With a bow and an audible scraping noise,
Jay
* * *
* Janet was fully inflated with umbrage on your behalf, and I understand she wrote you a letter supplanting mine. Rest assured: despite the discomfitures of last fall, you can trust her. Yes, she’s prickly, but she is also principled and well connected, and if you’re determined to escape this World of Payne, she’s well equipped to help you do so.
May 17, 2010
Dean Philip Hinckler
College of Arts and Sciences
1 MacNeil Hall
Dear Dean Hinckler,
I have been tapped, once again and for reasons that defy human understanding, to write a letter—during the final crisis-ridden week of the semester—on behalf of my colleague Franklin Kentrell, who has nominated himself for chair of the university curriculum committee. Given your own recent, crucial work on the selection of dirges for the all-campus picnic, you may not have had time to grasp or appreciate the nature of Kentrell’s contributions. He is, to put it mildly, insane. If you must allow him to self-nominate his way into a position of authority, please god let it be the faculty senate. There, his eccentricities, though they may thrive and increase, will at least be harmless. The faculty senate, our own Tower of Babel, has not reached a decision of any import for a dozen years.
By the by: word on the street is that our sociological friend, Ted Boti, despite various carrots dangled before him, will soon refuse to continue as chair. Rumors about his health have been circulating; through the pebbled glass of his office door, where one can observe him scratching the psoriatic tufts of hair on his head, he looks troubled and wan. A recommendation: next time you enlist someone from an outside department to step in and rule us, you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units—Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him- or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive.
As for Kentrell: he is one of the reasons no one wants to come near us. My suggestion to you: invent a committee for him—something Kafkaesque that requires years of fusty administrative investigation—and tell him that the difficult work he’ll be putting in, until retirement, will free him from all other service, forever, amen.
Confident that my colleagues will join me in welcoming Kentrell’s involvement in this distant and hypothetical realm, I remain
Yours in tender servitude,
Jay Fitger
May 20, 2010
USDA Forest Service
c/o Thomas Schaffler
Mailstop 1111
1400 Independence Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20250-1111
Dear Thomas Schaffler,
Simone Barnes, due to receive her BA in English in a matter of days (already the seniors can be found preparing for the upcoming pomp and ceremony by playing drinking games on the quad), has applied to your office in the hope of becoming an assistant wildlife observation specialist. Though I know almost nothing of the natural world—a blackbird and a robin are the same as far as I am concerned—it has fallen to me to recommend her.
Ms. Barnes has breathily informed me that should she be successful in this particular objective, she will immediately become “the happiest person on earth”—and on this basis alone I feel impelled to urge you to hire her.
I assume that sitting still for hours on a wooden platform, a pair of binoculars at the ready should anything ornithological raise its feathered head, would require steadiness, tranquility, and a meditative nature. Ms. Barnes—based on her performance in my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop—manifests all three of these traits. A person of few words, she spent a good deal of her class time gazing languidly out the window. When called on, however, she demonstrated a reasonable familiarity with the subject at hand. She received a B+ as her final grade.
In case it’s relevant, Ms. Barnes’s final project was a whimsical piece of fiction about a young woman who lands a coveted job as an assistant wildlife observation specialist for the Forest Service. One day a beautiful young man ascends the platform on which she perches and, with no words exchanged (Ms. Barnes prefers narrative to dialogue), makes swooping love to her before transforming himself into a hawk and plunging, airborne, into the tree canopy, lustrous and green. The story conflated aspects of Rapunzel and Icarus and Leda’s passionate swan—but confusions like these, given time and a healthy book list, can usually be alleviated, if not outright cured.
I can think of no other student better suited to the halcyon tasks Ms. Barnes will so delightedly embrace should you decide to hire her. Fortunate girl: to behold her ambitions still winking before her like stars.
Loftily,
Jay Fitger
Professor of Creative Writing and English
Payne University
June 21, 2010
Carole Samarkind
Student Services/Fellowship Office
14 Gilbert Hall
Dear Carole,
Thank you for your letter. It was very kind. I wasn’t sure whether anyone else on campus, now that we have entered the summer doldrums, would have seen the notice in the paper. I almost missed it myself. I don’t always read the obituaries, though I suppose in another ten years that will be the page I turn to first, over morning coffee, for news of my friends.
I remember you telling me once that you counted it a good day, a promising day, when you skimmed the obits and found only notices for people over sixty-five. No babies, no college students, no teens. And you pointed out what should have been obvious: that in cases when the deceased is young, with no cause of death listed, the culprit is usually suicide or drugs.
With this letter I declare my intention to establish a scholarship in Darren Browles’s name. I spoke briefly to his parents about it, as much as decency would allow a week after his death. They have two other children, one in college, and they have no money to spare—but I see no reason why they would oppose an honorific named for their son. Carole, I know you’ve secured your new job—off to the Big Ten; congratulations!—but I hope you can help me with this final task before you go. I confess that Browles’s death has affected me severely, I am not in what you used to call “fighting form,” and I don’t want to spend loathsome hours battling the Kingdom of No in order to get this accomplished. The minimum to kick-start a scholarship, I understand, is $30,000. I’ll take the money out of my savings and retirement. I have no reason to retire anyway.
