ‘Like a woman. Come on, how come you picked on me?’ William is aghast with his own guilt, glimpsing the darkness of his unconscious chauvinism. ‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry.’ It can of course only have one consequence: it is not very long after this – in fact later that night – that, person to person, with William abased, they are making love on the metal bunk bed in his room, while Ting goes ping below.
The winter outside the office window gets colder, and all is not well. Miss Daubernethy, who comes from Florida, is shrill, tastes of Listerine, and not quite William’s ideal type, or the sort of person he would have picked in the free and open market. He knows, and fears she does, that she is a surrogate for the fancy, fresh, forbidden bodies in his classes, for the flashing legs and mobile nipples under sweaters, such as Miss Armfelt’s sweater, that he finds himself staring at as he stands over the sink in the Chemistry Building, and talks about the use and significance of tenses. Miss Daubernethy is thirty, tight around the jaw, and has cramps because of the tension of her PhD orals. She wears long dresses to hide her legs, and has exhibitionistic tastes in lovemaking, liking to pleasure herself, by seeing herself or doing things to herself, which is spiriting at first, but somehow basically uncooperative, and not very easy in her or William’s dormitory room, or in the back of her Willy jeep. She has an overhung bottom, stout thighs and there are more moles round her waist. There is an old myth in these matters to which William has subscribed: that American women have outrun the world in establishing an intense level of sensation for themselves in sex. William, having had too much of the over-domesticated British variety, feels that this should have its potential for him, its high compensations. Yet, with Miss Daubernethy, as the weeks go by, it seems not to. He touches and rubs and kisses, they move and wriggle and sweat, but the challenging athletics gradually acquire not the tone of an existential liberation, a Reichian fulfilment, but rather of a vulgarly inflated achievement, like trying to play a Beethoven quartet with ten musicians, for better sound. A certain fleshly exhaustion begins to come over William, and something more: I’m a humanist, he thinks to himself. As he sits in his office by day, writing B, and D, and F on essays, and noting at the end of them ‘Shows improvement’, ‘This could be better developed’, ‘You get to the point too quickly’, he feels unease, knowing that his own beginnings, middles and ends, his paragraphing and spacing, his use of the colon, will be similarly flatly measured by Miss Daubernethy’s idealized grading system. The students get very anxious about these grades: ‘Do you grade on the curve?’ they come and ask, ‘Do you give As for the best work you get from us, or do you only give them for, like, Middlemarch?’ Miss Daubernethy in the dormitory room, lying across his armchair, feet splayed and apart, crotch high, raises a similar problem in standards: ‘You’re okay, you’re as good as anyone I’ve had, to be fair, but you’re not as good as the ones I’ll get.’ William grows haunted by these Joyces, Prousts, and Manns of sex. Back in the office, he tells the kids who come and sit in his consultation chair, ‘It’s not an abstract best. There are rules and good habits, which I’m trying to teach you. But it’s a humanist affair, the best from you, the fullest insight out of you.’ Back in the dormitory room, William, lying naked on top of Miss Daubernethy’s desk, the sweat on his brow, and the inexorable large thighs dominant above, says: ‘Do you think sex can ever become personal?’ ‘I want you back up higher and your knees more together,’ says Miss Daubernethy, monstrous against the light, ultimately and in all a teacher. ‘I want your adjectives spaced out more and your verbs more together,’ she is saying, in conference in her office, in the light of the snaky desk lamp, when William comes by to fetch her for a meal – for they eat too – the following night.
The winter grows colder still, and all is worse. One night, in her dormitory room, while Miss Daubernethy paints her nipples with silver nail varnish in the light of the desk lamp, William, naked on her bed, finds a large sharp knife under her pillow. ‘What’s this?’ he asks. ‘You shouldn’t have found that,’ says Miss Daubernethy, and starts to cry. William feels a little twinge of terror: ‘What were you going to do?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know, I think I must be going lesbian. I can’t tell you how the shape of a man’s body gets me disgusted. I hate you there.’ Then her nails come flying across the room and she is lunging for the knife. The door is locked but William turns the knob, flies out into the corridor. Happily he still holds the knife. There are long, long corridors back to his room, on the other side of the building. But William makes it in a hurry, seen only by Mr Ting, a cool person, who stands contemplatively in the passage, evincing only a modest clerkly scepticism at the sight of his nudity, his knife, his panting terror. He locks his door and leans against it, feeling for the first time not the chance and arbitrary nature, but rather the utter precious sanctity, of his male equipment. Is this the lesson? ‘You need to cut down your ending,’ Miss Daubernethy, unchanged, is saying in her office next day, as William goes in, interrupting a conference, to ask for his clothes back. The clothes turn up in the garbage can in the basement, just by the washing machine where they had first met, back there when the weather was by no means so cold.
