Ms. Hoch-Dunn is, I believe, one of the best undergraduate students we have been fortunate enough to count among our majors in recent years. She is a bright spot amid the intellectual and moral decay of our department, a decay now physically manifested in our surroundings (the fax machine is broken again; a large chunk of the ceiling fell and crushed it while Gunnar was attempting to use it this morning) at the behest of the dean, the associate vice provost, and their brutal band of incompetent henchmen.
Give the award to Hoch-Dunn, and God save us all.
In dire camaraderie,
Jay
P.S.: I’m sure you read the campus newspaper’s article about our venerable colleagues in the Economics Department? Not only do their salaries make ours look like an eleven-year-old’s allowance; they will now be able to offer funding to every student admitted to the econ major. An idea here, Ted: Why don’t you inquire in the dean’s office if—once they close our department down for good—we might be rehired to clean, perhaps with cotton swabs dipped in olive oil, the gold leaf surely to be installed in the brand-new fiefdom on the Econ floor?
December 15, 2009
Torreforde State University MFA Program
Admissions
77 Welshire Hall
Torreforde, MI 49004
Dear Readers and Committee Members,
Iris Temple has applied to your MFA program in fiction and has asked me to support, via this LOR, her application. I find this difficult to do, not because Ms. Temple is unqualified (she is a gifted and disciplined writer and has published several stories in appropriately obscure venues), but because your program at Torreforde State offers its graduate writers no funding or aid of any kind—an unconscionable act of piracy and a grotesque, systemic abuse of vulnerable students, to whom you extend the false hope that writing a $50,000 check to your institution will be the first step toward artistic success.
Do not suppose that I object to writing programs in general (I myself am a proud graduate of the Seminar) or that I indulge in the all-too-tiresome hand-wringing about the proliferation of MFA programs and the pseudo crisis of “too many writers.” If every member of the human race evinced a fondness for literature and even a moderate level of dexterity with the written word, I would be a happier, if not more well-adjusted, man. The trouble arrives when students are led to expect tenure-track jobs (those days are behind us) or champagne and caviar parties at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They might as well invest in Powerball tickets: book sales continue their downward spiral, and the launch of a first or a subsequent volume is rarely the occasion for the unbridled hoopla that, in earlier days, it once was.
A quick outline of my own publication history will perhaps be instructive.
My first novel, Stain, sold twice as many copies as did my other three books combined, either because the marketplace, twenty years ago, was still romantically invested in the idea of a debut author, or because no one else had written an R-rated (if fictionalized) tell-all about H. Reginald Hanf and the Seminar. My literary doppelgänger, George Fitzgerald, was zealously reviled, and the novel feted, and I assumed that my success had just begun.
Alphabetical Stars and Save Me for Later manifested my attempts to “stretch myself” and to demonstrate my range as a writer: I didn’t want to be typecast as a gossipy satirist limited to the material in his own backyard. But what did I know about cold war defectors and their families, or about NASA in the 1960s? Not enough: the Chicago Tribune called Save Me for Later a “poor choice of subject, a sort of weird homage to the Stasi,” and The Boston Globe claimed that Alphabetical Stars portrayed John Glenn as “emotionally deformed.”
So. I returned in Transfer of Affection to familiar ground—to Stain’s handsome protagonist, George Fitzgerald, and to the petty rivalries and comic (and sexual) misalliances in an academic milieu. Most readers think Stain is my best book, but Transfer is more sophisticated, more nuanced, smarter. Even so, it failed to move off the shelves. It also hastened the demise of my marriage, poor George Fitzgerald’s romantic blunders hinting too clearly at a few of my own. As for current and future projects, I have been working somewhat halfheartedly on a new novel, the early chapters of which my agent greeted with all the enthusiasm of a farmer presented with a bucket of dung.
The point of this little digression, in regard to Ms. Temple, is not to discourage the practice of writing: What, after all, is a writer’s life without a dose of despair? The point is that literary endeavor has always been riddled with frustration but in recent years has become increasingly formidable; ergo my revulsion for programs like yours that, under the false pretense of support, function as succubi draining the bank accounts and lifeblood of unsuspecting students like Iris Temple, whom I (warmly) recommend to you only on the condition that you offer her free tuition, at a minimum, as well as a frank disclosure regarding
a. the job market encountered by your recent graduates;
b. the dismal state of publishing;
c. declining literacy rates and plummeting support for the arts.
Should Ms. Temple matriculate at Torreforde State under these conditions, I shall wish her well and be the first to welcome her to “the writing life,” which, despite its horrors, is possibly one of the few sorts of lives worth living at all.
