Dear Committee Members: A novel

by Julie Schumacher

  Never mind, Ms. Gross. I advocate here for the lachrymose Ms. Lin-Smith—still weeping patiently in my office chair—and not for myself. I am fine, I assure you.

  Yours in this watery chasm,

  Professor Jay Fitger

  April 19, 2010

  Theodore Boti, Kapellmeister and Chair

  Department of English

  Dear Ted,

  In response to your clarion call for nominations for the four-hundred-dollar summer research fellowship for undergraduate majors (can’t we locate some wealthier donors? over in the business school, bronze plaques are crowded with the names of benefactor alums), I hereby forward the application of Gunnar Lang.

  Lang has done a knock-up job in the department this year, mastering the enigmas of copying, stapling, and filing; furthermore, you may recall that he was nearly decapitated back in December by a chunk of plaster that fell from the ceiling onto the fax machine while he was standing beside it—this only twenty-four hours after the engineers chuckled away our anxieties about the crevasse that had opened like a kraken’s mouth above the mailroom door.

  Lang is proposing next year to produce an exegesis of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods; if awarded the funds he will presumably put them to use in July and August by availing himself of the foul-smelling vending machine sandwiches in Appleton Library while immersing himself in a study of narrative uncertainty and violence: a summer well spent. Furthermore, Lang is unflappable about the near beheading and has not yet sued us. The four hundred dollars seems a small price to pay for his silence.

  I can vouch for Lang’s integrity, having seen him deposit fifty cents in the till in exchange for the liquid our department elects to call coffee. (Franklin Kentrell, on the other hand, has been known to regard the coffee till as a personal scholarship fund for his lunch.)

  Please bestow the fellowship on Lang.

  Signing off with the usual commitment to righteousness and justice,

  Jay Fitger, Winner’s Circle

  American Letter of Recommendation Society

  P.S.: I assume it was someone’s idea of a joke to insert in the minutes from last week’s budget meeting the idea of my serving as associate chair? Given your three-year mandate to “turn English around,” I presumed that—if you needed assistance quelling the rabble—you’d search for some hapless junior faculty member who lacked the clout to refuse. As for me, I am probably the least likely associate chair you could find. No one would listen to me; I seldom listen to myself.

  April 23, 2010

  Leticia Alistair

  Flanders Nut House

  771 Glass Lake Road

  Glass Lake, WI 54153

  Dear Ms. Alistair,

  This letter recommends to you my student, Oliver Postiglione, who informs me that he has applied for a summer job at Flanders Nut House at the south end of Glass Lake. In a strange coincidence, I spent one summer—during my teenage years, but indelibly impressed upon me—in the timeless village of Glass Lake; and as if I were at this very moment standing on the cracked sidewalk in front of it, I can envision the screen door of the Nut House slapping shut in the breeze and recall the smell of my favorite purchase, the roasted almonds wrapped, still warm and lightly salted, in a paper cone. I hope for the sake of Mr. Postiglione’s dignity your establishment no longer requires its most junior employee to dress as a human cashew.

  You will want to ascertain that Mr. Postiglione is trustworthy, hardworking, and of pleasant affect: he is all three. A member of my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop, he is currently writing a one-act play about a serial killer/scientist who saves humankind from a world-ending virus by discovering a method of harvesting corpses to create a vaccine. The concept is gruesome and not very original, but Mr. Postiglione’s workmanlike approach to the project’s completion is to be admired.

  I hope the gold lettering continues to grace the façade of the Nut House, its broad front window perfectly reflecting the water’s stillness. Though I have not returned to Glass Lake for forty years, one never forgets the places in which one felt pure.

  As for Mr. Postiglione: he will learn quickly, whether waiting on customers behind the pristine white tile counter or assisting with packages in back. I recommend him to you warmly and without hesitation, in part because writing letters of reference such as this one allows me to reinhabit, if only fleetingly, the pensive, knock-kneed person I once was and to advocate for that former version of myself as well as for Oliver Postiglione. Please do hire him; I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life.

