Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  Chapter III

  MARK MAY

  Cards on the table: my one conversation with Martha Yeats, just as I told Sherwood Graves and Billy Hoover, when they tracked me down on Labor Day. Every couple of weeks, to encourage the idea that we’re a close-knit faculty, “teaching, learning and living together” as Warren Niles puts it, the administration offers a free lunch in a basement dining room underneath the college commons. I was sitting with a guy from math and a woman from classics. They discussed the food in front of us, something called “Swedish Noodle Bake.” From there we switched to weather. Touchy subject. I mentioned something I’d read about how slash and burn agriculture was fouling skies over Southeast Asia. Suddenly, there was Martha Yeats, though I didn’t know her name yet. “It’s developing world,” she said. “If we can’t get that much straight, we can’t expect much from our students.” “Okay,” I said. “And,” she continued, “slash and burn agriculture is a racist derogatory term that might have a place at the World Bank where people specialize in turning family farmers into assembly line slaves for Nike. Try swidden, next time.” “Swidden, swidden, swidden,” I repeated, watching her walk away. That was in April, May at the latest. In August she was dead. Slashed and burned. Swiddened.

  That was it and that was all. If what happened on campus is a tragedy—and you’ll get no argument on that from me—then I was the drunken porter in Macbeth. Comic relief. Even that might be going too far. Situation comedy, that’s more like it. Call it My Wife, My Provost. When Caroline took the job here, people looked at me and said, well, that’s fine, you’re a poet and a poet can write poetry anywhere, that’s terrific Mark, that’s perfect, you’re so—what’s the word?—footloose and fancy free? open to experience? adventurous? No, folks, the word is portable. You don’t need a laboratory, you hardly need a library, say it loud and proud, you brave bard, you’re portable as in lavatory, just string that free spirit a hammock between two chemical toilets and watch those raggedy unrhymed lines come in for landings. It didn’t work out that way. Until Martha Yeats’ fatal final dog walk, I was the consensus choice for loser-of-the-year. I was Mark May as in Mark May-Not-Last. As in Mark May-Not-Stay-Married. And here’s the double whammy: the same person who ends my career may end my marriage. My Wife, My Provost.

  She likes her work, she tells me, she feels it’s “challenging,” but if you ask her whether she’s conservative or radical, she’ll ask you to define your terms. Ask My Wife, My Provost about tenure which, God knows, gets people going: either it’s the last best defense of free speech or it’s the last hope of gold-bricks. She’ll say, yes, good question, she realizes tenure is controversial and there are deep passions on both sides, and then she’ll do a history lesson, how in the not-so-distant past tenure protected professors against political pressure and although that threat has diminished it is never altogether absent. Therefore, my life’s partner continues, we have to weigh the need to protect free speech absolutely and at all times against the institutional cost of providing lifetime employment to professors whose accomplishment might end when they are tenured. She pauses. She’s impressive. She’s impressed with her ability to impress. The real problem, she suggests, may not be tenure per se but the way it’s administered, the way colleges recruit, mentor and review tenure track candidates. Our talk about tenure, she brightly ventures, must be enlarged. Tenure award or denial is merely the end of a six year process. If the process has integrity from day one onwards, the tenure decision will make sense. Any questions? Ah, she’s something. Meanwhile, the college tenures nine out of ten, make that nineteen out of twenty people. And—this is terrific—I may be the next rare sacrifice. That would do wonders for Caroline’s credibility. She shitcanned her own husband!

  It’s my fault, the way last year turned out, I admit it. The college made me uncomfortable from the first day. It was a country school. It was in the midwest. That didn’t help. But what really tore it was the mood of the place. The college isn’t wealthy but it caters to wealthy people, what with the country club looks, the humongous swimming pool, the lawns and flower beds, the high ceilings and dark wood and that snooty serve-no-wine-before-its-time atmosphere. It’s like one of those noble estates in England that’s obliged to rent rooms to Texans while the owner lives over the stables, counting the daily take from postcards. I hated the place. I hated myself for being here. Every day I walked to class, I felt like a costumed artisan at Colonial Williamsburg, one of those guys who dresses up in wigs and pantaloons and sits around pretending to be a blacksmith.