The last time I saw Browles he told me he was working on his book again. We had run into each other at the drugstore and I was struck by the tremor of liveliness in his speech. He said he was revising for the nth time, and he made a point of telling me that there was a piece of advice I’d given him in class last fall that was useful to him, and I felt glad to have been useful. He made a joke about inscribing the final words of the novel, if he ever finished it, into the flat of his desk. And I remember thinking—because we were pacing back and forth between the pain relief and the vitamins—that he must have gotten a windfall of new meds to be feeling so well. But of course that’s unfair.
You may want to know whether I told him about the HRH interview in Avenue A. In fact, I intercepted him a few minutes later on my way to the checkout, a collection of oddments tumbling in the plastic basket slung over my arm, with that purpose in mind. I touched his shoulder and noticed his wide-set eyes—one of them mildly strabismic—and a dried clot of saliva at the corner of his mouth. I was his advisor! It was my job to encourage and critique and suggest, to help him see his own project as if from a reader’s point of view. And I needed to be honest with him and to tell him that—regardless of my own machinations on behalf of the program, and irrespective of any demented remarks made by a formerly esteemed writer now poised at the edge of an open grave—his novel was not very good; the light of publication would not shine on the book in its current form. But h
ow to phrase that particular failure, which I knew was not only Browles’s, but mine? I clutched the sleeve of his jacket, the rubber treadmill of the checkout rolling vertiginously at my side. “Are you all right?” Browles asked. “Professor?”
He always called me “Professor”; I don’t think he ever used my name. And standing there by the checkout, still gripping his jacket (the shoulder was torn, he probably couldn’t afford a new one), I saw him not as my only remaining graduate writing student but in his own terms, Darren Browles-as-Browles, the ding an sich.
Browles raised his arm as if to summon help, so I let go of his sleeve and muttered something about a forgotten prescription. And I walked away, telling myself that if he read the HRH interview he would quickly conclude that I had betrayed him; but at some future moment he might also understand that I had been trying, however ineffectually, to advocate for him and for other wannabe writers in the coming years.
As for the scholarship: I know that regulations and red tape thickly cover these things, but I would like to make this one as simple as possible. Call it the Darren Browles Memorial Fellowship, and let the interest pay out on a yearly basis to a student writer who, in no more than five hundred words, explains his or her artistic and financial need. My only other stipulation: there will be no letters of recommendation required or accepted. As long as I’m above ground, I’ll read the applications, names redacted, and decide.
I suppose this is the last letter of recommendation anyone will write for poor Browles, so let me say this about him. Socially, he was awkward—shy, I suppose—and his writing at times was subpar; but an idea had presented itself to him, knocking at his brain like a nighttime traveler, and instead of shutting the door in its face, Browles built it a fire, he drew a chair for it up to the hearth and spent half a decade trying to decipher and then convey what it struggled to tell him. He was patient and industrious and quietly determined. Buffeted by setbacks and rejection and his own limitations, he persevered. Furthermore, he was kind—an admirable person. I wish I had told him these things directly, rather than saving my praise of him for letters and e-mails sent to other people: a correspondence Browles would never benefit from or see.
One thing the obituary didn’t mention: he burned his work. He wiped six drafts of the novel off his computer and made a bonfire of the paper copies in an outdoor fire pit behind his apartment. He apparently explained as much to his family, in a note. “He said he didn’t want us to read what wasn’t finished,” his mother told me when we spoke on the phone. She asked if I’d read the book, and if it was good, and I told her it was.
Thanks for your attention to the scholarship, Carole. And thanks (in advance) for shielding me from the talons of the development office. Explain to them that I have not won the lottery, I did not inherit from an eccentric millionaire great-aunt, and I am not an ardent booster of this institution. (They ought to know that by now: I believe my reputation precedes me.) This is my one and only bequest, and it springs not from tenderness toward my employer but from belated love and admiration for Browles.
Let me know what other information you need, and I’ll try to get it to you ASAP, before you leave town and before the new semester begins. Though we in English are still in limbo as regards our new chair (Boti is AWOL, perhaps holed up in a cave with a pointed spear), we’ve been told that the heavy construction on the building will be finished this fall. In fact, yesterday I spotted an asthmatic Shakespearean and two balding Modernists, presumably ejected from the architecture building, ferrying their books and bits and bobs across the quad, a little ragtag caravan of refugees returning to their long-lost home. While the economists will wait until the fleurs-de-lis have been inscribed by master carvers on their office doors, we in English will probably spend another few months wearing hazmat suits and latex gloves. To wit: this morning, a workman politely knocked at my door to warn me about an orange electrical cord in the hallway—he didn’t want me to trip—but he neglected to mention that three feet beyond the electrical cord was a large receptacle sporting a sign marked WARNING: ASBESTOS.
Mourning your departure already,
J.