Collegially,
Jay Fitger
Professor, Creative Writing and English—Payne
December 16, 2009
Internship Coordinator
State Senator Pierce Balnearo’s Office
The Halls of Power
Honorable Internship Coordinator:
This letter’s purpose is to recommend to you—in the capacity of unpaid labor, presumably licking envelopes and knocking on doors—Malinda Heisman, a student in my Multicultural American Literature class. Malinda is an A student, a wide-eyed earnest individual who will undoubtedly benefit from a few months spent among the self-serving pontificates in the senator’s office.
Malinda is intelligent; she is organized; she is well spoken. Given her aptitude for research (unlike most undergraduates, she has moved beyond Wikipedia), I am sure that she will soon learn that the senator, his leathern face permanently embossed with a gruesome rictus of feigned cheer, has consistently voted against funds for higher education and has cosponsored multiple narrow-minded backwater proposals that will make it ever more difficult for her to repay the roughly $38,000 in debt that the average graduate of our institution inherits—along with a lovely blue tassel—on the day of commencement.
Malinda’s final essay in my class—here it is on my desk, among a cast of thousands—is a windy but assiduous reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River. The essay demonstrates strong writing skills and rigorous thinking. Allow Malinda the privilege of laboring in your office for nothing (she’ll probably continue to work nights as a barista in the coffee empire), and I am confident you will be making, though perhaps not in the ways you might have intended, a remarkable contribution to her education.
With all best wishes, I remain
Your devoted public servant,
Jay Fitger, Professor of the Lost Arts
Payne University
December 21, 2009
Madelyne Tort-Verona, Director
Caxton Retreat Center
Caxton, WY 82201
Dear Elegant Madelyne, aka MTV:
It’s been too long—ten years?—since we ran into each other at the Western Writers conference in Denver. I remember sitting with you at the hotel bar, each of us (all right, yes, full disclosure, it was mainly me) unpacking the sordid facts of our professional and then our personal lives. Janet and I were still together then, but not very happily, and you had just gotten married, and you had come to the conference for a panel on writing about trauma and disability because you were interviewing for the job at Caxton, in the High Plains of Wyoming. I take my hat off to you, truly. I hope you’ve forgotten most of what you learned, that weekend, about me.
You may already
have guessed that I’m writing to ask you a favor. I know that Caxton is designated for PTSD sufferers and survivors of military violence (I remember you telling me about the phantom pain in your husband’s leg and the way he used to wake at night, convinced his foot had returned, his missing toes scrabbling against the sheet), but my understanding is that you occasionally treat civilian PTSD as well. And so I’m wondering if, out there on the plains, perhaps midwinter or spring, you might find yourself with a vacancy and be inspired, for the sake of that evening at the conference or in memory of our Seminar days, to accept as a working client an exceptional student and advisee, Darren Browles. I wouldn’t bother to plead his case with you under ordinary conditions—that goes without saying. Of course he’s working on an unprecedented novel (I’m including the opening chapter here so you can see for yourself)—but more germane in this case, he’s in dire need and probably meets 90 percent of the criteria for a posttraumatic classification. May I explain?
First, he has endured the intellectual abuse and collective lunacy for which the university system is widely known; second, due to administrative snafus and an Orwellian effort to quash graduate programs in literature and the arts, his funding has been rescinded; and third, I wrote him a recommendation to Bentham, and not only did Eleanor deny him (you heard, I’m sure, that she’s director now), she slammed his project. Browles wouldn’t show me the text of her refusal, but he shuffled grimly into my office with the news that Eleanor herself had turned him down, setting aside time in her busy schedule to communicate at length her belief that the entire concept of his novel was “derivative.” That’s the whole point: Browles’s book, Accountant in a Bordello (it’s a working title), is an ironic homage to “Bartleby.” Browles stood by my desk, immobile, and stared down at his shoes; I could see that he’d almost persuaded himself of Eleanor’s malignant opinions,*1 and I wanted to leap out of my chair and shake him and say, “It’s not you she wants to annihilate, you poor clueless idiot; it’s me.” This is vicarious decades-delayed payback. We were all in HRH’s Seminar for the same reason: to compete for Reg’s roving capricious interest, to gain his hard-won attention—because he was known for making the careers of young writers, for discovering even in the roughest of efforts some glimmering ingot. And even if it was generally understood that his few designees might be credulous emperors modeling new clothes, that didn’t matter, because his brother was an editor in New York.
Eleanor is still bitter that Reg was behind me. She is still bitter about the publication of Stain.