  The first time I became the talk of the town was last fall, when the admissions department sponsored a visiting students’ weekend, a round of classes, lectures, and get togethers for high school juniors and seniors and their parents. At lunch, I’m drinking lots of wine, washing down some dry, room-temperature salmon; it’s not easy, flushing something like that down your pipes. I hear one of those admissions guys refer to a poll which shows that our students ranked among the—get this—“happiest” at any campus. “One of the happiest colleges in America,” he proclaims. Which is when I blow it.

  “That combination of country club living and easy grading gets them every time,” I say. I don’t shout it. I just say it.

  “I beg your pardon?” the admissions guy says. I didn’t fire back. But the silence is embarrassing. The guy had to say something. “That’s our poet-in-residence, Mr. Mark May,” he says. “Was there anything else?”

  “Happy campers don’t prove a thing,” I say. “Free condoms at the health center, junior years abroad, passing grades for just showing up, no wonder they’re happy.”

  “I think you’ve been drinking,” the admissions guy says.

  “So I have,” I say, raising a glass of Save-Rite Chablis. “The milk from contented cows.”

  Maybe I should have left right then, but I wanted coffee, or what they call coffee in Ohio, a kind of brown-stained water that lets you see through to the bottom of a cup and make a wish: to be in a better place. Anyway, when I lurched out of my seat ten minutes later, a college cop was waiting.

  “Professor May,” he said. “I’m Billy Hoover. I got a call.”

  “How about that?”

  “They said, maybe you shouldn’t be driving home.”

  “They?” It was the admissions guy who called, no doubt about it. Chalk one up for the sales force. “I live two hundred yards from here. I can practically see my house.”

  “What say I drive you home?”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you do.” That was the first time I looked at him and saw that there was someone at home in that hulking, lunky country body, someone walking around with his eyes open. One loser, it could be, who was able to recognize another. He smiled and extended his hand. “Give me your keys, professor.”

  That was my last public drunk. But then there were—what should I call them?—questions about my teaching. My lecture class called Modern American Short Fiction lumbered along alright: put modern, American and short in a course title and students will swarm it, like flies on dog shit. But my fiction seminar was terrible. “The future writers club,” I called it. That didn’t help. Neither did my first week’s admonition that writing could not be taught, that writing courses at the college level were to writing what condoms were to sex. The course was over before it began. Doomed. Even after I weeded out submissions from I-am-sensitive-diarists, allegorists, sci-fi freaks, Dungeons and Dragons players, I was left with students who traded in clichés. Unknowingly. That was the saddest part. They hadn’t read enough to recognize that what they were perpetrating had been done a dozen times before. A vignette from a junior year in Europe. Drift and anomie in high school. Nursing homes. Alzheimer’s, especially in its early, flirting stages. One character recurred: the twenty-one year old tired-of-it-all. Soon, we were all tired. What were these students doing here with these airsickness bags of experience, disgorged and undigested? What were they doing here, when
they could be studying Shakespeare? And what was I doing here, ministering to kids who didn’t want so much to write as to have written and to be known as writers? Because that was what it came to, the creation—the decoration—of a persona. Well, I’ll give the place this: word gets around. We swim in a broth of reciprocal evaluation, we live and breathe reputations. Students can tell good teaching from bad. They may not want to contend with it, but they can recognize it alright.

  “Even the worst student is entitled to a professor’s attention, Professor May. Even the worst. Especially the worst.” That was My Wife, My Provost. She called me in for a conference which also included Blair McCartney, the department chair. Blair had just summarized the complaints she’d gotten about my classes. Ragged. Moody. Sarcastic. Self-centered. Blair took no obvious pleasure in this indictment. It wasn’t that she cared about me particularly, just that if one professor gets it in the neck, they’re all that much more vulnerable. No one had denied I was brilliant, she gamely added. I could, on occasion, be most impressive. But there were these problems that had to be addressed.

