by Renata Adler
It is no longer as clear as it was why I am in this flight school. Driving from the city to green places, it is acknowledged, takes too long. Flying is faster. Jim, who would be a less unlikely pilot than I am, says he hasn’t got enough certain free hours to take it up again. There is also in my mind the memory of a poem the Speech Arts coach recited, with great feeling and the purest diction, to our high school elocution class. “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings / And done a hundred things / You have not dreamed of. / Wheeled and soared and swung / Up, up the long, delirious burning blue,” and so on. “Put out my hand and touched,” the last line ended, “the face of God.” Well. It wasn’t Wallace Stevens. But at “touched,” each time, the Speech Arts coach’s voice broke. The poem had been written by a young Canadian pilot who fought in World War II. He crashed, unfortunately. Tino Bellardinelli, our All-State running back, was unmoved by this poem; he implacably chewed his toothpick. But another poem got to him. “There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, / Touch of manner, hint of mood; / And my heart is like a rhyme, / With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time. / The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry / Of bugles going by. / And my lonely spirit thrills / To see the frosty asters, like a smoke upon the hills,” and so on. And Agnes Betty Cotts, who had gone through the first eleven years of her schooling in some twilight of sexuality and inattention, became lofty, intellectual, and fierce with this: “So live, that when thy summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan which moves / To that mysterious realm, where each shall take / His chamber in the silent halls of death, / Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, / Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed / By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave / Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him,” etc. The Speech Arts coach worked with such diligence and faith on thirty juniors (who had before been known to mutter, derisively, “The Brain,” when anyone so much as spoke distinctly in their midst) that all of them subsequently went to college, each with an awful favorite poem in his heart. All of us, too, stared into a profound distance and, for years, dwelled upon this problem: “For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find in his hand a flower as a token that he had really been there, what then? What then?”
Well, I don’t know what then. Every autumn, presumably, the scarlet of the maples still thrills Congressman Tino Bellardinelli’s lonely spirit like a cry / Of bugles going by. When Agnes Betty Cotts’ summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan which moves / To that mysterious realm, she will receive it as a nun and president of a Catholic women’s college. I work here at the newspaper. Sooner or later, though, I guess I was bound to slip the surly bonds of earth / And dance the skies on the laughter-silvered winds of Six Two Uniform or Three Nine Tango.
“Take off everything except your slip,” the nurse said. “Doctor will be with you in a moment.” Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they all are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.
“Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop,” the moderator of the talk show said. They had been taping a panel. The Indo-Chinese lesbian restaurant owner, who was holding her fish-sauces cookbook, resumed a dignified, offended silence. The crisp, cold, bracing writer was drunk, and raving to the savage pundit. The French film-archivist was talking, with delight, to the Bulgarian movie personality from California, who was about to sell, in stores across the country, the product of her secret formula for face creams. “That,” said the French film-archivist, squinting through his smoke, and scattering more ashes onto his vest and trousers, “is a house of another color.”
“Horse,” the nine-year-old star of television commercials said.
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the lady critic, who had been trying to find her way into the conversation somehow. “Exactement what you mean, Emile,” she added, patting the Frenchman’s arm. The rock musician, however, spoke at the same moment. “Tu parles,” he said, amiably. It was his favorite (in fact, his only) French expression. For Italians, he had “Ecco” and “S’immagine”; for Germans, “Sowas” and “Unglaublich.” He had travelled widely. In this case, he said, “Tu parles, Monsieur Blin.”
“Stop,” the moderator said again. The nine-year-old sulked.
The gentleman critic was now in his cups and muttering. Seven years ago, an obscure Southern writer by the critic’s own name had been chosen for an international colloquium on modern humor, which was held in Seoul, Korea. It had not been widely covered in the press. Certainly there had been an error. Certainly the invitation had gone to the wrong—the obscure and unintended—Herbert Course. No publication, however, had called attention to the matter. In the critic’s mind, the outrage had assumed immense proportions, as a parable of the monstrous in contemporary life. His divorce, his conversion to the politics and the literature of alienation had been but one result.
“Of course, you have right,” said the Frenchman, in serene misunderstanding. “When I have eighteen, I go in Natalie.” He seemed to be speaking of a visit to Turkish relatives in Anatolia. “I have eat something. It give me a terrible pain. In my tripes.”
“Lord, yes,” said the quarterback, warmly. He was already a lay preacher. He had just made a large investment in organic dog foods. The lights dimmed. The tape and the cameras had been off for several minutes. “Exhausted?” the curator of the Sixties Art Collection was saying to a cameraman who stood there. “My dear, I was drained.”
