Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

He thought he sounded reasonable. Not as razzle-dazzle as Russell certainly, nor as grand as the riddles, jokes, and infinity professors or some of those other guys, but reasonable. Clear. Talking like someone conducting a meeting, say. A sort of administrator, someone orienting the troops, telling them where they could get their letterhead, pencils, supplies. A kind of Rita himself actually, or even a Madame Kaska Celli. He even thought that so far, at least after all the dense, high-intensity talk they’d had to listen to this evening, his manner of speaking might actually come as a sort of relief, put folks at their ease. Why the hell not? It put him at his. He even felt his heart had stopped sinking.

“I,” Miller said, “like you, am pleased and honored to be here. Certainly as pleased and clearly more honored. Well, I have no books, you see. Well, in community colleges, the sort of place I teach but scholars like yourselves wouldn’t give the time of day and, quite frankly, don’t have any reasons to think about much, where we consider ourselves lucky if our budgets can afford just to keep some of your seminal books amongst the library’s holdings, and where we still manage to hold our heads up even if all we can work out is to connect up with some interlibrary-loan deal with a like-minded and similarly ground-down institution which might just possibly arrange to get one of your titles into the course instructor’s hands sometime before the term is over, let alone the student’s, it really isn’t such a high priority to publish.

“Well,” Miller said, “I don’t mean to sound so negative. It isn’t as if the community-college system doesn’t serve its purpose in society. Admittedly, we’re pretty much a bootstrap operation, but you’d be surprised how many of our kids graduate and then go on to earn real good degrees from our nation’s most impressive four-year institutions, some of them. And even go on to apply to graduate school. I don’t have the exact statistics in front of me right now, but I’ve read how almost half the nation’s CPAs, tax accountants, franchisees, licensed real-estate brokers, and insurance salesmen have attended a community college sometime during the course of their academic careers.”

He had their attention. They looked at him with that same aggressive kindness they’d shown when Hartshine had taken him right up to their tables to introduce him the day before. They looked at him, that is, almost hospitably, as if he were somehow their dubious guest. And Miller felt the same mild, useless, almost humble outrage. Think tankers, he thought, fucking op-eders. Holding his tongue at the same time that he wielded it. Like, say, Iago. And threw himself on their mercies as if he were daring them to drop him.

“Even so,” said Miller, continuing, his heart no longer sinking he saw because it had already hit bottom, had come apart like any other settled, foundership, “I won’t kid you, it ain’t all roses and chocolates in our kind of operation. A considerable part of our student population is inner-city, and a whole lot more is, to put the kindest construction on it, well, vocational. Plus we get a host of boat people, and economic refugees, and English-as-a-second-language types. And a whole bunch of folks straight off the killing fields. And, well, a lot of what we do could be considered remedial— glorified and not- so- glorified high school.

“So I guess you can see what a personal privilege it is for me to come in from the cold and be here among you for the next five weeks. I’ve listened tonight with great interest to many of your provocative, trailblazing insights and ideas, and let me tell you up front and just as frankly as I can that when I wasn’t scratching my head I was catching my breath. I mean it. Who am I to butter you up? I mean it. Who am I to brownnose some of the greatest theoreticians and most famous hypothesists in their chosen fields? Where would I get off, a simple time server like me who’s never been practically anywhere? I mean it.”

He did. He really did. Who knew to the penny the exact amount of true awe and real viciousness he’d spent on them. He meant it, he meant it all. And knew, too, when enough was enough, that he better wind it up soon, was perhaps even now lecturing against the bell, but who had never appeared before a class like this before and, more than likely, never would again. But who loved his windiness. Who loved the sheer flourish, complicated as a monogram on a handkerchief, of his drawn-out speechifying, and who even at Booth Tarkington Community College, before the night school and boat people crowded in the two sections of the first, and pair of the second, and single section of the third course he taught — the five courses, the three preparations — loved above all the possibilities open to him in teaching, above love of learning, the possibility of doing good, of touching a life here, changing another there, the pure rock- bottom thrill, by sufferance here in Arles and the authority vested in him back at good old BTCC, of beating about the bush!

But who understood he was going too far, pushing against the envelope of even their compromised, condescendent patience. And who, in their shoes, would be shuffling his feet by now. (Though but twenty or so minutes before, in his own, he’d kept them still enough, his gaze locked in on the few square feet of scrutinized carpet, chased there by Russell’s defiant wink.) Really, Miller thought, they were quite remarkable. For folks with so much on their minds, quite remarkable. They did even less shifting about in their seats than Miller’s fender straighteners, hair stylists, data processors, communications majors, Central Americans, Cambodians, other assorted third worlders and drug dealers back home. Then again, according to Rita’s testimony, these Fellows walked the paths beneath tall trees, climbed the hills, were sightseers by nature, viewfinders. Perhaps, to them, he was just another pretty sight, quaint as those champagne-and-éclair picnickers, a piece of the life cycle, the sweetness and sorrow. Well, he thought, I’ll show them! I’ll knock off the humility, sacrifice the sweet windiness, close down the tap dance, and just bring it on home!

But just couldn’t quite. Since he’d failed to let them in on something, a matter of some delicacy.

He cleared his throat. (This, it occurred, was rather like a singer vocalizing, a pianist’s tuneless scales.)

“Well,” he said, “you can imagine. You can just imagine. I don’t have to draw you any pictures or put too fine a point on it. Everything boils down to self-esteem. Those poor kids. I can’t tell you how my heart goes out to them. I just can’t tell you. Because the fact of the matter is they’ve no illusions. I have statistics. I bet two-thirds of you are on your second or third marriages. It’s not my place to pry and I won’t ask for a show of hands but I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t at least two people within the sound of my voice who’ve been married four times. At least four times. And that a lot of your romances were with students, and that they began, innocently enough, with some really sensational insight you dropped on them in one of your lectures, or in class discussion, or when they came around during office hours to discuss their term papers. Sure, you have the insights, they have the legs.

“Well that doesn’t happen in a community college. There’s no hanky-panky. If they run into us at the library they know it’s not the Bodleian or the Widener, or see us climb into our cars in the parking lot they know full well it ain’t Harvard Yard. What I’m saying, there’s no stars in their eyes. To this day I’m single and not one of my students ever came on to me. They’ve no self-esteem,” Miller said. “Or maybe that’s backwards. The point is you don’t get points for anything that comes out of Cliff’s Notes or Masterplots.”