It is over; and William subsides into an extraordinary fleshy disgust, thinking over without pleasure the detailed, intimate construction of her body and sensing an ultimate deceit in what the flesh, with all its promises, actually contains. But it is not over, for Miss Daubernethy is omnipresent. She starts wearing sexy clothes, and appears by his side during the break in the Teaching Round Table, when they all stand in the corridor drinking Cokes, saying: ‘It was nothing personal, William. It’s not because I don’t like you or anything. It was just because you’re a man.’ ‘Anyone who’s historically supposed to be seen around with a prick,’ says William. ‘That’s chauvinism too.’
In the Victorian Novel seminar, on the very day he is due to read his paper on Jane Eyre, Miss Daubernethy comes into the class and sits beside him, though she is not enrolled for the seminar, being a medievalist. ‘Any comments?’ asks the professor, when he has finished. ‘I just love your penis,’ whispers Miss Daubernethy. ‘Do we all agree about the symbolism of the blocked up window?’ asks the professor. ‘You can’t have it,’ whispers William. ‘Narrative strategy?’ asks the professor. ‘I want to feel it inside me,’ whispers Miss Daubernethy, looking heated. ‘How do we relate this to the symbolic emasculation of Mr Rochester?’ asks the professor. ‘Now,’ says Miss Daubernethy. ‘Do you?’ says William, looking around at the rest of the class taking notes. ‘With or without me attached?’
At the faculty picnic in early December she appears round the other side of a tree by the icy lakeside, holds onto his coat, and says: ‘Funny dark things can happen, William. I was crazy. But I’m through it now. You have to be with me again, because I think of you all the time.’ William looks at her, thinks of her disgust, and then of his, inspects the body with no appeal, the body which is supposed to render us everything. ‘I’m really sorry,’ says William, ‘But I’m really way into celibacy now. I want to try that for a bit.’ ‘No,’ says Miss Daubernethy, pushing him into the lake. Two deans and three fully tenured professors are needed to get him dripping out. He is taken back by a Swinburne specialist and put into his dormitory bed. In the following days his throat seizes up and, after two croaking classes, speech becomes impossible. He goes to the campus hospital and lies feverish between clean, antiseptic sheets, while beautiful white-clad nurses inject penicillin into his bottom. Sometimes, hot, he thinks he sees Miss Daubernethy peering in through his room window, but only Fardiman comes inside, bearing the New York Review of Books. When he is better, it is Christmas, the festive season, and the students have gone home; happily Fardiman is there, with his old Studebaker, proposing, for his family have gone east for the break to New York City, that they both go off on a healthy vacation together. They drive south, William’s mind clearing under Spanish moss. They leave behind the cold and the snowfalls. On Christmas day he sits on the porch of a motel in the sunlight, watching pelicans, farcical birds, ungainly and unadapted, revelling in their own absurdity.
