by Richard Ford
They all seemed, however, extremely encouraging that I give another try at real writing. That was something they could understand a fellow wanting to do and then failing at nobly. They respected deeply the nobility of small failures since that was what they suspected of themselves. Though for my lights they thought too little of themselves, and didn’t realize how much all of us are in the very same boat, and how much it is an imperfect boat.
I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark. They may also be absolutely expecting to watch you fail, but they aren’t really cynical types at all. And since I wasn’t trying to set any marks (they simply thought I was and had some admiration for me for that reason) I probably got the best the place had to offer.
The only people whom I can say with certainty I didn’t get along with were the “junior people,” the sad, pencil-mouthed and wretched hopefuls. They hated the sight of me. I was, I think, too much like them—unprotected in the world—yet different in a way they found infuriating, incriminating and irrelevant. Nothing is more inciteful of disdain than somebody doing something other than what you’re doing, not doing it badly but not complaining about it (though at the moment I was as much at sea as a man can be). They looked on me with real disgust and usually wouldn’t even speak, as if certain human enterprise was synonymous with laughable failure, though at the same time as if something about me seemed familiar and might figure dimly in their futures if things did not work out. The gallows, I imagine, is less scary to the condemned man than to the one not yet sentenced.
I told them without rancor or the first wish to worry them that if they didn’t get tenure they might give sports writing a serious try, as other people in that situation had. Though they never appeared to like that advice. I think they didn’t appreciate the concept of interchangeability, and no one ever came by to apply for a job after they were let go.
Finally, though, what I couldn’t stand was not what you might think.
I didn’t mind the endless rounds of meetings, which I sat through wearing a smile and with nothing whatsoever in my mind. I didn’t care a mouse’s fart for “learning”—didn’t even feel I understood what it meant in their language—since I couldn’t begin to make my students see the world I saw. I ended up feeling an aching remorse for the boys, especially the poor athletes, and could only think of the girls in terms of what they looked like in their vivid underwear. But I was impressed with my colleagues’ professionalism: that they knew where all “their books” were in the library, knew the new acquisitions by heart, never had to waste time at the card catalog. I enjoyed bumping into them down in the lower level stacks, gossiping and elbowing one another about female faculty, tenure, sharing some joke they’d heard or whatever scandal had turned up in TLS that week. What they did, how they conducted life, was every bit as I would’ve done if I was them—treated the world like an irrelevant rib-tickler, and their own comfortable lives like an elite men’s club. I never once felt a sense of superiority, and would be surprised if they did. I didn’t object to the fisherman’s sweaters, the Wallabies, pipes, dictionary games, charades, the long dinner party palaver about “sibs” and “La Maz” and college boards and experimental treatments for autism, the frank talk about lesbianism and who was right in the Falklands (I liked Argentina). I even got used to the little, smirky, insider mailbox-talk passed between people I had just eaten dinner with the night before, but who, the next morning, would address me only in sly, crypto-ironic references from whatever we’d talked about last night: “… put this memo in The Cantos, right, Frank? See if Ole Ezra can translate that. Haw!” Live and let live is my motto. I’m at home with most interest groups, even in the speakers’ bureau at the magazine, for whom I occasionally journey into the country to talk to citizens about the philosophy of building-from-within, or to deliver canned sports anecdotes.
To the contrary. These eternally youthful, soft-handed, lank-shouldered, blameless fellows—along with a couple of wiry lesbians—were all right with me. They could always give in to their genuine boyishness around me, which was something their wives encouraged. They could quit playing at being serious and surrender to giggly silliness most any time after a few drinks, the same as real folks.
And deep down, I think, they liked me, since that’s how I treated them—like decent Joes, even the lesbians, who seemed to appreciate it. They’d have been happy to have me around longer, maybe forever, or else why would they have asked me to “stay on” when they could tell that something was wrong with me, with my life, something that made me melancholy, though all of them were careful enough never to say a word about it.
What I did hate, though, and what finally sent me at a run out of town after dark at the end of term, without saying goodbye or even turning in my grades, was that with the exception of Selma, the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core—men and women both—all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs, and finally I couldn’t stand their grinning, hopeful teacher faces. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible—time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
Everything about the place was meant to be lasting—life no less than the bricks in the library and books of literature, especially when seen through the keyhole of their incumbent themes: eternal returns, the domination of man by the machine, the continuing saga of choosing middling life over zesty death, on and on to a wormy stupor. Real mystery—the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book—was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they’re sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away—live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can’t do anything else.
Explaining is where we all get into trouble.
