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Lifelong Learner
THE STUDENTS WERE RETURNING TO DARWIN, rugged, fleece-clad mountaineers, their gear strapped to their backs. Steps behind, devoted parental Sherpas stooped under several months of clean laundry. Round two, the spring semester, that midyear clean slate academia offered, the chance to be disappointed and disappoint anew.
Flora had decided to audit a class: Modern Poetry, a survey course, taught by her father’s archrival in the department, Sidney Carpenter. But what choice did she have? In an English department, weren’t they all rivals of varying degrees? And in her role as her father’s literary executor, his chosen reader, shouldn’t she learn some of the things he had known by heart? (That old phrase now taking on new meaning, his own valve having proved itself so unreliable.) Yes, she should know, she should learn, for him. But that was how academia worked—what began as an act of loyalty transformed into a betrayal. You were helpless in the face of your good intentions. Not that her father had been so loyal, or trustworthy. While Flora made the arrangements with Pat Jenkins in the department, she could see Pat—the messenger, the news breaker—judging her, thinking, Some daughter she is. Or was that just the way she looked—rather stern in her dun-colored blazer and turtleneck, her short hair seal smooth, her only approximation of jewelry the plastic chain from which her glasses hung. There was something of the 1970s about her and the whole English Department. Darwin had a big endowment for a small college, but English lagged a few decades behind the rest. Paint chipped. Interoffice envelopes abounded. Paper yellowed. From down the hall, the men’s bathroom menaced.
But the class was something to do, or to tell people she was doing if they asked how she was keeping busy. And Flora wanted to know more about poetry. In college, she’d avoided such classes, feeling the form somehow her father’s. As if people could be said to own entire genres or disciplines. This semester, she would rent poetry and see how she liked it.
Sidney Carpenter was a few years older than her father, somewhere solidly in his seventies. He was short, with a round gut that echoed the roundness of his shiny, hairless dome of a head. Bespectacled and tweeded, and surprisingly agile as he moved to the chalkboard to jot down his office hours. Not instantly identifiable as a nemesis, at any rate. He was famous on campus for his glasses—thick-framed tortoiseshell circles tinged the slightest bit pink. The glasses most of all marked his complete liberation from Idaho. Without his glasses, Carpenter would be far less Carpenterial; he wouldn’t look the part. Also without his peculiar style of speech. He spoke slowly, head tilted back, his words projecting in the direction of the ceiling. He was one of those Americans who’d turned European somewhere along the way and affected enough accent to make people wonder where exactly he’d been imported from.
The class was a lecture, the wooden rows of seats fanning out around the room, bolted to the floor and one another. It was that fan-shaped configuration that saved the seats from being pewlike, that gentle semicircle the subtle, crucial difference between college and church. Flora, at twenty-eight, did not feel ten years older than the students assembled around her—from the looks of it, mostly freshmen and sophomores. Though what age did one ever feel? “For many years I was twenty-six,” her mother had told her. “Until I was well into my thirties, I was twenty-six.” Twenty-six, the age at which her mother married her father, once the pinnacle of adulthood, the unreachable future, now two years behind Flora, the unreachable past. Flora looked like one of them, like a student, in her thick gray sweater and dark blue jeans, her hair pulled back in a loose bun. Better rested, but like them still. “Not a day over sixteen, my Flora-Girl,” as her father would tell her, the pitch of his voice raised a note or two higher than normal, the voice he used with small children, never patronizing, only fond. But the students, if they heard her age, would begin to feel mildly sorry for her, that for whatever reason her life hadn’t worked out, forcing her back in time, back to school. As an undergraduate, she and her friends had regarded the older community members who returned to the university lectures—the “lifelong learners,” as they were called—uncharitably, with scorn. Now here she was, a lifelong learner herself.