III
After Christmas, with only a little more of the semester still to go, the snow piles up on the window sill of William’s office, from which the screens had gone, and there is a curious change of atmosphere in his classes. He has been, with his little English radicalism, and his fancy talk about fictions, a popular teacher, but now someone steals his nameplate from the door of the office, and the students come in to complain about grades he has been giving them. There is a politics about grades, but it is a curious politics. There is the problem of the draftees, which would have been simple (William has been putting brackets, and commas, in for them right through the course), were there not also, subjunctively, the problem of the girls, and the problem of the footballers, and the problem of the blacks, and the problem of the fraternity boys. ‘What did she mean when she said she’d do anything to get an A?’ asks William, as a girl who has plagiarized an essay, having submitted for him a copied-out article from Reader’s Digest, entitled ‘One of Nature’s Wonders: The Mighty Bee’, leaves his consultancy chair, right by his desk, and departs angrily from the office. ‘She means anything,’ says Fardiman, ‘She’ll use what she’s got, and what she’s got isn’t in her head.’ ‘I thought that’s what she meant,’ says William. ‘I wonder whether you could take a moment or two to talk to me about a few of my themes,’ says Mr Krutch, coming in; Mr Krutch sits in the front row of William’s class with his feet up on the teaching desk, sometimes with vaguely insulting messages – like ‘Limey’ – written on the soles. ‘Sure,’ says William. ‘I wonder whether there’s any rational explanation of the grades you gave them,’ says Mr Krutch, ‘Or whether you’re just plain crazy.’ ‘I could be,’ says William. ‘Look,’ says Mr Krutch, ‘this theme was handed in by another guy to another teacher. He gave it a B, you gave it a D. How come?’ ‘Maybe you didn’t copy it out very well when you were plagiarizing it,’ says William. ‘What do I have to do to get good grades from you?’ asks Mr Krutch, ‘Stand on my head? Play the piano with my ass? I’m just a nice, ordinary guy. I’m not so different than anyone else on this campus.’ ‘From,’ says William, ‘We did different from.’ ‘Tell him goodbye, and Happy New Year,’ says Fardiman. An hour later the football coach is in to plead for Dubchek, who has submitted an essay called ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, an argument so complete that it even concludes with the name Matthew Arnold. Fortunately there is Miss Armfelt, who comes next, dark, intense, with no bra, a city girl. She has been getting As right through the course. ‘Another A,’ says William, handing her theme back to her with relief. ‘So what?’ says Miss Armfelt, putting her Mexican totebag down on the desk, and putting the folded theme, with William’s red A on it, inside it, ‘Grades are crap.’ ‘That’s right,’ says Fardiman, leaning back, ‘Take Hester Prynne. She got an A, and look what happened to her.’ Miss Armfelt looks coolly at him. ‘Grades are repression,’ she says, ‘Grammar’s repression. All true creativity transcends rules.’ ‘So does all true stupidity,’ says Fardiman, eating apple cake. ‘I wondered if I could have a private word with you, Mr Honeywell,’ says Miss Armfelt. ‘Sure, I’ll go to the john for a minute,’ says Fardiman, ‘Since you’re already getting As.’ ‘Oh, it’s not about grades,’ shouts Miss Armfelt after him, ‘Screw grades.’ When Fardiman has gone, she says: ‘It’s just a crazy thought. We were wondering – we is myself and Laura Ann Dix, she’s my room-mate and she’s in your section too, you know? – we thought you looked kind of bushed. We both enjoyed your classes. So, like to say thank you, we thought we’d ask if you’d like to stop round at our place sometime for a drink. And one thing we won’t talk about is grades.’ ‘That’s very human,’ says William, ‘Sure I’ll come.’ ‘Tomorrow night around eight?’ ‘Fine,’ says William. ‘They’re even crowding round the doors of the faculty john,’ says Fardiman, when he comes back, ‘Hoping to catch us unbuttoned.’