  “Professor May,” My Wife, My Provost said. God, she could be scary, in her straight-faced executive mode. “Surely, students are exasperating. Always. Everywhere. But no college can survive by alienating the students who select it. We grade harshly, on occasion. We say hard things, when necessary, and there are harder things that are left unsaid. But this is their alma mater, professor. And nobody makes a career out of beating up on students. Here’s a letter that came in from a participant in your writing seminar. It’s not the only letter I’ve gotten.” She glanced down at her desk and this is what it came to. She had a dossier on me.

  “There’s quite a number,” she said, gesturing towards a file which contained some posted letters, some printed out e-mails.

  “I wish they’d sent them to me,” I said.

  “So do I,” she retorted. Now she found what she was looking for. She read aloud. “Dear Provost Ives. I hesitate to write this letter which concerns a faculty member, Mr. Mark May, who is also your husband. I apologize in advance for any awkwardness this causes. You should know that whatever discomfort you feel is matched, probably exceeded, by what those of us who enrolled in Professor May’s Introduction to Fiction Writing seminar experienced last semester. From the beginning, Professor May treated the seminar in an offhand and cynical manner. He questioned whether we should be in the course at all, whether such a course could even be taught. He demeaned our work from the start—‘necessary hits,’ he called his comments—but they seemed random and inconsistent. He was laughing at us and the fact that he also laughed at himself didn’t make things better. Typically, he would breeze into class and ask a few of us to read our work aloud. He was hearing it for the first time. He didn’t read things beforehand and he didn’t mark them afterwards. Every seminar we had, he walked into empty-handed and he left empty-handed also. At first we were anxious to be called on, to have our work considered, but that didn’t last long. His comments were snide and derogatory, not helpful. He didn’t like how we wrote and he also criticized our subject matter so at the end, he made us feel we didn’t have much to say and what we said, we said badly. He never, never gave suggestions about how to make things better. He expected us to be perfect but if we were perfect we wouldn’t be taking his course. We started out with exercises and moved on to short stories but the class was always the same. Some of us left angry, feeling ripped off, and others left in tears. Sure, in the end, we all got B’s. That didn’t make us feel so hot. It was just another way of telling us that we didn’t—and wouldn’t—amount to much. Here’s your B, now get out of my face. Provost Ives, I don’t know if I have what it takes to be a writer. That’s what I wanted to find out. I’m an honors student. I have a scholarship. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I don’t drink much, I hardly party. I work hard. I work harder than Professor May. And I can prove it. I can prove it even if it means confessing to something that I’d never do again, something I planned on keeping to myself. It’s going to cost me, but I don’t care. I plagiarized. I submitted a short story that was not my own. I wanted to see what Professor May would say about something that was good. I typed out, word for word, ‘Daylight Savings,’ by our own Harry Stribling, which appeared in Best Stories of 1938, after it was published in the college’s quarterly magazine. It’s in Stribling’s Selected Stories and in Hilltoppers, the collection of stories and poems by people who have been at this college. I made it look like I’d struggled over the story. That was fun. I threw in alternative words and sentences that I crossed out, substituting what was in the original story. I turned in a faithful manuscript but it looked like I’d worked on it. The only thing that was mine was the title which I changed from Daylight Savings to More Light. By the way, I think I learned something, copying word for word the work of Harry Stribling. I went further. I slipped a copy under Professor May’s door, along with a note that said I guessed this was a break-through story for me and I’d appreciate having it discussed in class. Well, that was the first time any of us saw Professor May come into seminar carrying more than a cup of coffee. I was praying he hadn’t read the story someplace else, but by this time I didn’t care. I was endangering my scholarship but that didn’t matter either. There was something about integrity that was on the line here. Not mine. His. He ridiculed the piece, which he’d marked up and down. He had himself a field day. ‘A wussy, dithering wimp narrator.’ ‘Ornate, self-consciously virtuoso prose.’ ‘Magnolia-scented writing, in love with itself.’ On and on he went, about as fired up as he ever got. ‘No dramatic transaction.’ ‘The writer chews more than he bites off.’ All his favorite one-liners. His or other folks’—I’m not the only plagiarist in town. ‘The longest short story I’ve ever read.’ ‘Perusing this piece is like watching an ant crawl over a face on Mount Rushmore.’ We sat there watching him do his negative thing and nobody said a word. I guess we all learned something that night. It’s not just that Professor May hates bad writers. He’s even more uncomfortable with good ones. Well, that’s all I wanted you to know. If you haul me in front of the Academic Infractions Board or lower my grade to F, I’ll take the ‘necessary hit.’ If you take my scholarship, I’ll move on. Just last week, the student paper took the number of classes we take and the number of meetings per class and divided it into the amount per year we pay which is around $25,000. It turns out that every class we take is nearly the cost of a Broadway show. This class isn’t worth it. If there were an Academic Infraction Board for professors, they’d shut this guy up, or down. I still love to read and write. I’ll work hard wherever I go. I came to this college because of the famous English department, the writing tradition, the literary reputation and all. I came because of people like Harry Stribling. I wanted someone like Harry Stribling. I got Mark May. I got cheated. Yours truly...”