One of the strangenesses of Darwin: It was defined, hourglasslike, by what passed through. Those promising young scholars, on their way to so much more. The whiteness of the room surprised Flora—both in the sense of race and in the sense of paleness. Were they all unwell? Though a few had clearly just returned from ski vacations in Aspen and the like, with those sinister and ridiculous goggle tan lines. Rich and white and young, with near-perfect SAT scores and dazzling extracurriculars: the world their world. So well-rounded, they had no edges at all. Good at everything and with no shred of personal taste that might get in the way of general excellence. And yet, that wasn’t fair. You couldn’t dismiss everyone you envied as an asshole, could you? You couldn’t write off an entire classroom because they had the audacity to be younger than you, and higher-achieving. And Flora felt a charge being there with them; the room was charged with their eagerness, their longing to please, to succeed, to think thoughts no one had ever thought before. And there it was, floating above the hard-backed almost pews—the excitement of the first day of school. The new notebooks, the distribution of the syllabus still warm from the photocopier, the litany of titles, books you still have every intention of reading, authors who might change your life. The sense of potential, raw and pungent, like gingerroot. The room tense, and lusty. She remembered that—the cool surveying of your fellow classmates to see who you will while the long minutes away imagining you are kissing, who will become your friend, who might be smarter than you, who, thank God, stupider. The boys looked not only younger but smaller than the girls, a vaguely fetal look about many of them, their skin too thin, their nerve endings exposed. They were outnumbered, too. Growing up in her household, Flora had regarded poetry as a male profession, but judging by the class, reading poetry, at least, was a woman’s game.
“A blowhard,” her father had said of Sid Carpenter. “A voice like a tuba.”
And he wasn’t wrong. And yet there was something winning about the man, in the extremity of his professorialness, in the operatic tilt of his head, in his tweed jacket and pink glasses. Carpenter was telling stories, free-associating as her favorite teachers and talkers always did. “The best free-associator,” Paul had called her father. Carpenter was handing out copies of Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats.
He said: “In a censorious mode, Philip Larkin wrote a piece called ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’ in essence arguing that post-1940 Auden wasn’t worth reading. That he’d gone from a cheeky insouciance toward the past—mocking the holy trinity of Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare with Joyce’s ‘Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper’—to being a drippy eulogizer. He claimed Auden had ‘become a reader rather than a writer,’ as though the two were mutually exclusive—an absurd suggestion. It won’t come as a shock to any of you that we’re all trying to sort out our relations with our forebears—to say nothing of our contemporaries. And more often than not, our views ripen and soften. And they should soften. Youth looks soft but is hard really.”
What had been the source of her father’s animosity, her father’s hardness? Some well-preserved jamlike grievance—a vestige of the presidency perhaps, the fallout of one committee or another, a feud played out in the rancorous world of scholarship. Maybe he would have softened had he lived a few years longer. But her father had not lived long enough to learn to like Sidney Carpenter. They were old men by most standards, certainly by their students’, but too young for death, or forgiveness. “The hairy knot of anxiety doesn’t dissolve till thirty”—that was one of her father’s lines, or Ira’s; she couldn’t now remember. But what of the hairy knot of competition, or professional jealousy? Those more fetid, mangier, and harder to untangle.
Carpenter read: “‘The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.’” Well, fuck. That was apropos of everything. Her father still ever
ywhere, the narcissism of loss like the narcissism of love. He did own poetry, after all.
“He’s an inferior mind,” she’d heard him say of Carpenter more than once.
Though Carpenter’s mind seemed quite fine to Flora. He was warm; he had charm. He was self-deprecating; he was self-taught.
“An autodidact,” her father had said, his voice heavy with snobbery; in anyone else he would have found the trait admirable. “With all the bizarreness and unevenness of thought that entails.”