The next day William posts one set of his final grades on his office door and locks himself in. He can hear the students outside, reading the grades and banging on the door. He has been infinitely generous, a compromise between the system and his politics, but indignation is rife: ‘We know you’re in there,’ voices shout. Towards evening he creeps out down the ill-lit hall and, his coat-collar turned up, eats a hamburger at the hamburger stand, before going to Miss Armfelt’s. He crosses the campus. Some black students, sitting-in in the computer block, have started a fire. Outside a dormitory, boys in red Ford Thunderbirds are shouting to girls to come away with them to the West Coast. William reaches the tree-shaded streets just off campus, with ploughed snow stacked on the sidewalk, and finds Miss Armfelt’s place, a small basement entrance below a frame house. He taps on the door. ‘Come on in,’ someone shouts. Some freak music is on the record player. ‘Hi,’ says Miss Armfelt, wearing her swimsuit and sitting on an exercise bicycle in the middle of the room, pedalling busily, ‘I’ll be through in a minute.’ Laura Ann Dix, whom William knows, sits on the sofa, next to a brown retriever, which growls at him. ‘Stay, Fidel,’ says Laura Ann. ‘Fix some beer, eh?’ says Miss Armfelt, peddling on, ‘There’s some in the icebox.’ ‘I’ll get it,’ says William. ‘Let me, you talk to Ellie,’ says Laura Ann. William leans against a bookcase and watches Miss Armfelt getting up real speed. ‘You don’t need exercise,’ he says. ‘I wish I had one of those exercise pogo sticks, with a pedometer on it,’ says Miss Armfelt. ‘And another one for the dog?’ asks William, ‘Why do you need exercise?’ ‘It’s for the bodily pleasure,’ says Miss Armfelt, ‘Hey get me a cigar, will you? Right there in that box, Mr Honeywell.’ ‘William,’ says William, getting a cigar and slipping it between Miss Armfelt’s pert lips. ‘How’s that for symbolic action,’ says William. ‘They’re illegal Havanas,’ says Miss Armfelt, ‘I guess it keeps him in business.’
‘How come we have so much light?’ says Laura Ann, bringing in the cans of beer. She switches lights out and others on, leaving a paper Japanese lampshade hanging low over the end of the sofa, and a tiny intense-light desklamp on the coffee table. William picks up a matchbook and lights Miss Armfelt’s cigar. ‘Get one,’ says Miss Armfelt. ‘She’ll be through in a minute,’ says Laura Ann, ‘Come and sit on the sofa with me.’ William sits down. ‘Doesn’t it drive you crazy, teaching this crazy course?’ asks Laura Ann. ‘It wouldn’t, if all the kids were as bright as you.’ ‘I look at you sometimes, standing there, and I keep thinking, what he must be thinking! But you never get mad.’ ‘I really would just once like to see you really let fly,’ says Ellie Armfelt. ‘It’ll happen,’ says William. ‘But you must have such a good level of consciousness,’ says Laura Ann. William laughs and says: ‘I’m a stranger. Maybe what sounds commonplace to you doesn’t to me.’ ‘Oh, but the things they tell you,’ says Laura Ann, ‘They make up things because they think you’ll believe it.’ ‘He knows that,’ says Ellie, ‘I keep wanting to interrupt, but I say to myself, he knows that.’ ‘I loved the way you put down that WASP kid who was talking about dates,’ says Laura Ann. ‘What’s that?’ asks Ellie. ‘Oh, she was saying she gave a boy her right breast on the first date, and her left breast on the second date, and he said, it was funny, what happens on the third, don’t you run out of breasts?’ They all laugh. ‘We really enjoy your classes. You’re the most interesting teacher I ever had.’ ‘You haven’t had him,’ says Laura Ann. ‘You haven’t had him,’ shouts Ellie Armfelt. Laura Anna laughs, and then pushes her face against William’s. He kisses it. Miss Armfelt suddenly gets off the exercise bicycle and disappears into the kitchen space. Laura Ann surfaces out of William’s arms and says: ‘What are you doing, Ellie?’
‘I just had a great idea, let’s have some tequila,’ shouts Ellie. Laura Ann’s face pushes back into William’s. ‘She’ll be a minute, let’s have a first date and a second date.’ William’s hand goes in under her blouse and slides up over her right breast; she presses it into her and he feels the fluttering stir in his palm. ‘Wait,’ she says, and pulls off the blouse. Her brown body is under the light from the Japanese lantern, and William feels at last the waning of his physical aversion that Miss Daubernethy had left with him. His hands run up her, and then a voice says: ‘Me too,’ and there is Ellie Armfelt by him, swimsuit off, naked. William feels a splendid, relaxed sense of benison, of plurality of gifts. The record player switches over to Beethoven. Now Laura Ann is out of her skirt and her hands are on his body, pushing aside his shirt. Ellie Armfelt is working on the trousers. ‘I thought,’ says William, ‘you were lesbian.’ Miss Armfelt leans over Laura Ann and William and hugs them together, kissing both their faces. Laura Ann is pulling his body round to reach it with her mouth. Ellie Armfelt puts a breast against his face. William can hardly see, but he knows there is another girl in the room. The impression is so hazy that it almost drifts past him. But there she is, near the bicycle, holding up a square black box. ‘Who’s that?’ asks William. ‘That’s our other room-mate,’ whispers Ellie, ‘She’s in your class too.’ The flashbulb goes off, leaving a glaring residue of light in William’s retina, showing him, vividly, the breasts against his face, like the breasts of the fat girl he saw on the grass in the electric storm. She was graceless; he has an instinct of the gracelessness of these bodies too, but the shudder is coming up him. There is another flash of light, and another, and another. The girl with the camera comes nearer for a moment. She says, politely, ‘Why, hi, Mr Honeywell,’ and then she goes away.