P.S.: I’m sure you know that I’ll miss you terribly, having no other ex-girlfriends and only one resentful ex-wife here on campus. I understand that you don’t want to stay in touch, and I’ll respect that decision. Have you selected the lucky person on whom I’ll bestow my recommendations, once you leave office?
July 9, 2010
Ballot for Election to the Faculty Senate—please return to the office of Dean Philip Hinckler by July 11, 2010.
You may vote for up to three candidates for the Faculty Senate. Place an X by the names of the faculty for whom you vote. Faculty Senate members serve a (renewable) term of three years.
_____ Winifred Matchett (Sociology)
_____ Klaus Arthursen (German, Scandinavian, and Dutch)
_____ R. T. Sawma (Computer Science)
_____ Philip Lang (Psychology)
_____ Miriam Schoellner (History)
_____ Phoebe Allan (Philosophy)
__X__ Franklin Kentrell (English)
(Electronic Signature and Department or Unit)
J. Fitger
Creative Writing/English
August 3, 2010
Eleanor Acton, Director
Bentham Literary Residency Program
P.O. Box 1572
Bentham, ME 04976
Dear Eleanor,
The purpose of this letter is to recommend warmly to you a former student, Max Wylie-Hall, for a one-month writer’s residency (January, please) at Bentham. Max completed his undergraduate degree here five years ago (English and anthropology), finishing up cum laude with a 3.8. During his final semester in my fiction workshop he wrote a competent but lethargic story about a sellout who—though he once had dreams and aspirations—finds himself at thirty years old (gasp!) with two ungrateful adenoidal children and a corporate job. The worst fate some undergrads can imagine for themselves: full employment, a home, a spouse and kids, a car.
So: I was surprised to find a thinner and darkly mustached version of Mr. Wylie-Hall at my office door half a decade later and even more surprised to read the new work he pressed on me. Exquisite prose: he has a bit of a Faulkner fixation, but that will probably resolve itself—do take a look. Wylie-Hall tells me that during the past five years he has held a series of menial jobs (warehouse, restaurant, lawn service, etc.) that allowed him an artist’s flexible schedule as well as the peace of mind that comes of self-abnegation. I don’t know that he’ll finish the book he’s working on, but I’d like to give him the opportunity to try. No caveats or warning flags: Wylie-Hall is stolid and serious and will not spend his free time scoping out opportunities for debauchery. He wants to write.
Thank you for your thoughtful letter and generous check for the Darren Browles Memorial Fellowship. I gather Janet told you. She showed up at my apartment a few weeks ago (she actually cut a vacation short and came back to Payne when she heard the news), washed the dishes that had collected in my sink, swept and squeegeed my floor, and then set two generous glasses of whiskey on the yellow enamel-topped kitchen table (one of my souvenirs from the divorce; she didn’t want it), where we sat and talked late into the night. I felt as if the past ten years had been folded up like a battered tent between us, and it was only by exerting extreme self-control that I refrained from inviting her, at least for one night, to move back in.
You aren’t the only person to suggest that I identified with Browles, that I saw him as an earlier and more ingenuous version of myself. It’s a reasonable thesis but I resist it, as it posits Browles as a concept more than a person—a screen upon whom others cast their wishful light.
He deserved better.
Lately I’ve been puzzling over the way in which HRH, on a weekly basis during the Seminar, somehow persuaded us that he wielded inordinate power over our futures, that he could predict and even determine who would flounder and who would succeed. Sham
e on us that we often believed him. And for following his counsel rather than my conscience, shame on me. (None of the above should be mistaken for an apology, by the way; my apology to you, twenty-some years in coming, will arrive by separate cover, accompanied by a modest donation to Bentham.)
Onward. Your plan for a “reunion weekend” at Bentham in October has a poignant appeal: Madelyne TV would have loved the idea and been the first to sign up; and Janet has a brother in New Hampshire (an unbearable prig, but every year or two she feels obliged to see him); and you’ve already got Troy tidily tucked in his lakeside cabin; so it’s only a matter of persuading Ken—tell him to write it off as a business expense and round up some new clients. But I’ll have to decline. It turns out October will be busy for me, first because of the folderol reopening of the building in which English resides (long story—you don’t want to hear it); and second because, defying common sense as well as my own and my colleagues’ best interests, I have decided to accept a desperate departmental nomination for chair. Janet will tell you that, throughout this institution, I am widely disliked. (I’m sure you’re shocked at the news.) She has attempted to bolster me, however, by claiming that, though understandably reviled, I am not universally distrusted, and on that basis I should serve out a three-year term. Last week she went so far as to smuggle into my office a contraband letter of nomination* written by the acting chair, Ted Boti, who recommended, in sweeping and hyperbolic language, that I take his place. The poor misguided soul described me as generous, “a champion for the department and particularly its students”; he went on to say that my disagreeable nature was “at least 50 percent façade” and that “Fitger behaves like more of an ass than he actually is.” Janet described these comments as persuasive praise.
Dear Committee Members: A novel Page 11