  Commemoratively,

  Jason T. Fitger

  Professor of Creative Writing and English

  Payne University

  April 29, 2010

  Philip Hinckler, Dean

  College of Arts and Sciences

  1 MacNeil Hall

  Dear Dean Hinckler,

  Firmly situated between the proverbial rock and its opposing hard place, I am in this letter recommending that your office, in its infinite wisdom, renew and continue the provisional appointment of Theodore Boti, social scientist cum litterateur, as English Department chair. In my wildest nightmares I never imagined that I would make or endorse such a recommendation, akin to Hamlet naming Uncle Claudius counsel (Hamlet is a play by a writer named William Shakespeare; I’ll send you a copy on some other occasion)—but these are desperate and difficult times.

  Mindful of your office’s infatuation with all things pithy and straightforward,* I offer below a cogent list of reasons why Boti—duck out of water that he is—should continue as chair.

  1. A single year of any administrative responsibility is pointless. Boti hasn’t yet reached the first fat dot on the learning curve. As chair, he will most likely fail—after which my colleagues and I will condemn him—but subsequent to a traditional three-year term, our condemnation and Boti’s failure will be seen to occur on more solid ground.

  2. In the context of the hiring freeze—purportedly imposed on all departments but inflicted mainly on English and the Lilliputian units—and in light of our diminution via recent retirements, we can’t afford to sacrifice even one teaching colleague to the funeral pyre of administration. You want undergraduates who can write, think, and read? Stop pretending that writing can be taught across the curriculum by geologists and physicists who wouldn’t recognize a dependent clause if it bit them on the ass.

  3. Boti’s a sociologist. And yes, sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet’s surface; still, Boti was a student once, drawn during some primeval past to the study of human communities and social organizations, and as such he is likely to possess an albeit long-buried interest in the operation of a collective. If nothing else, he may get an academic paper out of the experience (though who’d want to read it?).

  4. Boti loves protocol and detail. Your office loves protocol and detail. Nuff said.

  5. Finally and perhaps most important: despite himself, Boti lately evinces an incipient understanding of the dilemmas of our woebegone department, and this dawning knowledge may eventually lead him to advocate for its health and well-being. Witness, for example, his mild amazement when informed that English has shrunk in the past eight years by more than 20 percent. See the wrinkle in his snowy brow upon learning that our student fellowships have been slashed, our graduate programs defunded, our classroom sizes increased, our faculty research and travel funds canceled, the student literary journal paid for by donations collected on street corners in aluminum cans, and on and on. You may have intended his installation as outside chair as a punitive wake-up call for our department, but I am not sure the arrangement has resulted as planned.

  In an unguarded moment, Boti expressed surprise at what he termed our faculty’s “docile disengagement.” I infor
med him that we are like oxen accustomed to the yoke: our hides thick from insult and whippings, we have forgotten how to do anything other than trudge dully along.

  Even more: Having spent his tenure-seeking years in the gleaming spaceship of Atwell Hall, Boti—like a wealthy traveler touring the slums—is suitably horrified by the state of our building, with its intermittent water supply, semioperational light fixtures, mephitic odors, and corridors foggy with toxins. Yesterday, on the metal bookshelf in my office, I came across a cluster of insects—a beetle, two moths, a centipede, and several bluebottle flies—writhing together like dirgeful companions in their final death throes, presumably poisoned by vapors from the second floor. But never mind: I am sure our foreshortened life spans will be made worthwhile on the day when the economists, in their jewel-encrusted palanquins, are reinstalled in their palazzo over our heads. (Climbing the stairs and peering into their future home yesterday, I found that the double doors leading to their sanctuary are equipped with locks—presumably to prevent riffraff and English faculty from getting in.)

  Enfin: With mixed feelings (but what feelings aren’t mixed, when one is a professor of the humanities?), I put my shoulder to the wheel for Boti: give him two more years.