IV
There is an envelope, almost expected, lying under the door of William’s office when he gets there early the next morning. He has slept well in his dormitory bedroom, post-coitally tired, and then, waking up towards dawn, has thought of this, getting up soon after the light came to come over and check. But they have been up early too. He carries the envelope, with his name on it, the handwriting recognizable from themes, to his desk. He opens it up and takes out the single Polaroid print, with its whirl of bodies and its central, naked Honeywell, and then the sheet of folded theme-paper, with its long message. It says:
Dear William,
This is to thank you for last night. Oh boy are you a swinger. It really was a good scene. Take a look at the photo. Isn’t it great? It was taken by a friend, Delise Roche, who shares our pad too. I guess you saw her when she stopped by. She’s a really keen photographer, and a friend. Please remember. This is all part of the fun we have had, and a wonderful way of us all remembering it for all time. It was a swell evening, and I know I will always want to remember it. I hope you will come around again, ‘for a drink’, I mean it, you’re really welcome. Next time we ought to make it a foursome. I mean, you really ought to meet Delise. She’s a really good friend of Laura Ann and I. You will know her, she’s in your Comp. class too, a different section than us. A great kid with a problem. Her problem is that she has been working really hard ‘for the cause’, active in Civil Rights, anti-war, Women’s Lib, etc. and has just not made the grades. Like me, she thinks grades are crap, though I guess her parents would kill her or something if she flunked out of college. Anyway we need her around, on the political front, etc. A great girl. Photography’s her bag right now. She says a photograph is truer than words, and I guess she’s right. It’s typical of her that she takes these photographs of us just for fun, and for keepsake. Not to do anything with them. Show them to anyone, I mean. What grade are you giving her in Comp, William? Hey, you have a great body, William. See you maybe? Yours with affection, really,
Ellie.
Williams sits at the desk. He scratches at a body bite and reads the letter through carefully, twice more, trying to penetrate it. It is a crisp and beautiful morning, and through the window he can see the sun bringing out red glitter on the new snow that has dusted the campus, in the small hours after he got back to his room. An innocent morning. The fire seems out now in the computing complex. He stares at the photograph, with its sticky surface and falsified colours, at the image of himself from outside, alienating, gross, yet retrieving the doings already hazy now in his head. There is a footstep out in the hallway. A key turns in the lock. ‘I already opened it,’ shouts William. ‘My,’ says Fardiman, coming inside in red earmuffs, ‘And I thought I was early.’ ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ says William. ‘I’ve got some more grades to turn in,’ says Fardiman, hanging up his coat, ‘I’ve been reading themes all night. I’m so tired. I start to think the way they do. In unattached subordinate clauses. Like this.’