What’s true, of course, is that they were doing exactly what I was doing—keeping regret at arm’s length, which is wise if you understand it exactly. But they had all decided they really didn’t have to regret anything ever again! Or be responsible to anything that wasn’t absolutely permanent and consoling. A blameless life. Which is not wise at all, since the very best you can do is try and keep the regret you can’t avoid from ruining your life until you can get a start on whatever’s coming.
Consequently, when these same people are suddenly faced with a real ambiguity or a real regret, say something as simple as telling a sensitive young colleague they probably like and have had dinner with a hundred times, to go and seek employment elsewhere; or as complicated as a full-bore, rollicking infidelity right in their own homes (colleges are lousy with it)—they couldn’t be more bungling, less ready, or more willing to fall to pieces because they can’t explain it to themselves, or wanting to, won’t; or worse yet, willing to deny the whole beeswax.
Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature’s consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don’t know that and who can’t forget, and for whom such knowledge isn’t a cornerstone of life.
Partly as a result, Selma Jassim and I gave ourselves up to the frothiest kind of impermanence—reveled in it, staved off regret and the memory of loss with it. (Muslims
, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.)
A person with a cold eye might say what happened between Selma and me—after our romantic dinner in the starchy fireplaced Vermont Yankee Inn the very night I put X and the children on the bus—was simply an example of the usual shabby little intrigues visiting firemen in small New England colleges are expected to get embroiled in, since there’s nothing else to do from bleary week to bleary week, and you’re not really into the swing of things. And my answer is that in the grip of desperate dreaminess even the most trivial of human connections can bear a witness, and sometimes can actually improve a life that’s stranded. (Beyond that, you can never successfully argue the case for your own passions.)
X had come up with the children the second weekend I was there (I’d just seen Mindy Levinson). She brought a pair of brass candlesticks for my little house, neatened the whole place up, sat in one of my classes, went with me to faculty parties two nights in a row and seemed to have a good time. She slept late and took a long autumnish walk with me along the Tuwoosic, during which we talked about a spring driving trip with the children down to the Big Bend Country, something she had been reading about. But as we were driving out to the Bay State Tavern for the three of them to catch the bus home Sunday morning, she looked across the seat at me and said “I really don’t have any idea what you’re doing up here, Frank. But it really all seems pretty extremely stupid to me, and I want you to resign and come home right now with us. It’s not so great being home without you.”
I told her, of course, that I couldn’t just leave. (Though if I had I might still be married, arid I had the feeling she was dead right about my staying; that another failed writer would crawl out of the woodwork and be in my place in less than twenty-four hours, and Arthur Winston would never think of my “interesting” face again.) I felt, however, that something had brought me up there and it may have been ridiculous, but I thought I needed to see what it was—which is what I told X. Plus, I’d given my word. I told her, lamely, that I wanted her to come up every weekend, and she could even take Paul out of school and move all three of them in with me (which was, needless to say, even more ridiculous).
When I said all this, X sat in the car staring out at the waiting bus, then sighed and said sadly “I’m not coming back up here anymore at all, Frank. Something’s in the air up here that makes me feel old and completely silly. So you’ll just have to go it alone.”
And with that she got out with Paul and Clary, and lugged their big bag onto the bus. When they climbed aboard the children both cried (X didn’t), and they left me standing alone and dazed, waving at them from the Bay State parking lot.
What Selma and I did after that and for the next thirteen weeks before I went back home to New Jersey and divorce, was simply share a fitful existence. She was an acerbic cold-eyed Arab of dusky beauty, who was thirty-six at the time (exactly my age), but seemed older than I was. She had come to Berkshire College that fall from Paris only to obtain a visa (she said), so she could find a rich American “industrialist,” marry him, then settle down in a rich suburb for a happy life. (She knew a pleasant, easy existence staunched almost any kind of unhappiness.)
I never visited home again until the semester was over, and X never wrote me or even called. And what Selma and I did to amuse ourselves was stay inside my little faculty cottage lolling in bed, or else drive in my Malibu wherever we could go in the time we had away from campus, talking for hours about whatever interested us—conversations I actually remember as the most engrossing of my entire life—primarily, of course, because they were stolen. We drove to Boston, up to Maine, down into Westchester, far up into Vermont, and as far west as Binghamton. We stayed in small motels, ate in roadhouses, stopped for drinks in bars with names like The Mohawk, The Eagle and The Adams—dark, remote, millstone places where the outside world rarely entered, and where we knew no one and were cause for no notice: a tall, long-necked Arab woman in sleek black silks, smoking French cigarettes, and an ordinary-looking Joe in a crew-neck sweater, chinos and a John Deere Tractor cap I’d affected when I got to Berkshire. We were tourists headed to and from nowhere.
