Philip Roth - Letting Go

I walked to the University through the crackling weather and the virgin snows, and arrived at Cobb Hall feeling as righteous, as American, as inner-directed as a young Abe Lincoln. Ears tingling, I taught two consecutive classes with such passion and good spirits that one of my students — a kittenish girl who never read the assignments but had a strong desire to please — carried her pouty lips down the corridor after me and, before my office door, allowed them to part. “Mr. Wallach, I think that was the most important hour of my life. It opened up whole new worlds.” We did not touch, but I went into my office thinking we had. My spirits remained untrammeled. I decided that before I began to mark papers I would call Martha Reganhart and verify our dinner date. By mistake I dialed the Herzes’ number. Paul answered; following a moment of dumb silence, I hung up.

The moral: Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on.

Later, because it was four o’clock and because it was Monday, there was the usual meeting of the staff; so life is ordered in academe. I arrived early, chose a seat near the window, and made myself comfortable at the round meeting table. I had with me mimeographed copies of four student essays which had been handed out to us the Monday before; they were to have been graded and mulled over preparatory to today’s meeting. A quarterly examination was coming up, and the object of evaluating these essays was to make sure that we were all in agreement about standards of judgment. We lived forever on the edge of a deep abyss: there was a chance that one of us might give an A to an essay to which another of us had given a B. And, intoned our more pious members, it was the student who paid the penalty. But it was we who paid the penalty, these grading sessions being nothing less than the student’s last revenge on his teacher. If the phenomenon we all engaged in that afternoon were ever to be staged in the theater, I would suggest that a chorus of freshman be placed behind a gauze screen, visible to the audience but not to those playing the part of teachers; rhythmically, while the meeting progresses, the chorus is to chant ha ha ha.

My colleagues drifted in, alone and in pairs. First — always first, with a clean pad of lined yellow paper and a cartridge-belt arrangement of sharpened pencils around his middle — Sam McDougall, a man whose dedication to the principles of grammar could actually cover you with sorrow. Sam had written a long work on the history of punctuation, and though he looked to be the world’s foremost authority on hayseed, he was in fact one of its foremost authorities on the semicolon and the dash. A year ago he had unearthed two comma faults in an article of mine in American Studies , and ever since had chosen to sit next to me at staff meetings to show me the light.

After Sam came our young ladies: Peggy Moberly, everybody’s friend, plain and oval-faced, a girl who in certain sections of our land would probably be considered the prettiest in town; and Charleen Carlisle, with whom — a year and a half before — I had fallen in love for five minutes. She was tall, purple-eyed, and stunning in a haughty way, and the day the Dean had introduced the two of us I had thought he had said her first name was Carlisle. Flustered by her complacent beauty, I melted in the romance of her appellation. But she turned out to be called Charleen and was engaged to an intern at Billings, with whom she bowled twice a week.

Then entered Frank Tozier, about whose sexual persuasion I am to this day in doubt; and Walker Friedland, our glamour boy, who jumped up on desks in the classroom whenever he taught Moby Dick. Walker had made honest men of us all by marrying a student with a spectacular pair of legs. We had all hung around, yawning, waiting for her to swell up with Walker Jr., but a year had passed and now she was a slender sophomore, still locomoting herself with those legs, and Walker was probably swinging out over his class from the light fixture: he had gotten away with it. He was a peppy and amusing fellow, rumored to be our most popular member — though it was rumored that I was myself a little in contention, having been invited the previous year to partake of lunch once a week in the dining hall of one of the girls’ dormitories—“Mr. Wallach, do you really believe Thomas Wolfe is over written?” “Mr. Wallach, don’t you think Frannie is pregnant?” “Mr. Wallach, someone said that you said in class—” “Could you give a little talk to the girls, Mr. Wallach?”

There were two other bachelors engaged in this baleful competition: Larry Morgan, a petulant young fellow who sported a beret and a cane, and our madman, Bill Lake. Bill had been connected with the University of Chicago since before puberty; rumor had it that one day he had been seen slipping a note to Enrico Fermi — and from that it all began. In fact, Bill had been a Quiz Kid; I remember him from my own youth as the one with the noseful, who was always converting a hundred and sixty-four dollars and thirty-two cents into its equivalent in francs, marks, lire, and what have you. Now, wrapped in his red wool scarf, he stormed through the hallways leaking freshman compositions after him, bound for the sloppy smoky hell of his office, where it was his pleasure to reduce coeds to tears because of their lifeless prose styles. Next came Bill’s buddy, Mona Meyerling, a bull-dyke, I’m afraid, but awfully sweet, though always a little too anxious, I thought, to give other people’s cars a push with her Morris Minor. She had been an officer in the WACs and still wore the shoes. In a way, she always struck me as our most solid member, which may reveal some secret as to my own sexuality, or lack thereof.

Trotting on the heels of Mona was Cyril Houghton, who had confided to me once that he had invented most of the footnotes in his dissertation, which nevertheless was reputed, by Cyril, to be the last word on the poet, Barnaby Googe. Also our New Critic, Victor Honingfeld, forever off to Breadloaf or the Indiana School of Letters, forever flashing at me rejection slips signed in John Crowe Ransom’s own hand. And our Old Critic — our tired critic — the victim (willing, I believe) of two opinionated wives and college politics, gentle Ben Harnap. Next was Swanson, a blond, wide-faced boy from Minnesota who had a blond, wide-faced wife from Minnesota. He had been hired at the same time as I, and obviously some kind of scale-balancing was supposed to be going on. Prior to her retirement, Edna Auerbach had referred to me as “a playboy in academic clothing,” and perhaps that helps to explain the presence of our silent, serious Lutheran.

Lastly, there was John Spigliano and my contribution to the staff, Paul Herz.

I do not see that there is much to be gained by chronicling all that was said that afternoon. Since it is already clear that I have neither great love nor admiration for certain of my colleagues, it might seem that I was taking the opportunity of recording their words to make them appear silly. Teaching is a noble profession with a noble history, and it may simply be that we are living through a slack time.

I was not really giving the meeting all my attention anyway. No sooner had I sat down at the table than Paul Herz sat down across from me. The sight of him stimulated my memory; I was reminded of my recent encounter with his family, and with his wife … And an idea came to me then that seemed the most daring and spectacular of my life. All through the afternoon (Paul across from me) I tried to dismiss it, and yet it hung on — and not at all because it made sense. Perhaps it hung on because I wanted something to hang on — to hang on to —that didn’t make sense. What I’d like to call my spirit, what I’d like to consider the most human part of me, was like some vapor that I couldn’t get my hands on; it evaded all expression, it wouldn’t leap out and shape my life. I wished I could just push it a little, and perhaps it was in an attempt to push it that I deliberately thought to myself all through the long afternoon: Run off with Libby. Run off and marry Libby.