‘Can you bear to read one more?’ asks William. ‘Only for a real friend,’ says Fardiman, sitting down at the desk and taking off the earmuffs. William throws the photograph and the letter onto the stack of papers on his desk. ‘Look at the photograph first,’ he says. Fardiman looks, and whistles. ‘You should make the sex magazines with this one,’ he says. ‘I like it, but I’d question whether you can count it in your list of publications.’ ‘It was taken by a student,’ says William. ‘Well, I like the way the guy has got this bicycle wheel in the foreground, to give perspective.’ ‘Now the letter,’ says William, ‘Read it carefully, for tone.’ ‘For tone, heh?’ says Fardiman, automatically picking up the red pen from his desk, and making marks as he goes through the document. When he has finished he says: ‘Well, William, I think it’s got a lot of tone. I told you if you taught these kids properly they’d learn to write relevant prose.’ ‘You did,’ says William, ‘What do you think it means?’ ‘Well,’ says Fardiman, ‘We could have a graduate seminar on this one. Indeed it’s better than Moll Flanders. If read at the level of innocence, she likes you, William. She’s a sentimental girl, given to reminiscence. If read for irony, with the methods of the New Criticism, hunting for paradox and ambiguity, I’d say she’s got you. It’s a rhetorical technique called blackmail.’ ‘How do we determine which?’ ‘I have a feeling it’s one of those occasions where the intrinsic approach fails us. Where we turn to contextual factors, like are there more photographs.’ ‘I think she took four,’ says William. ‘Of course, they may not all have come out,’ says Fardiman, ‘but that would affect my reading of the text.’ ‘Yes,’ says William, ‘Fardiman, am I in a bad position?’ Fardiman looks at the photograph: ‘It looks quite a good position,’ he says. ‘With the university,’ says William. ‘Oh, with the university,’ says Fardiman, ‘That depends what you want to do, in the future. These are permissive times.’ ‘This permissive?’ asks William. ‘What are your career plans?’ asks Fardiman. ‘I’d like to stay on here a couple of years, and get my Master’s, and then take a university post, if there are any around then. Here, or in England. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I like teaching.’ ‘William,’ says Fardiman, looking at Honewell in despair, ‘why pick a future like that at a time like this?’ ‘No?’ asks William. ‘No,’ says Fardiman.
William sits for a minute, and thinks. The sun is coming up over the snow, and the early students are going to eight o’clock class. He says: ‘You really think if she sent these photographs to anyone, I’d be in difficulties.’ ‘There’s still a professional code, especially for guys without tenure,’ says Fardiman, ‘If she sends them to our Department Chairman, I’d think your chances of a renewal next year, or a good reference on your placement file, sort of low. Like around zero. If she really papers the town, and sends them to the Regent and the President, it might be wise to have a booking on the next flight home. On the other hand, if she keeps them in her purse, and looks at them occasionally, with a fond smile for the teacher she once had, then you’ll have a sweetness following you for the rest of your days.’ ‘I suppose I could, at a pinch, argue that I’m human like everyone else,’ says William. ‘What kind of an excuse is that?’ asks Fardiman, ‘The plea of the rogue throughout the ages.’ ‘It could happen to any of us,’ says William, ‘I didn’t really do anything. It was all done to me. And it happens all over, Fardiman.’ ‘I know,’ says Fardiman, ‘But you got caught.’ ‘I could tell the whole story.’ ‘Then all four of you would get fired. You could run away and make blue movies together.’ William sits and stares at his desk, at the list of grades he has given. He inspects the list; Delise Roche has a D. Not even an F. Just a D. ‘Fardiman,’ he says, ‘How will it end?’ Fardiman looks sadly at him. ‘I’m sorry, William,’ he says, ‘You have to write your own ending.’ ‘Do you think,’ says William tentatively, ‘I should raise Miss Roche’s grade? We raised grades for the draftees, for the blacks. She’s been working for them.’ ‘I would never advise it under any circumstances,’ says Fardiman, ‘But my mother, that old fiend, my mother would raise Miss Roche’s grade.’ ‘I’d never do it at home,’ says William. ‘You’d never do that at home, would you?’ asks Fardiman, tapping the photograph, ‘I guess we all do things away from home we wouldn’t do at home. And since most of us are never at home we’re always doing things we would never do.’ ‘Fardiman,’ says William, ‘if I do it, and keep my job, I wouldn’t feel fit to keep the job I was keeping.’ ‘I said you were a well set-up, morally earnest fellow,’ says Fardiman, ‘and they always get screwed. Of course, we could be screwing ourselves.’
