Leaving the World (20 page)

He was completely right about that. I went straight home after the meeting and spent the following two days burrowing into Professor Holder’s lectures. Part of me felt like a poacher as I was reading through these notes to discover the shape of her courses and the take she had on the Naturalists and Dickinson. There were times when I vehemently disagreed with her – especially when she tried to discern leitmotifs in Dreiser. But her analyses of Dickinson’s internal metric rhythms – and the metaphysic of her poetry – hugely impressed me. The passion she had for the work she was discussing was both remarkable and intimidating. I couldn’t help but feel that she was several cognitive notches above me; a true natural when it came to engaging with the flow of literary ideas. Of course I felt a stab of envy – but it was the sort of envy that arises out of seeing someone in your field raising their game and playing at a higher level. Reading her notes was both sobering and sad because, by the end of the weekend, I realized just what a major loss Deborah Holder had been.

When I returned to New England State early Monday morning I was in an advanced state of anxiety. My first day as a professor – and as I strode into the classroom, a firm smile on my face, a voice in my head kept telling me:
They’re all thinking, ‘You’re not Deborah Holder.’

The first class was a course in American Originals, encompassing new movements in twentieth-century American poetry from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg. According to her notes, Deborah Holder was about to start discussing Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. When I reached the combined desk and lectern at the front of the hall, I found myself staring at seventeen students (I’d made a point of learning all their names over the weekend). They all looked bored, half-awake, wishing to be anywhere but here. I wrote my name on the blackboard, and under that my office hours and the number of my telephone extension. As I scrawled this information across the board I could feel my clammy fingers failing to gain purchase on the chalk.

This was stage fright. Like all such manic jitters, it was bound up in that most commonplace of horrors: being found out. More than anything this dread permeates so much of adult life: the very private belief that a few ill-chosen words will show the world what a total fraud you know yourself to be.

As I finished writing my extension number, I shut my eyes for a nanosecond and told myself that the show must go on. Then I turned around and faced the class.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s make a start.’

I took another fast steadying breath. I started to talk – a long exhalation which lasted for the next hour and during which the self-doubt was replaced by an ever-growing sense that I was pulling this off. After explaining my awkwardness about taking over Professor Holder’s classes – and my realization that I would be replacing someone who was irreplaceable – I started speaking about ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and how, as the title implied, the poem dealt with a simultaneously simplex and complex idea.

‘How you interpret all that arrives in life determines so much about how the narrative of your life is dictated. Perception
is
everything. We choose to see the world in a certain way. This perception can – and most certainly
does
– change as we grow older. But we are always conscious of the fact that, as Stevens so lucidly notes, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird – and that, like so many things outside the range of empiricism, there is no one defining point of view. Like everything in life, it’s all subjective.’

I sensed I lost them a little bit with the reference to empiricism, but I was still pleased overall with this first outing and did seem to have engaged them . . . for a moment or two anyway.

The class in American Naturalism was a little shakier. It had over seventy students, many of whom seemed to be members of the jock brigade and had chosen it as a means of getting one of their English requirements out of the way. The football players – loud, show-off types – sat together in a pack and made a point of whispering loudly as I lectured, slipping notes back and forth and generally trumpeting their team-player ignorance for all to see. Interspersed among them were several cheerleader types, the sort of blonde, clean-limbed women who all had names like Babs and Bobbi, probably came from white-bread suburbs, and would end up marrying the same sort of blocky men who were now showing off to them at my expense.

I was trying to talk about the trial scene in
An American Tragedy
where Clyde admits to ‘thinking’ about killing his pregnant girlfriend, and how Dreiser plays with notions of culpability and the way we all want to confess something, even if it means orchestrating our own self-destruction. But as I was warming to this theme, the biggest and blockiest of the football clique turned around and started chatting loudly with one of the giggly cheerleaders. I stumbled over a sentence and then snapped.

‘You . . .’ I said.

The guy continued talking.

‘You . . .’ I said again.

The guy ignored me.

I threw down my pen and stormed right up the aisle to where he was talking. He kept chatting to the bimbette.

‘You . . .’

He finally looked at me.

‘You want something?’ he asked.

‘What’s your name?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘This is my course, my classroom, and you are behaving in a rude, disruptive manner.’

He turned to his jocky cohorts and pulled a face – one which essentially said:
Do you believe this nobody?
My rage turned cold.

‘Your name.’

He continued to pull a face. That’s when I slammed a fist on his desk.

‘Your name
now
.’

There was shocked silence as Mr Football realized that he had just crossed that line of scrimmage marked Danger Zone.

‘Michaels,’ he finally said.

‘Well, Mr Michaels, gather up your things and get out. You’re now officially on Dean’s Report.’

He looked wide-eyed at me.

‘You can’t do that,’ he said, suddenly little-boyish.

‘Oh, yes, I can. You’re on Dean’s Report and you’re to leave this classroom now.’

‘But if you put me on Dean’s Report—’

‘It’s not an “if”, Mr Michaels. You’re there already.’

I turned and walked back to the lectern. Michaels didn’t move, but he did look to his pack for support. Everyone was suddenly averting their eyes from his and generally zoning him out.

‘We are all waiting for you to go, Mr Michaels,’ I said. ‘Or do I have to call Security – a call that will result in your immediate suspension from this university.’

Another long silence. Michaels again looked to his cohort, beseeching them to back him up here. But they all stared down at their desks.

‘Mr Michaels, I am not going to say this again. There is the door. Use it.’

His face was now full of rage. He grabbed his books and his backpack and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. I let the silence in the classroom hold for a good fifteen seconds. Then, in as mild a voice as possible, I asked: ‘Now where were we?’

