by C. P. Boyko
He remembered their cabin, and the view from the windows of the pastel lake in the morning. He remembered every lane of the town. He remembered the dim shops and the graffiti carved into the legs of their table at the restaurant. He remembered the wide fields and tangled woods, the farms and the school and the post office in the bakery. He remembered the people, and he remembered, not their clumsy words, but their stories.
Memories are ideas, and ideas are often lovelier than reality, because they are simpler and therefore seem more perfect, like objects bathed in soft moonlight. Memories therefore are often lovelier than the buzzing hubbub of present experience. Terence remembered their life in the countryside, and because his memories were beautiful he believed that they had been happy there. For five wonderful months, at least, they had lived intensely and had loved each other.
Sometimes, as he wrote in that noisy café or that crowded pub, he was jostled; and before he looked up he would finish his sentence with an especially distant and determined air—while vividly imagining the young woman with large eyes who had been watching him all this time and had finally mustered the courage to nudge him and ask him what on earth he was writing about so intently.
By the time Terence returned home several hours later, Madison had gone through countless cycles of anger and pity, blame and forgiveness, self-justification and self-loathing, before arriving at last at a precarious resolution to empathize. Falling in love, she told herself, might be like winning the lottery; but staying in love was more like a weekly paycheck: one had to work for it. The only problem was that whenever she took the trouble to see things from Terence’s point of view, she soon realized that he could be doing the same for her—and obviously wasn’t. If she was going to put herself in his shoes, he could damn well put himself in hers! And so empathy backfired: because she could understand him, she was unable to understand why he couldn’t understand her; her tolerance made her intolerant of his intolerance. Then she caught herself being intolerant, and cursed herself—and the cycle started all over again.
When he came in, she gritted her teeth and forced herself to be kind. She sat down beside him and touched his hair. “Bad dreams last night?”
He withdrew his head, as if to focus. “Huh?”
“You were shouting again. In your sleep.”
He stared past her. “I don’t remember,” he shrugged at last. “It’s too late.”
THE PRIZE JURY
THEY PACKED UP their papers and filed from the classroom, as righteously weary as Crusaders exiting a sacked city. Christin, whose novel had been workshopped that night, sobbed for ten minutes in the washroom before joining her classmates at the pub. They all raised their glasses.
“Good discussion tonight,” said Ronnie, who had called her prose “pedestrian.”
“Some good points made,” said Preston, who had described her plot as “turgid” and “derivative.”
Glenda, who had used the words “hackneyed,” “boring,” “stupid,” and, most damning of all, “commercial,” said she hoped everyone was as gentle when her turn came next week.
Alec noted that Bruiser had seemed a little out of sorts. No one could decide if he had been in a good mood or a bad mood. When Brownhoffer was in a good mood he threw books and chalk brushes at them. When he was put in a bad mood by the worthlessness of their writing, he hit them with his fists. His nickname, however, was affectionate and ironic. He did not hit hard (though he obviously tried to), and his aim was comically poor. Besides, they all admired his passion, and felt guilty before it. As much as they might have felt compelled to, none of them had ever punched another novelist in the face for the flaws of her syntax or the poverty of her characterization; Brownhoffer, according to legend, had once bitten a student for using a sans-serif font.
That night, however, he had been strangely quiescent. He was hunched rigidly over his table at the front of the room as if bowed by stomach pains, chewing his lips and muttering sounds of expostulation, and alternately squinting and goggling at the floor, his eyebrows writhing like pinned caterpillars with incredulity. Occasionally—apparently at something one of them said—his head recoiled, his neck became furrowed with chins, his eyes shut involuntarily, and his mouth slewed from side to side in disgust. But he had said little; and faced with his awful browbeating silence, they had striven to outdo one another in the ruthlessness of their criticism.
“What grade did he give you?,” Pauline asked.
Christin withdrew from her bag the battered, dog-eared manuscript, which had been neat and immaculate only a week before. On the top page in blue pencil Brownhoffer had inscribed a large “F.” This surprised no one, and hardly even distressed Christin: “F” was the only grade Brownhoffer ever gave. But the wide margins were still pristine and unmarked throughout. He had given no feedback whatsoever. This was unsettling indeed.
“What does it mean?”
“He must be in a bad mood.”
“He must be ill.”
“He must really, really have hated it.”
“Unless maybe he—liked it?”
They all paused in thought, then simultaneously shook their heads. The idea was too terrible to be borne: that they might have censured with unprecedented violence the one novel that Brownhoffer had actually admired. Over several rounds of drinks they recapitulated their criticisms, and elaborated them, and added to them, and found them to be sound. Unless Bruiser had suffered a stroke, he too must have hated Christin’s novel; anyone with any sense would. Reassured, they broke up and staggered, individually and in pairs, home to bed.
All except Christin, who went looking for Brownhoffer.