  As for the rumor that, Boti unwilling (I assume you are tempting him with previously undiscovered funds), I might be counted among the eligible candidates to serve in his place—I consider it both ludicrous and unsound. Why? Because the upper echelons of the administration justifiably detest me; because my colleagues view me as a cantankerous pariah; and because, given my stance on several university-wide issues, I would consider the position a significant ethical and even spiritual compromise—and I say that as an agnostic. Ergo: Assuming that the rumor isn’t a joke expressly devised for my humiliation, you may color me

  Flattered but uninterested,

  Jay

  * * *

  * I recall your witticism at the provost’s reception last year: that as much as you detested my LORs, you found them more engaging than any of my novels, which you dismissed as “ponderous.”

  May 3, 2010

  Ted Boti, Chair

  Dear Ted,

  You have asked me—for the third time this year—to submit a letter of recommendation for Franklin Kentrell, applicant/supplicant for the Citrella Service Award.

  You requested that I leave out “all extraneous information,” limiting myself to statements associated with my endorsement of Kentrell’s (self-)nomination.

  Thank you for this opportunity to express so thoroughly my feelings on this crucial subject.

  Elliptically,

  Jay

  P.S.: I assume you’re demurring on the reappointment for chair in order to bargain for something. Might the Overlords be persuaded to fork over the faculty lines they promised to give us three years ago?

  May 5, 2010

  Ken Doyle

  Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency

  and Hemorrhoid Excision Center

  141 West 27th Street

  New York, NY 10001

  Dear Ken,

  Do you know what you’ve unleashed, making a six-figure sale for Vivian Zelles? Every student novelist I’ve ever known—along with a few I’ve never met—is tracking me down to remind me of the halfhearted praise I once bestowed on his or her work. The ones who still live here in town are dropping by with their cherubic infants and jars of homemade jam. Some of them, I suspect, haven’t written so much as a greeting card for years, but the news of Vivian’s sale is like blood in the water, and now, fins sparkling, into the shallows they come.

  I’m sure the bold and the brash will contact you directly, but if you’re curious about who’s been vetted, the only two I can safely vouch for at this moment are Eileen Tolentino and Carlos DaFoy. I won’t bother to describe their work—you obviously make your own decisions—except to say that Tolentino’s prose will be more palatable if you can get her to quit with the obsessive renditions of bodily functions; and DaFoy (a restless, bearded man with the tics and gesticulations of a hopping spider) ought to admit to himself that he’s a writer of historical romance and start collecting his checks. You’ll see if there’s anything you can do for them. As for the others: I don’t like homemade jam.

  Ken, in your e-mail from last week you asked how Browles was doing. I assumed the question was pro forma (or a further opportunity for you to rub salt in the wound)—until yesterday evening when Janet called to tell me what I now conclude you already knew: that HRH gave an interview. His first in nine years. Not to The New York Times, thank god, or The Paris Review, but to Avenue A, an online journal, circulation five thousand. “I think you should read it,” Janet said. She sent me the link.