William looks at Fardiman, wondering. ‘We’re complex people,’ says Fardiman, ‘that’s our training. We’re always reading for necessi-ty, design, structure, plot.’ ‘It’s quite a plot,’ says William. ‘But are we missing innocence? Maybe it’s contingent, not necessary, as Kermode would say. Maybe this letter’s a pristine, guileless thing, all this while. A statement of modern love.’ ‘Can it be?’ asks William. Fardiman gets up from his desk and goes to his jar of apple cake. ‘We find it hard to believe. I mean, what’s personal now? In bed my wife is a political agent, a minor functionary for the woman revolution. My kids rip off cookies from the refrigerator and call it an anti-capitalist gesture. But people do do loving things.’ ‘But how do we find out?’ ‘Well, how do we? Do we really know about ourselves? You could go and see her.’ ‘These grades go into the office at nine,’ says William, ‘then they go in the computer, unless it’s all burned up.’ ‘There’s always another computer,’ says Fardiman, ‘I’m sorry, William, I don’t think you can know. Here we are: we’ve read Leavis and Kermode, and Tel Quel and Marcuse. We’re lost souls on the historical turn. But, we say, we know how to read. Then here’s a text, offering two worlds, one glowing with fleshy promiscuities, one tainted with the harsh corruption of interest, okay, radical interest, and what happens? We can offer multiple interpretations. We can see it psycho-linguistically and socio-linguistically. We can find the apocalyptic figure and the low mimetic type. We can note its thematic constituents, like Delise, photography, politics, grades. We can observe in it the post-modernist or the McLuhanite emphasis on the visual as opposed to the verbal or linear mode, right? We can read it as Sontagian erotics. The only thing we can’t say is whether she got you round there to try a bit of Sontagian erotics herself on that nice British body of yours, or to shake you down for a safe passing B for this Delise. We can’t read it, William. Or, in a phrase, penetrate the literal level of this reality.’
And so there sits William Honeywell, who came here on the Greyhound bus and stood in the courthouse square, in his high-back swivel chair, looking out at the snow. It has been the coldest night on record in this little Mid-Western town, with its rich folks and its poor folks, its go to church and its not go to church, two hundred miles south of the state capital, where they keep all the money and the record of accurate time. On the literal level of William’s reality, it is seventeen minutes past or after eight, and his grades are due at nine. Can there be a knock on the door, Miss Armfelt come by to say that it is all for love? He sits and sits, staring at the path between Humanities and Business. Fardiman, with a red pen, marks.
VA
There is a knock at the door. Fardiman goes and opens it. ‘Happy New Year,’ he says to whomever is outside. ‘Is Mr Honeywell there?’ asks a voice. ‘He’s gone to Chicago, Mr Krutch,’ says Fardiman, ‘the Windy City.’ ‘I have to see him about my grades,’ says Krutch. ‘Come back another day, when once more he’s not here,’ says Fardiman. ‘There’s someone breathing back there,’ says Krutch, ‘He’s there.’ ‘No, there’s no one breathing,’ says Fardiman, ‘If I let you in here, you wouldn’t see anybody, but I won’t. You’ve got to learn to take words on trust.’ ‘Oh, sure, Mr Fardiman,’ says Krutch, unconvinced. ‘Goodbye now,’ says Fardiman. William breathes: he reads, and then rereads, the letter. He takes up the red marking pen from his desk. From under the letter he takes out the computerized mark-sheet. He runs his eye down it, finds a name and, with the pen, he makes a small alteration. Then he picks up the letter, tears it, and throws it into the wastebasket. ‘How about keeping the photograph?’ asks Fardiman, ‘A sweet reminiscence. Something gained, however momentary.’ William reaches in his pocket and brings out a matchbook. It has the name of a motel in Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866, on it. William stares at it, for he has never in his life been to Saratoga. Then he recalls that he picked it up in Miss Armfelt’s basement apartment, to light her cigar. He strikes a match on the matchbook, closing the cover as instructed, and puts the little match to the photograph. It flares, with a smell of chemicals. ‘You must come back to New York City and meet my mother,’ says Fardiman, coughing in the polluted smoke.