Though it was raining and near midnight, this was not a foolhardy task. Brownhoffer did not keep office hours, and could be found wandering the campus footpaths, chewing his lips and muttering angrily to himself, at any time of day or night and in any weather. Indeed, he was as ignorant of his surroundings and as indifferent to discomfort as Socrates, and had often been spotted carrying a furled umbrella through thunderstorms and an open one indoors. He was the most familiar figure on campus, an object of fear and pride and ridicule—laughable to freshmen, revered by grad students, and tolerated by faculty. Everyone assumed he was a genius, and kept a respectful distance.
It was therefore with a feeling almost of sacrilege that Christin hailed her professor and chased after him into the botanical gardens. But desperation is the last stage before despair, and she was recklessly desperate.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Dr. Brownhoffer, but I was hoping I could talk to you about my chapters?”
Brownhoffer, however, was a difficult man to interrupt. Several moments passed before he realized that he was being addressed, and nearly a minute before her words began to infiltrate and displace his own thoughts. He awoke to Christin’s presence as gradually and incompletely as a medieval clergyman awakening to theological doubts.
“Yes?” he said at last, as if answering the phone.
“I’m real sorry to interrupt you. I know you’re busy—probably working on something completely brilliant.”
In fact, Brownhoffer’s mind was not, as was generally supposed, occupied with the composition of his long-overdue second novel. It was busy nursing grievances.
He had a veritable garden of these, as lush and various and dark and dripping as the one they now walked through. His latest grievance, the one that had absorbed him that evening and all that week, was held against a former student by the name of April Allen. She had betrayed him by not only successfully publishing her novel, but actually winning for it a nomination for the Hart Winslow Prize—whatever the hell that was. Brownhoffer, in his mind the greatest novelist of his era, had never been nominated for anything. April Allen had mailed him a gloatingly inscribed copy of her book the previous week. Reading it, or ostensibly rereading it, he had found it to be the most crassly commercial of trash—just the sor
t of thing prize juries ate up. He was appalled that she had learned so little from him, and incensed to discover his name in an unprominent position among a dozen others on the acknowledgements page.
“What exactly is the matter, Miss Shane?”
Christin took a breath. “You didn’t like my new chapters.”
Brownhoffer barked at the understatement. “No I did not.”
“May I ask why?”
“That is your prerogative, surely.”
“Well—why?” But as the professor grimly pursed his lips to begin pronouncing the indictment, her nerve failed. “I mean, I did everything you told us to—I tried to do everything. I avoided the obvious word. I used the first-person present for immediacy. I made my paragraphs longer and used less punctuation for momentum. I withheld; I mean, gosh, I deleted whole swaths of exposition, really I did. And I read all those books you told us to. Henry James, Proust, The Human Comedy—I know I don’t read French and I know it’s not the same in translation but I did read all of it, just like you said we should.”
Brownhoffer awoke more fully to Christin, who was the source of a major grievance in her own right. She was by far the most earnest, conscientious, and therefore irritating student in his workshop that year. Of course, all his students were irritating, always; with their questions that could not be answered, their allusions to authors and books he had never heard of, and their referral to him for adjudication of all their esoteric squabbles, they constituted a perpetual threat to his authority and dignity. He defended himself with a pose of sorrowful disdain for their ignorance, and fobbed them off with plausible quotations and impossible homework assignments; but Christin Shane alone among them asked for his sources and completed the assignments.
“You read all of Balzac’s Comédie humaine?”
“Well sure. Over the holidays. And James and Proust and Trollope, like you said. It was real helpful, too. Well,” she admitted ashamedly, “Trollope’s Letters were a bit dull in parts.”
Brownhoffer grasped this straw. “That was the entire point of the exercise, Miss Shane. Give me your manuscript.”
She handed him the disheveled heap of paper.
“Trollope’s dullness is legendary. You don’t suppose I directed you to him for his lyrical prose? You must know your enemy. Trollope’s collected works provide the most estimable education in how not to write fiction. I should have thought that was obvious; but I see the lesson was lost on you. Here! on your very first page: ‘He held the door open for her.’ Period. My God. My God!” He was genuinely angry now; pellucid prose had that effect on him. “I have read that same sentence ten thousand times in my life—must I read it again? If you can’t say anything new, please, Miss Shane, don’t say anything at all.”
She hung her head. “I know. I know. I tried to make that lyrical, but I couldn’t see how. There are some things I just don’t understand how you’re supposed to say them—creatively,” she said, for the word “poetically” had been banned from Brownhoffer’s classroom. “‘He held the door open for her’—I mean, that’s what he did. That’s all he did. How else do you say it?”
“There are a million and one ways to say it; I could give you fifty off the top of my head. ‘His hand lingered on the door to permit her egress.’ ‘He maintained the portal’s agapeness to facilitate her passage.’ ‘In the doorway he paused, that her progress through the doorway might be unimpeded.’”
Christin shook her head in wretched admiration.
He made a dismissive gesture. “These are not brilliant by any means—but my God! they are a damn sight better than ‘He held the door open for her.’ Did he now? Did he indeed? Show me! Prove it to me. How did he do it? Describe his hold: Was it firm? Was it hesitating? Describe the door: Was it oaken? Was it glass? Describe the openness of the door: Was it ajar? Was it yawning? Describe him! Describe her! Where are the adjectives, Miss Shane? Adjectives!”