And I resumed the lecture.

After class I returned to my office and typed up a Dean’s Report which detailed the event in the classroom and the reason why Michaels was evicted. A Dean’s Report was a reasonably big deal at New England State. I had read about it in the hefty Faculty Rules book that I had received from Professor Sanders last week and noted that it was ‘only to be used when a student breaches all rules of classroom etiquette and/or engages in actions that are disruptive and detrimental’. I read this statement again before writing up the report and actually incorporated it into my comments on Mr Michaels’s rude and ignorant behavior. Then I sent one copy to Alma Carew, the Dean of Students, and another to Professor Sanders. An hour after I had dropped them off, Sanders was knocking on the door of my office.

‘You’ve had an eventful first day,’ he said.

‘I’m not going to be bullied by a student, Professor.’

‘Word has it that you engaged in an act of physical force.’

‘Did Michaels tell you that?’

‘No, Michaels told his coach that. Just as he also told his coach that he was on Dean’s Report for the second time this term, which means an automatic suspension until next autumn.’

‘So he won’t miss the start of the football season.’

‘He’s a hockey player, Jane. The captain of the team – and a complete moron. The first Dean’s Report was for setting off firecrackers in the toilets of one of the girls’ dorms. Really classy.’

‘Well, I didn’t engage in an act of physical violence.’

‘But you did slam your fist down on his desk.’

‘That’s right. I did just that, in an attempt to get his attention as he refused to acknowledge me when—’

‘Yes, I heard all that from one of my spies in the class.’

‘I didn’t know I was under surveillance, Professor.’

‘Be glad that you are. This student backed you up and told me that Michaels deserved being tossed out.’

‘And this student’s name is . . . ?’

‘You don’t expect me to reveal my informants, now, do you? What I will say is that she . . .’

‘. . . was very impressed with the way you didn’t let him push you around. Michaels is the sort of oaf who’s always getting his own way because he understands the uses of intimidation. You called his bluff and I congratulate you for it. But there is nonetheless a problem now. Not only is Michaels the captain of the hockey team, but he is also “the lynchpin in their entire offensive structure” – and yes, that’s a direct quote from his coach. They have a big game against U. Mass this weekend. If the university has no choice but to enforce the second Dean’s Report then he is effectively suspended for the rest of the semester. Which means he can’t play in the game on Saturday. And if New England State lose because of this . . .’

‘I will look like the villain in the piece.’

‘Absolutely – and the English Department will also take the rap. According to the very jock-oriented trustees, we will have cost the university a big game, upon which hinges their ability to hoist some goddamn trophy that I don’t give two shits about. But it could be the stick they beat us with when we ask for nothing more than the maintenance of our current departmental budget next year.’

‘So you want me to rescind the Dean’s Report.’

‘No, that’s not what I want. That’s what the Dean of Students, the Director of Athletics, the Director of Giving and the university President want. Personally, I only care about this in so far as it has an impact on my –
our
– department.’

‘If I refuse . . . ?’

‘You won’t be doing me any favors. You will also be getting yourself off to a shaky start. However, I cannot influence your decision except to say that, quite frankly, I’d prefer it if you’d let the idiot off this time.’

‘I’ll need an apology from Michaels,’ I said. ‘An apology in writing.’

‘I’m certain that’s possible.’

‘I’ll also need an assurance that he won’t pull this sort of stunt again.’

‘That won’t be a problem either. I’m very grateful for this, Jane. It saves me a huge headache.’

The apology arrived the next morning – a hastily scribbled letter, written on a half-torn piece of notebook paper and scrawled in such a way as to emphasize Michaels’s desire not to make amends. The penmanship was deliberately hard to read, but I still managed to decipher:

Then he signed his name. I wanted to call in on Professor Sanders and toss the letter on his desk and tell him that this was the sort of payback you received when you let louts off the hook. But I decided it was best to let the entire matter drop.

The next day my course in American Moderns went smoothly, as we dissected Stevens’s ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, honing in on the lines: ‘You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it.’

‘Stevens focused his attention on that most American of beliefs,’ I said. ‘Reinvention. Yet here he’s tempering it with the perception that, once again, how you look at something determines how it is for you. Or perhaps he is saying: the only way we can escape our given realities is by accepting that we have to somehow try to reinterpret that which we see every day.’

The students in this class remained relatively animated and asked reasonable questions. But there was one student who immediately struck me as well above the intelligence quotient for New England State. She had remained quiet during my first lecture, but when I asked for questions at the end of my talk on ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, she raised her hand cautiously and asked me in a shaky voice: ‘Do you think that Stevens’s ultra-conservative professional life forced him into such experimental language?’

‘That’s an excellent question, Ms . . .’

‘Quastoff. Lorrie Quastoff.’

She stared down at the floor as she said this.

‘Well, Lorrie, why don’t you tell me – and everyone else – what you think about that.’

‘No thanks,’ she said.

‘I know that’s throwing the ball back at you but that’s kind of what I’m paid to do. Just as Stevens was paid to . . .’

Lorrie Quastoff continued regarding the floor, then looked up in horror at me when she realized I was waiting for her to supply me with the answer. I gave her a nod of what I hoped was encouragement, and she finally said: ‘Sell insurance. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Actually, he didn’t do the selling. He was an executive in a big insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut – and he kept his poetry very much to himself. When he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” it came as a total surprise to all his fellow executives. They had no idea that he did this in his spare time – just as, I guess, no one at the Charles Raymond and Co. insurance agency knew that Charles Ives also wrote music.’