Two decades later, let me tell you the truth, TV, a few simple facts:
1. I would have done anything—I would have sold my own mother into slavery—in order to publish that first book, and HRH was my connection to the publishing world.
2. Of course I took his advice and “spiced up” the narrative; what else could I do? But I did cut the scene in which George and Esther tear up the pages of their professor’s novel and make love in the tumble of his words. One night when I was working on the edits, Troy showed up at my apartment with a bottle of Wild Turkey and spent five or six hours politely insisting that, as the honorable person he knew me to be, I was going to let that bit go—a considerable sacrifice that didn’t lessen Eleanor’s rage.
3. Eleanor goaded and disliked me even before she slept with me. She used to call me Jay the Obtuse,*2 and when Reg noticed the animosity between us he began subtly to urge me to see her as the prototype for George Fitzgerald’s libidinous antagonist, Esther, in Stain.
Enough. Moving on. Here’s what I’m asking, TV: let Browles unwind at Caxton for a month or two, longer if that’s feasible on your end. Offer him solitude, and let him be shielded from the shit and the failures to come. I vouch for him completely (alter ego, you ask?), and I promise he won’t set off firecrackers under a fellow resident’s cabin. You could probably include him in some of the therapeutic sessions; I’m sure he’d benefit, as would anyone—myself included, god knows.
Apologies for the rant and the nostalgic detour. Like Scrooge, less than a week before the clamor of Christmas, I’m making this last-minute request with every scrap of human warmth I’ve got left to muster. I’m the tide propelling a shipwrecked man to your doorstep. Please take Browles on. I guarantee he’d be amenable to periodic tasks around the compound—groundskeeping and whatnot—if that would be useful.
With admiration, and wishing you a peaceful holiday, I remain
Your friend,
Jay
P.S.: Have you heard from Troy? He’s stateside again, and I know he always had a soft spot for you—I’m bewildered and a bit chagrined that he’s reached out to me …
* * *
*1 I should have warned him that Eleanor played Lady Macbeth in college.
*2 NB: Because of my obsession with Jude the Obscure, Janet still calls me “Jay the Obtuse” now and then, but it doesn’t sound as cruel when she says it.
January 4, 2010
Kathleen Quam
Associate Chair, Comp/Rhetoric
Lattimore Community College
16 Fountain Place
Lattimore, IL 60491
Dear Professor Quam,
Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move to Lattimore, wherever that is. You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.
How do I know Alex? During the early years of his doctoral studies in English at Payne, he was assigned to me as an RA; this was back in the precrisis era, a dulcet time in our university’s history when faculty were allotted luxuries such as research support, access to a working copy machine, and paper and pen. (Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.)
In any case, Alex. I leave to others the task of evaluating his thesis* and will limit myself to discussing his performance as my RA, which was more than adequate. Ruefle is highly capable, efficient, and independent. I confess that some of the assignments I gave him might have been easy to misinterpret, based as they were on episodes of my own life and experience. (At that time I still indulged in sweet dreams of success, blissfully ignorant of the relentless downward drift of my career, my novel-in-progress, when published, to be greeted by a sphinxlike silence in the press, the wrath of my [now] ex-wife, and the near universal condemnation, on campus, from readers who failed to understand the concept of satire.) But Ruefle seldom lifted an eyebrow. Like a waiter committing a lengthy order to memory, he would listen and nod, hands in his pockets, and then disappear, presumably heading home to work by himself, in his footie pajamas, uninterrupted by the demands or neuroses of his supervisor. He always got the work done.
I urge you to hire Alex Ruefle and to offer him a position commensurate with his multiple decades of education and his abilities—that is, a position well above, both in salary and rank, the one your college has posted.
Hoping the New Year inspires conscientious behavior in one and all, I remain
&nb
sp; Jason Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English
Payne University
* * *
* I assume he listed me as a reference because of the retirement and demise, respectively, of his two thesis advisors: it took Ruefle fourteen years to earn the doctorate. During that time he became a fixture here at Payne, beginning his studies as a vigorous man and, after marrying and acquiring multiple children, staggering across the PhD finish line in late middle age.
January 7, 2010
Sellebritta Online
C. R. Young, Communications Coordinator
Dear C. R. Young,
Ms. Tara Tappani knocked at my office door this morning and, with the air of a woman wearing diamonds and furs, entered the icy enclosure in which I work, perched at the edge of my red vinyl chair, and urged me to respond to your second e-mail request for a recommendation, as she dearly hopes to be hired as assistant editor of Sellebritta Online.
Dear Committee Members: A novel Page 5