Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

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snafus and an Orwellian effort to quash graduate programs in literature and the arts, his funding has been rescinded; and third, I wrote him a recommendation to Bentham, and not only did Eleanor deny him (you heard, I’m sure, that she’s director now), she slammed his project.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, *1and 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, *2and 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 …

*1I should have warned him that Eleanor played Lady Macbeth in college.

*2NB: 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.

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

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.