The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  By the time I was leaving Brown toward decade’s end, the picketing was happening up on the hill itself, in response to the creative writing program’s inaugural Unspeakable Practices conference and the fact that its assemblage of metafictional masters had inadequate female representation. The repercussions of this sentiment were discernible many years later in the Sunday New York Times, when critic Wendy Steiner would declare the bloated male world of metafictional hijinks as used up, and female realists and the “commonplace of love” in clear ascendancy. My quarrel with her assessment was that it held no place for female metafictionists, or irrealists or postmodernists, as if the meta were intrinsically and exclusively a male domain. And yet for a budding female metafictionist like myself, and for a host of female writers whose fiction was more traditionally oriented as well, there was, in fact, no more congenial or inspirational place to be than Blistein House on Waterman. Those postmodern males with their textual swagger were not bloated merely with bravado. They were incubating us. Their distention was our procreation.

  Overlapping with Reagan’s eight years and Cianci’s double decade was the reign of more specific relevance to me: the John Hawkes years. Of the thirty-three he taught (a mythically charged number), thirty were at Brown, and I was blessed to have his mentorship and friendship for the entirety of his final teaching decade—not to mention the post-teaching decade—during which he advised me on almost everything, ranging from the mundane to the metaphysical: from matters of art to matters of the heart. Jack—as Hawkes was called by all who knew him well—would essentially teach me how to teach, sharing strategies pioneered at special conferences at Stanford; he even helped me navigate the vertiginous subjectivity of student evaluations. (In two sections of the same class the first year I taught, one student compared my personality to Clark Kent’s, i.e., before his apotheosis, while a student from the other section said, “I thought she was an angel, or maybe God.”)

  But when I first arrived in Providence, I felt acutely mortal. Due to a bad case of transition jitters, I was conflicted in a dozen ways. A dozen solutions were arrived at, courtesy of Jack, within a week. He convinced me to trade poetry for fiction, rather than to straddle the two genres, since he was sure that all of the lyric gestures I prized could be housed comfortably in prose. Regarding a more literal housing comfort, I lamented that my apartment was directly in front of Brown’s football practice field, and Jack, in his pragmatic way, proposed that I “get earplugs” and assured me that the karmic coincidence of Angela Carter’s having occupied that space the prior year, while guest-teaching at Brown, would offset any negativity. (She was the queen of metafictional unspeakable practices and often pulled the weight of all her gender.) Besides, he said, it was the perfect size to hold our graduate fiction workshop. And it was only blocks away from Elmgrove Avenue, where the Waldrops lived—which led to his most sweepingly generous proclamation: that if I felt uneasy about anything at all before nine p.m., I should call him. And if I felt uneasy after nine, then I should call the Waldrops.

  A convenient enough prescription, given that many nights after nine, one found oneself chez Waldrop anyway, participating in Providence’s premier literary salon hosted by the divine city’s most erudite and gracious literary couple, and publishers of Burning Deck Press. Keith possessed encyclopedic knowledge of both esoteric literary facts and Providence lore; he’d take you to see Poe’s abode or Lovecraft’s grave, or 111 Westminster, the tallest building in the city and spitting image of the Daily Planet, hence affiliating Providence with Superman. The Waldrop hospitality—and hyperliteracy—was another cornerstone of Providence beneficence. Tea was always brewing in a beautiful glass pot to serve from glass teacups, alongside wine and words, exchanged amidst towering stacks of books. Not one book was for show; all of them were read or being read, some written or translated by the hosts, others published by them, on letterpress, in their humble basement. Their night-owl schedules somehow allowed astonishing productivity, even on the heels of entertaining all of us!