I have been writing speeches for a politician. Jim, who is a lawyer from Atlanta, has been running the campaign. My normal job is reporting and reviewing at the paper. By mistake, these past few months, I also teach. Normally, left to myself, I am not inclined to work much. To the contrary. “To the contrary” is what the head of the mine workers’ union said when he was asked whether he had ordered the murder of a rival and his family. It is hard to know what to the contrary of ordering a murder might, exactly, mean. Jim thinks ordering a birth, perhaps, or else a resurrection. The man was convicted anyway. I have now written “fairly and expeditiously,” and “thoroughly and fairly,” and “judiciously and seriously,” and “care and thoroughness and honor,” and so on, so many times that it may have affected my mind. I eat breakfast fairly and expeditiously. Jim cuts his own hair thoroughly and fairly. It rains judiciously and seriously, with care, and honor, and dignity, in full awareness of the public trust. Our politician, anyway, is a good and careful man—who sounds always a little pained, as though someone were standing on his foot.
Edith, from Kiev, twice divorced, and in New York, in her own words, a “terrapist,” was stealing a bonbon from one of the trays on the Steinway grand. She went to the bookshelves, removed a fine old volume there, and tore the four-leaf clover pressed inside to bits. The party had not yet begun. “This Max,” Franz, her own analyst, said to her next day. “How he makes you regress.”
“Now here, where it says Name,” said Miss Fiotti, from Fringe Benefits, “you write your name. Good. Now where it says Date. Yes. That’s right. Now here, where it says Name again. Exactly. Now once more. And your signature. Wonderful. Thank you, Professor Ellis.”
Miss Fiotti is the only efficient person at our city university. She is employed by the union itself. The union helps us with our forms, our insurance and pension plans, tenure, strike threats, and salaries, of course. The fact that the university is unionized at all, from janitors to deans, means that we have in many ways the worst of the civil service and of academe: a vast paper-riffling ivory tower in a cast-iron union shop. We are, in fact, a scandal citywide. Our faculty, liberal on most issues far away, sleeps well on this. Politicians tend to say the issue “does not sing.” Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours By Appointment; that is, never. Young instructors, hoping for tenure here, are scheduled to teach days and nights. The idea is that as long as an instru
ctor is required to be in a classroom every hour, he will not have the time to write or publish anything. Not having published, he will never earn his tenure. Under this system, instructors tend to get hepatitis and become demoralized, but, thanks to the union, they are highly paid. And so they stay.
I see Edith, Max, Franz, and Miss Fiotti every week or so. I’ve taught courses for two semesters here, as Ms. Associate Professor Fain. I thought I missed the academic world, the books, the hours. I took the job part-time. I noticed only gradually. One evening, in a seminar, a student spoke of the required course they had all taken with the Recording Secretary of Professor Klein. “The what?” I said. “The Recording Secretary,” the brightest student said again, “of Professor Klein.” Dalton Klein has been, for thirty years, a book reviewer and writer of unsuccessful musicals. I don’t know what recording secretaries are. I know professors earn our professorial thirty-eight thousand a year. “Has anyone,” I asked, “ever had a course with, um, with the, with Professor Klein himself?” Certainly not; even his Recording Secretary now is H.B.A. Two students within memory had, however, actually met Professor Klein; he had approved their Prior Life Experience credits—for a year they had spent raking famous people’s leaves.
Prior Life Experience credits, as substitutes for courses, are one of our educational anomalies. They are normally inseparable from a less innovative program known as E.I.F. The Dean, it turns out, has a great longing to know the private phone numbers of celebrities. He hires people from newspapers, the theater, movies, television to teach. In time, he mentions the importance of having students placed with people who are already E.I.F., that is, Established in the Field. He means people who are often mentioned in the press. If one can just give him a few phone numbers, he will call them at home. I should have known. I did not understand for quite a while.
It was midnight in our paper’s office building. There was a Pinkerton man in the elevator. “Something wrong?” Jim asked. “Yeah,” he said. “A girl on the fifth floor has been molestated.”
On the television set, El Exigente was mouthing his “Bueno,” the natives were diving and splashing with pleasure, and Jim and I, who were never going to drink that brand of coffee, were watching the news. “His lawyer looks bored,” I said. Jim reached for his drink. “You always try to look bored,” he said, “when your client is committing perjury.”
A lady lifted the lid of her toilet tank and found a small yachtsman, on the deck of his boat, in the bowl. They spoke of detergents. A man with fixed dentures bit into an apple. A lady in a crisis of choice phoned her friend from a market and settled for milk of magnesia. A hideous family pledged itself to margarine.
Testimony resumed. Apparently, no good lawyer permits a client who is lying to tell a long story—to perjure himself in detail. The longer the story, the more true it did seem. “Well, you had a little social conversation together, did you not?” Senator Montoya was asking. There was a short answer. “Well, did you socialize about the Watergate?” Senator Montoya insisted, in his idiosyncratic way.
“Mangia,” said the lady in the lovely spaghetti-sauce commercial. “Mangia, Bernstein. Mangia, O’Malley. Mangia, Garcia. Mangia, Jones.”