  “Still Writing After All These Years: A Conversation with H. Reginald Hanf.” And what is Hanf, who has given almost no interviews in the past forty years, writing? A Melville novel. “ ‘I am interested in the conflation of contemporary and classic works,’ Hanf says. ‘And in the problem of “Bartleby” in particular.’ ” Is he fucking kidding? He lifted that phrase from Browles’s proposal. I don’t know if Browles reads Avenue A—I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in the last few weeks—but some jackass will probably send him the link. Good god, Ken: HRH isn’t going to write a “Bartleby” novel; a perusal of the interview immediately suggests that he’s living on pabulum and stewed prunes, but because somebody showed up with a tape recorder (probably the day after he got the excerpt I sent him), he started regurgitating passages from Browles’s book like a witless parrot. But Browles doesn’t know that. He’ll imagine Reg to be the potentate of old, the predictor of literary fortunes, and reading that interview is going to crush him. Do you remember HRH telling Janet that her writing was “sterile” and unproductive? She would kill me for telling you this, Ken, but that comment haunted her for years—it was like a venomous seed planted inside her, to the extent that when she couldn’t get pregnant (she wanted children; I recognized myself as a poor candidate to be anyone’s father), she felt he’d cursed her or created a weakness in her by issuing his verdict aloud. Years later when she found out about my affair (brief, unsatisfying, pointless), she was angry not only because of the betrayal but because of what she called my collusion with Reg. She claimed I had never disputed his diagnosis in regard to her work, that I was Reg’s acolyte, his garden gnome, eager to believe in his pronouncements because of his preference for Stain, and in exchange for his favoritism—inspired mainly by prurience, she said—I was willing to sit back and see my friends and my classmates dismissed and degraded, ignored. She said I had bought into the idea, instilled in her by HRH, that she was a lesser writer than I was, and that she would never write anything good.

  It was striking to realize that we were getting divorced at least in part because of something that had happened in a classroom two decades before—and even more striking, once the papers were signed, to admit to myself that, as vehement and strident as Janet was (and still is), I missed her. I have missed her terribly every day and have told her so (proclaiming my continued affection inadvertently once, in a public e-mail), but she claims she is healthier without me and remains unmoved.

  Tolentino and DaFoy will send you their packets of prose next week. I was happy to hear that you got a nice arrangement for Troy at Folkstone. A bright spot in the fecund gloom of spring …

  Drearily,

  JTF

  May 11, 2010

  Student Services/Fellowship Office

  Carole “The Charitable” Samarkind, Associate Director

  14 Gilbert Hall

  Carole—

  You probably heard that I’ve been thoroughly scolded* for the LOR I wrote as a part of your application to Shepardville; once again, I’m sorry, I’m putting my ankles and wrists in the stocks and sending you a bushel of overripe tomatoes by campus post—you will find me publicly repenting of my sins on the quad. Does it alleviate your anger at all when I try to explain that my motives were good? If you’d applied to a school tha
t deserved you, I would have written something more appropriately laudatory and banal.

  Carole, I do hope you’ll forgive me because I am in desperate need of a favor. I have one remaining graduate student, Darren Browles, the last of his kind, whose funding possibilities have gone up in flames. Rather than tucking his tail between his legs and leaving campus, he’s been living on borrowed cigarettes and the castoffs from business school catered lunches; I suspect he sleeps and showers at the gym.

  I recommended Browles to Bentham (Eleanor), which spurned him, and to Ken Doyle, my agent, who is so busy making millions off a comp lit student whose book I placed in his hairy hands that he can’t devote even a few modest hours to this more demanding (i.e., less profitable) project. I even wrote to Zander Hesseldine and his kinky coterie about a summer RAship, but I got no response; they are probably busy packing their bags for Camp Foucault.

  Worst of all—I hesitate to confess it—I sent a portion of Browles’s manuscript-in-progress to my former advisor (I’ve told you about HRH) and it turns out he’s babbling nonsense in a nursing home, having managed to emerge from the miasma of senescence long enough to spout the twisted and mistaken idea that he and not Browles is composing a novel based on Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”. Yes, I know, confidentiality! But in a moment of infirmity or nostalgia I was searching for wisdom and for the benefit of HRH’s connections … The possibility of Browles’s success appears to be receding over a distant horizon, but if he could get some summer funding and finally complete the damned book, he might still have a shot.

  You have your fingers on the pulse of student finance over there in Gilbert; may I send Browles over? He’s not in terrific shape right now, frankly—I’ll give him a talking to about getting a haircut and changing his clothes—but when he doesn’t feel the world is out to destroy him, he presents fairly well. I would so appreciate it, Carole. In the absence of other hidden pockets of funding, perhaps you could hire him to work in the office?