  Presumably from two a.m. to dawn they wrote, and that’s when I would do my penance in the now-defunct mainframe computer space in the basement below the Science Library—the graveyard shift allowed the possibility of a longer session—the only competition being undergraduates playing what might have been an early version of computer games. I was learning to input my evolving thesis stories onto the computer, since Robert Coover wanted all the grad students to employ this nascent technology. I remember the frustration of spending hours trying to get the damn accent aigu over the e in The Star Café, as well as the triumph of walking out to see the May sunrise with a completed thesis in hand. (Well, almost in hand; it was waiting in the queue to be printed off the mainframe.)

  The final thesis reading each creative writing graduate student gave, because of Jack, felt equally exhilarating. When he introduced me at the elegant Spanish House on Prospect Street, he spoke the words he had requested I provide. Jack had an idiosyncratic, utterly commanding style of delivery that to the naked ear might fall between histrionic and stentorian but was truly marvelous and inevitably generated both hilarity and pathos. I can still hear that mini-bio of a lapsed Catholic. “She fell from grace”—he paused for laughter—“and then further from poetry into prose”—another pause for yet more laughter as he worked the crowd, a crowd consisting of Brown undergraduates as well as grad students, some of whom were destined to become the country’s most renowned contemporary writers. Many were unknown to me then, but I now think of them as family, because of the mentorship we shared under Jack’s tutelage. They were in that room for him.

  My words uttered by Jack and colored by the inimitable inflections of his comic genius elevated them so far beyond their worth that they became priceless to me—I who had barely opened my mouth all through college, though once I arrived at Brown and started Jack’s workshop, seldom shut it. Among the scriveners of unspeakable practices, I had finally found the wherewithal to speak.

  Evenings not spent at Keith and Rosmarie’s might be spent at Jack and Sophie’s or at Bob and Pili’s. In fact Jack’s slightly early retirement was, as I remember, precipitated by a dinner conversation during which my then companion Sheffield—a painter whom I had met one evening at the Waldrops’—who cherished, as we all did, Jack’s work, urged him to embrace a more luxurious future and create a more capacious writing space within his life. Shortly after this discussion, Jack declared he would retire. Given that there would only be one decade left for him, I am all the more grateful Jack took this suggestion to heart, though the loss to the writing program was devastating.

  All this took place before Providence was “discovered”—when it was dismissed as that funky little city on the way to the Cape, identified primarily by what it wasn’t, i.e., not New York and not Boston, although Jack referred to it affectionately as the sepulchral city, and its thousand-and-some streets of hidden gardens and colonial charm and painted-lady Victorians were, to those of us under its spell, as ensorcelling as the thousand and one nights conjured by Scheherazade, she the muse and her narrative the urtext for the renegade fabular writers who presided over Brown’s, and in fact the nation’s, avant-garde literary culture, and who were to be for me the seat—or might I take the liberty to say the teat—of nurture.

  Even as the Semiotics and English departments were about to declare irreconcilable differences, it was to us more exciting than distressing, as we children derived the benefits of joint custody. In fact, creative writing graduate students had offices in Adams House, ostensibly pedestrian spaces covertly designed for the voluptuary. Extending from our third-floor offices were slender overhangs, just wide enough to hold a body or two. Thus, even if grad students were crammed four to an office during the week, on Saturday we could selectively sneak back up and climb out the window onto the makeshift deck to view the skyline of downtown Providence, the ersatz Daily Planet its most salient structure, then make ourselves supine with no ambition but to bask in the sun, whose
rays had not yet acquired the status of carcinogen.

  Alliances across the divide, i.e., between Blistein House and Horace Mann, between the faculty writers and the scholar-critics who sometimes were the honorary subjects of each other’s work, were robust regardless, and the galvanizing energy of Robert Scholes or Albert Cook or Arnold Weinstein and so many others made yet clearer what a major center Brown was for contemporary American letters. Initially I had applied to Brown’s creative writing program believing it to bestow a doctor of arts degree, but that degree was now defunct and someone had neglected to remove it from the catalog. I still yearned, irrationally, for some version of that D, and started a PhD in English twice, but when offered the chance to teach instead and skip that step, I forfeited that fantasy, loitering far longer than your average doctoral student.