“Hello, Jen?” the voice on the phone said, at two one morning. “It’s Mel. Sorry to call you at home.” Mel is the Acting Head of our department—Drama and Cinema. The Acting Head of the Acting Department, in a way. The Permanent Head, a flustered lady of pure steel, whose academic background consists of a Midwestern degree in Oral Science and a brief marriage to an actor, is on a city grant to study Media History abroad.
“Hi, Mel,” I said to the Acting Head, as warmly as I could.
“Jen, the Art Department wants to do a course in Space on Film,” he said. He paused. “We knew you’d want to be informed.” He paused again. “And, without trying to influence you in any way, we’d like to know what your position is.” I yawned. “Mel, I feel strongly about this,” I said. I had been teaching for some months. I was catching on. “I really do.”
“We hoped you would,” he said. “Len has just pointed out—we’re having coffee here—that there are just two things on film. Time. And Space. If we let the Art people go ahead with Space, we’ll have lost half…”
“Yes,” I said. “And if the History Department takes Time away…”
“Exactly.”
Summer. The speedboat was serious. The young tycoon was serious about it, as he was serious about his factories, his wife, his children, his parties, his work, his art collection, his resort. The little group had just had lunch, at sea, aboard the tycoon’s larger boat, a schooner. The speedboat, designed for him the year before, had just arrived that day. The tycoon asked who would like to join him for a spin to test it. The young American wife from Malibu, who had been overexcited about everything since dawn, said she would adore to go. Her husband, halfway through his coffee still, declined. The young Italian couple, having a serious speedboat of their own, went to compare. In starting off, the boat seemed much like any other, only in every way—the flat, hard seats, the austere lines—more spare. And then, at speed, the boat, at its own angle to the sea, began to hit each wave with flat, hard, jarring thuds, like the heel of a hand against a tabletop. As it slammed along, the Italians sat, ever more low and loose, on their hard seats, while the American lady, in her eagerness, began to bounce with anticipation over every little wave. The boat scudded hard; she exaggerated every happy bounce. Until she broke her back.
She was sped to shore, of course, and then to Rome, by helicopter. Soon after that, she was well enough to fly back to New York. She recovered in Malibu. But violent things are always happening to the very rich, and to the poor, of course. Freak accidents befall the middle classes in their midst. Martin, our campaign contributor, who spent one term at Oxford many years ago, and who has sounded English ever since, tends to say “How too like life” when he is drunk. Anything—a joke, a sigh, a quarrel, an anecdote—has upon him, at such times, this effect. He says “How too like life.” When the American lady had her accident, Martin said How too like life all afternoon.
The Dean of Cultural Affairs called a meeting of the representatives of our two departments on the question of jurisdiction in the Space on Film course, late one morning. Seven H.B.A.s attended this, because, not having thought or published anything in twenty years, and not having, like Professor Klein, careers near the mainstream of cultural life, they do not spend their lives entirely in idleness. They quarrel. The Dean, whose analyst is Franz, has the same girl who caused Edith to tear Max’s four-leaf clover apart. The situation is, in every way, unorthodox. Franz was once suspended for a year from his analytic institute for having twice married his patients and divorced his wives. He spent that year as a therapist for children in our Guidance School.
Our branch of the university is accustomed anyway to jurisdictional disputes. Drama and Cinema grew out of a workshop that existed many years ago to remedy the accents of bright city girls, who could not afford college out of town. When such programs became unfashionable, the staff chose to become two faculties: Dramatistics, and Perspectives in Media. Within a year, the Media people chose to join the newer Department of Minority Groups and Social Change—which already offered History of Broadcasting 204, 301, and Seminar and whose course on Prostitution, Causes and Origins, was being televised. The Dramatistics people felt they could not attract students, or budget allocations, on their own. They added Film. Our department changed its name, and became what it now is. Our Drama people are trying to take over the English Department’s course Creative Writing 101; Playwriting A. The English Literature people are beleaguered on another side. For twenty years, they have had The Brothers Karamazov (translated, abridged). The Department of Russian Literature, which teaches all its courses in translation now, wants Dostoevski back.
The Drama people have designs in other fields: Ibsen and Strindberg, in particular—which seems reasonable enough, since all the texts are plays. Ibsen and Strindbe
rg, however, belong, with Swinburne, to the Department of Germanistics and Philology. Between 1938 and 1949, all German courses were unpopular. The German Literature people simply seized Ibsen and Strindberg—and by some misunderstanding, which was noticed too late, got Swinburne as well. There were no Drama people, or any other sort of people, at that time, to compete. Chekhov, meanwhile, for reasons that, I am afraid, are clear, is taught in the Classics Department (Greek 209C). The operative principle appears to be that if any thing or person mentioned in another department could conceivably be mentioned in your own, you have at least an argument to seize the course. One night when the Women’s Studies Division gets under way, we all expect there’s going to be a coup.