VB
There is a knock at the door. Fardiman crosses the room and opens it. ‘Mr Honeywell in?’ asks a voice. ‘He’s gone to Chicago,’ says Fardiman, ‘Hog butcher, stacker of wheat.’ ‘I need to talk to him right now about my grades,’ says the voice. ‘Try again some other time, Mr Krutch,’ says Fardiman. ‘There are papers rustling in there,’ says Krutch, ‘I know he’s there.’ ‘It’s the wind,’ says Fardiman, ‘The local mistral. I’m all alone. Okay?’ ‘I don’t know whether I believe you, Mr Fardiman.’ ‘What’s truth?’ asks Fardiman, ‘What’s lies? What are fictions? Where is the literal level of reality? You just go away, huh, Mr Krutch.’ ‘Metaphysician,’ says Mr Krutch, and goes. William releases the papers he is holding: he reads, and reads again, the letter. He takes up the red marking pen from his desk. He goes carefully through the letter once more, making professional markings on it. He underlines the phrase ‘a really good friend of Laura Ann and I’ and writes ‘error in case’; he underlines the phrase ‘a different section than us’ and writes ‘Not a comparative: different… from’. On the bottom he writes: ‘You get to the point too slowly’ and then ‘Two errors carrying full penalization: F.’ From his desk drawer, he takes a clean envelope and addresses it to Miss Ellie Armfelt, at her apartment address. ‘Sell me a stamp, Fardiman,’ he says. Fardiman, marking, reaches in his back pocket and pulls out his black wallet. ‘Have it on me,’ says Fardiman, and then, ‘Let me go down the corridor and mail it. That guy could still be waiting out there, puzzling through the metaphysics.’ Fardiman goes, and William sits at his desk, and looks out of the window.
Vc
There is a knock at the door. Fardiman steps across and opens it. ‘Oh, hi,’ he says. ‘Is Mr Honeywell there?’ asks a voice. ‘He’s gone to Pittsburgh,’ says Fardiman. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says a voice, ‘My name’s Krutch. I just wanted to tell him he’s the best teacher I ever had. I really learned from his course. I didn’t understand it, but it was really good, you know what I mean? It’s funny, there are some teachers who just make everything seem really interesting. I mean, I’m a dull, ordinary guy. I got these terrible grades from him. I may flunk. But who cares? That’s not what matters. I’ll never forget being taught by him. You know?’ ‘I’m sure he’ll be really glad to have that message,’ says Fardiman, ‘I’ll tell him when I see him.’ ‘You won’t forget?’ asks Krutch, ‘I mean, if a guy’s great, he ought to be told, right?’ ‘Right, Mr Krutch,’ says Fardiman. ‘Oh, and a Happy New Year,’ says Krutch. ‘And to you.’ says Fardiman. William reads, and then re-reads, the letter. He takes up the red marking pen from his desk. He takes up a clean sheet of paper and begins writing. ‘Dear Ellie,’ he writes,
I can’t tell you how good it was to get your letter. It was under my door first thing this morning, when I arrived, just what I needed to hear. I’d been wondering all night, with the snowstorm going on outside my window, just how you felt, you and Laura Ann. I mean, it could have been something just casual. Like Blow Up or something – did you see that great film? What it meant to me was a breaking down of distances, a real getting close. How these artificial rôles, teacher and student, block out real relationships. I accept your invitation, who wouldn’t? I’ll be round tomorrow night (I have a paper tonight to finish for my graduate course; I wonder what grade I’ll get!). Certainly I’d like to meet Delise. She’s right, of course; photography is better than words, as involvement is better than analysis, life better than writing about life. And you’re right too, about grades being crap. In fact that whole academic factory atmosphere is crap too. Petty research by petty minds evading everything that’s real and alive. Well, you’re alive, and you’ve taught me something. Do you know what your letter made me do? Burn my grade sheets. I guess that’s the end of my contract, but who cares? What kind of life is that? I wanted to write songs anyway. Don’t take too much exercise before I come. Do you know what I’m doing? I sit at my desk, in a high-back swivel chair, looking out at the snow. I have an incredible, fresh sense of reality. It’s a really crisp, beautiful morning, and out through the window I can see people walking in all their peopleness, and the sun bringing out red glitter…
‘Hey, William, William,’ says Fardiman, marking, ‘what’s all that stuff you’re writing?’