  But both times, I found deciding agonizing. I am eternally grateful to Robert Scholes, who shared a personal anecdote about a time in his life when he struggled with twinned aspirations of creative work and scholarship. He was in the middle of composing a story, and each time he tried to work on it, he was interrupted by studying for prelims or the demands of his dissertation and he finally had to abandon the fiction. He was giving me permission to make what should have been the obvious choice, for me, i.e., to be content with the degree in hand and be a writer. There were, after all, only a fraction of the MFA programs that now exist and we, with no small hubris, thought of ours as the corrective to the prestigious one amidst the cornfields of the Midwest that represented the opposite aesthetic pole.

  Among all these remarkably supportive presences I found safe haven to develop, ad infinitum, one of my earliest short stories, a retelling of Greek myth, in which a man transforms into a woman and then back into a man, experiencing all the sensations that he visited upon women but as a woman: a fictive exploration of empathy as afterlife that had arisen from my reading of the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner; Jack perpetually defended it against assumptions that it was too esoteric or too pornographic—he had much practice given the controversial nature of his own fiction—even as a critique penned by a young male peer read, “read it to me in the shower.” I suspect at most other MFA programs such aspirations and such fiction would have been regarded as pretentious and self-indulgent, and met with ridicule or at best bemusement, but I gained confidence from the voluminous goods with which Jack littered the margins in each successive draft of the story.

  When, several years after my degree, through the grace of C. D. Wright and Forrest Gander’s Lost Roads Press, my first book was published, and the undergraduate reviewer in Brown’s Issues magazine perceived a series of fabular narratives I had intended to be tender love stories, devoid of any ideological bent, as strident feminist narratives, replete with antimale sentiments, I retained my confidence because of Jack’s support. The tales had arisen from an ingenious, customized assignment he had given me: to write a hundred Chinese fairy tales so as to become comfortable with the nuts and bolts of narrative cause and effect. The reviewer put forth a challenge: only when I delved into male consciousness would my work fully evolve. I dismissed this, and yet my next long project did feature a male protagonist, concerning whom Jack again came to my aid, by coaching me on how to stay inside a comic novel even in grief, since I had lost my father while immersed in writing it. A haunting stand of birch trees at Swan Point Cemetery—much nearer to the entrance than was Lovecraft’s grave—seemed more mesmerizing and more worthy than my contrived fictive world, and I wanted to abandon the novel. But I stayed with it and shrank it to novella size, finding solace in its comedy—and yet more solace knowing that Jack, deep in the process of his own novel, had once contended with the persistent image of his deceased father in the mesmerizing palette of a fireplace’s flames.

  But I have jumped ahead. The novella was composed well after I graduated from Brown, when I was teaching there and down the hill at RISD, in the latter years of my Providence sojourn. In the spacious two years of the master’s degree, little was required of us except to write. We were left free to sample any course within the university and made to take no more than one beyond a workshop. That only fueled in me the lust to audit everything—including, very briefly, an introduction to physics by Nobel laureate Leon Cooper. Professor Cooper happened to be of great interest to Jack because of Jack’s career-long infatuation with the concept of entropy; the author of Travesty, Second Skin, and The Passion Artist believed his narratives investigated randomness and chaos in the realm of the unconscious—and he dreamed of some profound interdisciplinary meeting of the minds. A colloquium was arranged, Professor Cooper invited as the honored guest. Thus my apartment became an interdisciplinary laboratory for an afternoon, with complicated results. Had I read more closely then the textbook Cooper authored and used for the introductory course, and which I still possess, I might have seen the following statement and gleaned its function as a kind of literary foreshadowing.

  It is part of the occupational hazard of being a physicist to be asked questions about time dilation at cocktail parties, just as doctors are expected to write prescriptions, psychiatrists to give analyses, palmists to read in an outstretched hand the future erotic monkeyshines of the owner.