  I knew who’d written that letter. Jarrett Stark, a fragile, earnest Ohio kid, one of only two or three who’d tried stopping by during office hours, not to talk about his grade or ask whether I could get his stuff published or what was the deal with agents. He wanted to get to know me, he said, up front. He’d never met a writer before. I could see it in his eyes: he found me fascinating. He asked whether I could give him a list of “extra books,” contemporary authors he might read outside of class. What I gave him was a clever reprise of Cyril Connolly’s old and mostly rhetorical question, whether you could name a single living writer whose death would be a literary disaster. I ripped apart one name after another.

  “John Updike?” he asked.

  “Updick, Jarrett. And getting more flaccid by the minute. The old three-quarters gherkin. Goes around corners. Rabbit turning into hamster, from where I sit.”

  “Philip Roth?”

  “Oi, vey! Gives self-indulgence a bad name. Read twenty pages for the sake of two. Is there an editor in the house?”

  “Thomas Pynchon?”

  “Strikes me like a fork off a new filling. That’s not an audience, th
at’s a cult. He and his whole law firm.”

  “Law firm?”

  “Gass, Gaddis, Delillo, Barth and Pynchon. The great unreadables.”

  “Jay McInerny? Richard Ford?”

  “Listen, Jarrett, there’s nothing sadder than yesterday’s youth movement.”

  “Tim O’Brien?”

  “A one-trick pony. A one subject author. Vietnam. Earth to O’Brien: give peace a chance!”

  “Joyce Carol Oates?”

  “Save our forests.”

  “How about...Toni Morrison?” I sensed he was playing his strongest card. “She won the Nobel Prize.”

  “She deserved it.” I allowed.

  “She did?” Jarrett was surprised.

  “Sure enough. She’s as good as Pearl Buck, any day.”

  All the kid wanted was a list of books to read, as if I didn’t have a dozen enthusiasms, famous and obscure and envied, I could have shared without being a smartass. Weren’t there two or three teachers who’d intervened in my life, who’d made lists of books for me to read, who’d given me the books themselves, marked and underlined, sharing what they loved?

  “Plagiarism is a serious offense,” Blair McCartney remarked, but it was just-for-the-record. There were worse offenses on the table. Mine. “Here’s somebody who confessed to it. I hope he’s not going around bragging about it.”

  “Don’t touch him,” I said. “Don’t do anything. Please. It was my fault. All of it.”

  “Don’t touch him?” Caroline asked. “Is that for your sake? To avoid embarrassment?”