We hardly ever talked about literary subjects. She was a critical theorist and as far as I could tell had only the darkest, most ironic contempt for all of literature. (As a joke, she invented a scheme for taking all the “I” pronouns out of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and gave a seminar on it that all our colleagues said was “ingenious.”) What we talked about instead were small-talk things—why a particularly brilliant hillside of sugar maples changed their color at different schedules and what that might suggest of disease; why American highways ran though the places they did; what it was like to drive in London (where I have never been and she had been a student); her first husband, who was British; my only wife; an acting career she’d abandoned; how I felt about compulsory military service at various crucial stages in my life—nothing of great interest, though anything that came along and that we could chatter about without implying a future (we had no delusions about that). Yet it all served to make one day passable before we had to go back to teach, something I came to loathe. I found out a great deal about her in the course of things, though I never asked any of it, and it was always understood that I really knew nothing. There were other people in her life, I knew that, a good many of them, men and women both, people who lived in foreign countries—some possibly even in prison—others who were estranged for reasons that she simply wouldn’t go into. For a period of one week I felt extremely strongly about her, entertained all kinds of impractical and romantic notions, things I never went into, and then I abandoned them all. I told her I loved her a hundred times, usually in chuckling, dare-devilish ways we both understood was a lot of hooey, since she laughed at the idea of almost any kind of usual affection and claimed love was an emotion she had no interest in finding out about.
She had only one, I thought, strange attachment, which was the subject of altruism and which she lectured me about at length the first morning we woke up together, when she was standing around naked in my sunny little house smoking cigarettes and staring out the window at the Tuwoosic as if it were the Irrawaddy. She said altruism drove Arabs crazy because it was always “phony” (a word she liked). She grew furious when she talked about it, threw her head from side to side and shouted and laughed, while I simply sat in bed and admired her. It was not religion or economics that fueled the flames of world hatreds, she felt; it was altruism. She told me that first morning, with a grave look, that by the time she was eighteen she’d survived two drug addictions, a “profound” involvement with terrorists in which she hinted she’d killed people; been kidnaped, raped, imprisoned, had flirtations with a number of dark isms, all of which had galvanized her intellect and forged unassuage-ably her belief that she knew why people did things—to suit themselves and no other reason—which was why she preferred to stay as remote as possible. She said she disliked the Christian members of the faculty (not the Jews), and not because of the self-satisfied squalor of their collegiate lives which she made laughing, sneering reference to (though only because they weren’t rich), but because the Christians thought they were altruists and pretended to be generous and well-meaning. The only remedy for altruism, she felt, was either to be very poor or enormously rich. And she knew which of those she wanted.
What Selma thought about me I’m not exactly sure. I thought she was simply a knock-out, though I’m not certain she didn’t think of me as pathetic, despite expressing admiration for me of the kind every American would like to inspire when traveling to faraway, more advanced cultures. I would sometimes get into sudden states of agitation during which I would clam up and get somber as a mental patient or else begin directing vicious remarks toward something I knew nothing about—often, near the end of the term, it was some colleague I’d decided had slighted me, but whom I really had nothing against and usually had never even met. Selma wo
uld humor me at that point and say she’d never met anyone like me; that I was the savvy, hard-nosed realist she had heard real Americans were (puny academics fell far below), but that I also had a thoughtful, complicatedly whole-hearted and vulnerable side which made the whole mix of my character intellectually exotic and brilliant. She said it had been a positive step to quit real writing and become a sportswriter, which she knew practically nothing about, but saw just as a way of making a living that wasn’t hard. She thought my being at Berkshire College was as ridiculous as X did, and as her own presence there. Though in truth what I really think she thought of me was that we were alike, both of us displaced and distracted out of our brainpans and looking for ways to get along. “You might just as well have been a Muslim,” she said more than once and raised her long sharp nose in a way I knew she meant as estimable. “You should’ve been a sportswriter, too,” I said. (I didn’t know what I meant by that, though we both laughed about it like apes.)
From a distance it could seem that Selma and I existed on the most dallying edge of cynicism. Though that would be dead wrong, since to be truly cynical (such as when I romanced all those eighteen women in all those major sports venues of this nation) you have to hoodwink yourself about your feelings. And we knew exactly what we were doing and what we were existing on. No phony love, or sentimentality, or bogus interest. No pathos. But only on anticipation, which can be as good as anything else, including love. She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther. And since she wanted nothing from me—I was not an industrialist and had many more problems than I needed; and since I wanted nothing from her but to have her in my car or in my bed, laughing and touring the quilted New England landscape like leaf-peepers, we thrived. (I figured this out later, since we never talked about it.)