“But Dr. Brownhoffer, the door’s not really important, is it?”
“Everything is important!” he screamed, crumpling the sodden manuscript to his chest. “Or nothing is important! That is what your writing would have me believe!” His wet face in the green shadows was grotesquely gnarled. “Nothing matters. All is vain. Why live? Why, indeed, go on living, if ‘He held the door open for her’?”
Christin was crestfallen. Her novel had made her professor not want to live. She probably deserved her “F.” Despair began to trickle through her.
“Maybe I’m just not cut out to be a novelist.”
“No one is ‘cut out,’” he said, handling her idiom with distaste. “One must labor at writing, endlessly. One must make oneself a novelist.” He handed back the chapters of her novel and said with a sneer, “You’re young yet.”
This was the closest that Brownhoffer in thirty-five years of teaching had ever come to positive encouragement; but its effect was lost on Christin, who happened to know that she was already ten years older than Brownhoffer had been when he had published his novel.
They emerged from the gardens. The rain slackened to a fine drizzle. Christin’s face, although forever now bereft of hope, became wistful.
“Was it—was it very difficult to write Gravy Train?”
What she really longed to ask was whether it had been very wonderful to publish a novel—to package and disseminate across the world a deathless transcription of one’s soul.
“Of course it was difficult,” said Brownhoffer, his thoughts already reverting to April Allen.
“I thought so,” she sighed voluptuously, as if he had answered her unspoken question instead.
But the mention by name of Brownhoffer’s novel was too rare an occurrence not to have some effect on him, however belated. His posture became rigid and his expression wary. “You wouldn’t have asked that, had you read it.”
“I did read it—once,” she said. In fact she had read it once in the fall before class started and twice more during the holidays; but she had not understood it at any time, and did not want to risk implying a familiarity or fondness she did not possess.
“When? How? Where did you find a copy?”
“I don’t know,” she stammered. “Interlibrary loan. From someplace in Texas, I think.”
A change came over Brownhoffer. His pace slowed and grew languorous. His eyes became thoughtful and far-seeing, while his mouth became horribly, unnaturally contorted. Though Christin could not have known it, Brownhoffer was smiling.
“Yes, a very difficult book to write,” he said complacently, and inaccurately.
Though Brownhoffer did not remember it, the writing of his novel had been a pure joy, for it had been an act of rebellion. He had started with the modest aim of becoming famous, and it had seemed evident, from the orderly succession of innovators that constituted literary history, that the best way to achieve fame was to do something different. So he studied other people’s novels and soon discovered certain uniformities among them; these conventions of the form he called limitations, and proceeded methodically to smash them. He did away with plot, and characters, and punctuation, and paragraph breaks, and chapters, and dialogue, and comprehensible diction. As the work progressed, it became more than a bid for fame; it became his own personal war on the mundane. When it was finished, he realized that he had not merely reformed the novel, but destroyed it. His reward, he was sure, would be commensurate with his achievement.
He sent the manuscript in two boxes to a publisher chosen benevolently at random, and for a week confidently awaited the first stunned recognition of his genius. In the weeks that followed, expectation gave way slowly to puzzlement, and puzzlement, painfully, to frustration, and frustration finally to outrage. He sent the book to other publishers; the tone of his cover letters became increasingly belligerent. It was during these dark days that he refined his aesthetic philosophy, arriving at last at the comforting formula that recognition comes
in inverse proportion to quality. The publishing industry—which quickly acquired in his imagination a composite identity, as though all editors everywhere were members of the same board, and had voted against him—the publishing industry catered to the public, and the average moron had no interest in or capacity for great works of art. He was surrounded by morons. Everyone was against him.
Into this darkness there one day came a dim ray of light. One of the university presses that received his manuscript mislaid it; it circulated like a gallstone through several departments before finally landing on the desk of an administrator in Human Resources, who took it for a CV. Impressed by its size and the confident tone of its cover letter, this administrator added it to the stack of applicants for the position of assistant history professor. Brownhoffer’s novel, by virtue of its daunting bulk, survived the pre-selection process; he was invited for an interview. He made it clear at the outset of this interview that he had no interest whatsoever in becoming an assistant history professor—a gambit which bemused and beguiled the selection committee. They offered him the job, and because he was broke, he took it. His prospectus, when submitted, revealed that he intended to teach Introduction to Roman Law through the critical dismantling of popular, not necessarily Roman-themed, novels of the present day. The selection committee had second thoughts, and at the last minute foisted Brownhoffer on the English department, which was obliged to give him, as the only “internal applicant,” their poetry survey course. When it became apparent midway through his first semester that Brownhoffer was not teaching his students how to read poetry but rather how not to write novels, the course title and calendar description were surreptitiously revised. The dean, however, uneasy about having the college’s first-ever Novel Writing class taught by an unpublished novelist, persuaded a friend at a vanity press to expand his operations as far into legitimacy as the printing of five hundred copies of Gravy Train. Four hundred of these, deviously miscategorized, made their way unread into university libraries; the remaining hundred were pulped; Brownhoffer himself had never held a copy in his hands.