Carpenter had not been to Oxford, or even to Yale. He’d been to some small college in the West, and a state university for his Ph.D. Like Carpenter, Flora had not gone to a school like Darwin. Growing up in Darwin as she had, she could almost imagine she’d been a student there, but she hadn’t the grades. Her parents had insisted if she wanted to, if she really tried, she could be a great student. She had the brain but not the will. But that was a wish on their part, or at least a guess. It was an untested hypothesis. Once, as a child, Flora said to her mother that she wished she lived in Victorian times, when there was no expectation that women would work. Her mother had looked at first indignant, then amused. “You wicked girl,” she said, pulling a braid. “What a revolting thing to say.” She had laughed, and Flora heard her repeat the anecdote to friends as though it were charming. Was it charming, Flora’s naked lack of ambition? Or was there ambition—only to be unambitious? Was she willfully unexceptional?
People often talked about parents envying a child. But it was possible, too, to envy a parent. Her father’s had been the kind of accomplishment Flora resented in people her own age. Had her father been her contemporary, she might have written him off as a summa cum laude asshole. A golden boy, whose hair had at one time actually been rather golden. Perhaps Carpenter had resented him on similar grounds. Flora had friends from college who were now architects. She saw them only if they hosted parties attended largely by other architects. She had friends who were artists and hung out with other “creative” people who “made art.” No one she knew in her generation was doing anything to make the world better—she leading the charge of helping nobody. The one doctor she knew was a dermatologist, saving humanity from the indignity of acne, one adolescent at a time. But maybe she just knew the wrong people.
Carpenter told the class a story against himself of “discovering Auden” at a used-book store in his college town, a battered, early volume, thinking he’d happened upon some unknown, unappreciated genius, as he’d never heard the name.
“None of you would make that mistake,” he said. “But oh, the things I did not know.” He shook his head, his expression between embarrassment and awe. “What is the saying—‘It could fill a book’? And then some. A bookstore, I suppose, in my case. Though I was not entirely wrong—he was undiscovered, at least by me. Every reader has to discover the writers who move him or her most, and in those discoveries we make the writer new again. Every silent revelation, every moment of recognition that takes place on the page between reader and writer is a renewal and a rebirth. You have all that still ahead of you.” He paused and looked theatrically around the room. “I do not mean to say there was no Auden before I ‘discovered’ him. And yet. If you are hoping to engage in postcolonialist examinations of the word discovery, or any other word, for that matter, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. If theory is what you’re after—poststructuralist, deconstructionist (why so many building metaphors, have critics suddenly become engineers?)—if you are in the market for Marxist or Lacanian interpretations or any kind of ‘critical lens,’ please, go down the hall to Professor Das’s seminar. She will be delighted to have you. What we will be doing in here is simply reading. Some call it close reading, a term I must say has always struck me as redundant and boorish—as if there could be any other kind. How does one read without attending closely to the words on the page? Not very fashionable these days, I’m afraid. New Criticism is, of course, anything but.”
He filled the time allotted, the full seventy-five minutes-something her father would never have dreamt of doing on the first day—reading aloud for long stretches, rocking back on his heels as though the force of the words might tip him right over, his passion so much at odds with the apathy of his audience—spacey mouth breathers, twitchy watch checkers, bemused text messagers asserting their opposable-thumbness. But the performer seemed unaware of the ingratitude displayed before him—there it was, the revelation between reader and writer, the pure appreciation of craft, of word, of gift. The poems of old men undid him. At one point, his eyes watered and he had to remove his glasses to wipe the tears away on his sleeve. Was there anyone in Carpenter’s life, anyone living and present, about whom he felt this way, or anything near to it? Was that the burden readers faced—beyond the world of print, no one quite measured up?
We readily accepted that there were no perfect fathers or daughters or lovers. But we persisted in thinking history might give a writer in the fullness of time a perfect reader; or, on the other side, the scholar’s fantasy that he could understand, see, know a book, a poem, as all others had failed to see before. We saw so little, so wrongly, with the people in front of us, and yet with words on a page, we fooled ourselves that we could get it right. If Flora knew anyone, it was her parents. She had studied them in that academic way children learn their parents. She was the world’s living expert on her father. Ready with the footnotes, a thoroughly cross-referenced index: the boarding school years, the Yale years, the Rhodes years, the city interlude, and the Darwin recapitulation and coda. And yet, did such scrutiny and research make her his perfect reader? Looking closely did not mean seeing truly. In fact, it might mean reading wrongly—magnifying glasses distort—everything writ large. And then there was all she did not know, all he’d kept from her. How little she had factored in. She, his own daughter. Barely a footnote in his journal.