  Our workshop, never held in a classroom and always serving wine, might well have seemed, in Cooper’s eyes, the equivalent of a cocktail party, which he perhaps attended as a form of community service, and Jack’s infatuation with the concept of entropy may have been considerably less flattering to him than we presumed it would be.

  Would entropy be demystified or remystified? By evening all would become clear.

  As the afternoon wore on, it became demoralizingly obvious that worlds fashioned in fiction should only cautiously make a claim on rigorous scientific principle. One couldn’t blame a Nobel laureate for being protective of a concept prone to the vagaries of metaphorical elaboration when interrogated by a roomful of benighted, metaphor-besotted writers. Perhaps the very conference itself served as a metaphor for entropy. In any case, before our eyes and lacking agency, entropy had somehow transformed ecstasy to agony. Jack seemed quite dejected for the next few days.

  And yet when Jack himself served as a guest speaker at Harvard (his alma mater), it appears that he was equally capable of leaving his audience mystified—or so I gather from a brief anecdote within an eloquent New Yorker article John Updike wrote approximately ten years ago called “Mind/Body Problems.” Updike refers to Jack as a “conspicuous avant garde libertarian” and seems bemused to recount the following capsule ars poetica Jack offered to their Harvard class: “When I want a character to fly, I just write ‘he flew.’ ” Isn’t it quintessentially Hawkesian that pedagogical instruction, and in fact fictive construction, could be both so pragmatic and so permissive, as unostentatious as it was outrageous—not unlike the spirit of Franz Kafka’s opening of The Metamorphosis, in which, with analogous lack of fanfare, Gregor Samsa is transformed into a giant insect?

  Updike honors the “dizzying freedom” available to a fiction writer that Jack’s straightforward statement implies, even if a reader gets the sense the former finds the latter reckless and might himself opt for a method more respectful of the laws of physics. Or perhaps that’s my projection, given that Updike was presumably the American author least likely to denounce plot, character, theme, and setting as irrelevant, as Jack had famously done. In truth, all those Updike stories that appeared in the New Yorker through the seventies were precisely the catalyst that prompted me to seek an alternative fictive avenue, one not mired in the suburban or the secular, one that took flight from the real, inspired by and aspiring toward the visionary.

  A few years after studying with Jack, I wrote a story of a girl who turns into a mythic bird: a phoenix. The narrative was a bit more elaborate than the formula “she flew,” but that was essentially its synopsis. She could have served as mascot for our transformative endeavors, she and that guy with S emblazoned on his chest, the one perpetually leaping over 111 Westminst
er Street as we scanned the skyline before closing our eyes to commune with the sun, two at a time, on the overhang of Adams House. Though we appeared no more than indolent voluptuaries seeking solar gratification, the supine status of our bodies was entirely misleading. With our imaginations we could truly leap tall buildings in a single bound, thanks to Jack. Or to quote the narrator of Travesty: “But see how we fly.”

  DIVERSITY

  I came to Brown direct from three years of working on half-mile racetracks, hardly a literary milieu. I was too used to a solitary writing habit by that time to be a model member of a writers’ workshop, but the great thing about that MA program, that English department, and indeed the Providence literary climate, is the extent to which diversity and eccentricity are permissible.

  —Jaimy Gordon (’72)

  Though there are no Jewish quotas in the Ivies today, policies of geographic diversity and legacy preference still serve as de facto quotas. In the 1980s, Asian American students at Brown raised concerns that their admittance rate had declined because they tended to be concentrated in large cities and because interviewers stigmatized them as boring, grade-grubbing nerds, similar to the “carpetbagger” stereotype of Jews in the 1920s . . . [The] Brown Report on Slavery and Injustice [sic] concluded: “We cannot change the past. But an institution can hold itself accountable for the past, accepting its burdens and responsibilities along with its benefits and privileges. This principle applies particularly to universities, which profess values of historical continuity, truth seeking, and service.”