At the end of class, Flora waited till the last backpacks had floated out the door, then approached the professor, a nervousness in her stomach, as if she were a real student. “I wanted to introduce myself, or reintroduce myself,” she said. “I’m Flora Dempsey.”
“Of course you are!” Carpenter rocked back on his heels, pointing his chin upward, a wolf baying at the moon. “How lovely to see you. Pat mentioned you’d be sitting in on the class. You look very well.”
“Thank you.”
“I remember seeing you walking across the campus with your father when you were as tall as this desk,” he said, laying his hand upon the desk and leaning against it. He smiled at the memory, as if it were special. “Are you thinking of following in your father’s footsteps? Does academe lie lurking in your future?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Not for me. No, I don’t think so. The class just sounded interesting.”
“‘Interesting’? I don’t recall what you’ve been doing to keep yourself busy—you graduated more than a few years ago, if I’m not mistaken.”
“I’ve been working. In the city. At a magazine.”
“Ah, a journalist!” Everything he said implied an exclamation point.
“That’s rather a grandiose term for what I was. It was a magazine for the home and garden.”
“I’ve always admired the domestic arts,” Carpenter said. Was he trying to make her feel bad or better? “I’m a disastrous housekeeper myself. Can never find a thing.”
“It’s not really about housekeeping—the magazine,” Flora couldn’t help saying. “More about design, style, a holistic approach to living.”
“Of course.”
“But I’ve left my job, and I’m not sure what comes next. But no, no graduate school for me. I don’t think so.”
“You know, I was reading something about you.”
“About me? Or my father?”
“No, no, I did not misspeak. About you. Well, both of you. That he was working on a great new project before the end. And that you have been named his literary executor and hold the reins.” Carpenter had the faded eyes of the old,
an eerily translucent liquid blue that lit up greedily as he announced this information. He was a beaming, radiant nemesis. “The scholarly world now awaits your next move!”
“Did Cynthia Reynolds say something to you?” She could see his interest stirred.
“No, I’ve not spoken about the matter with Ms. Reynolds.”
“Where did you say you read this?” Had Cynthia’s editor friend told someone?
“Some online journal, I think. Don’t look so surprised, my dear. I am well aware of the Internet, and perfectly capable of browsing the latest literary gossip. An odd verb choice—browsing. Suggests all research is basically shopping, no?”
“Did they mention what he was working on?”
“Well, Ms. Dempsey, I’m sure you know more about it than I. A far cry from your material at the magazine, hmm?”
The snobbery stung.
“They just said he was moving in a new direction,” Carpenter crowed. “I’d be curious to read Lewis Dempsey’s new material, certainly. Always intriguing when the critic is bold enough to face a jury of his peers.”
“I’m afraid I have to run. But I’m really so looking forward to this semester.” Flora gestured to the syllabus in her hand, speaking with exaggerated warmth, as one does when lying. She shook Carpenter’s hand, and escaped the cloister of the classroom. She ran across the quad to the Cross Library. At the computer, she typed “Flora Dempsey poems publication,” feeling self-conscious, as one does when researching oneself—the feeling not unlike that of being caught in the act of examining one’s own reflection. Nothing. She tried “Lewis Dempsey poems” and “Lewis Dempsey literary executor” and “Dempsey Darwin death poetry.” A photograph of her father from his inauguration appeared and with it an archived article from Darwin’s alumni magazine that described a small child—her—running out and hugging her father as he led the processional into the gymnasium. She hadn’t remembered doing that. But she could not find the story of his new material, of literary anticipation. Was it possible Carpenter had invented it? But then, how would he know of the new project in the first place?
Maggie Pouncey Page 17