The only people whom I can say with certainty I didn’t get along with were the “junior people,” the sad, pencil-mouthed and wretched hopefuls. They hated the sight of me. I was, I think, too much like them — unprotected in the world — yet different in a way they found infuriating, incriminating and irrelevant. Nothing is more inciteful of disdain than somebody doing something other than what you’re doing, not doing it badly but not complaining about it (though at the moment I was as much at sea as a man can be). They looked on me with real disgust and usually wouldn’t even speak, as if certain human enterprise was synonymous with laughable failure, though at the same time as if something about me seemed familiar and might figure dimly in their futures if things did not work out. The gallows, I imagine, is less scary to the condemned man than to the one not yet sentenced.
I told them without rancor or the first wish to worry them that if they didn’t get tenure they might give sports writing a serious try, as other people in that situation had. Though they never appeared to like that advice. I think they didn’t appreciate the concept of interchangeability, and no one ever came by to apply for a job after they were let go.
Finally, though, what I couldn’t stand was not what you might think.
I didn’t mind the endless rounds of meetings, which I sat through wearing a smile and with nothing whatsoever in my mind. I didn’t care a mouse’s fart for “learning”—didn’t even feel I understood what it meant in their language — since I couldn’t begin to make my students see the world I saw. I ended up feeling an aching remorse for the boys, especially the poor athletes, and could only think of the girls in terms of what they looked like in their vivid underwear. But I was impressed with my colleagues’ professionalism: that they knew where all “their books” were in the library, knew the new acquisitions by heart, never had to waste time at the card catalog. I enjoyed bumping into them down in the lower level stacks, gossiping and elbowing one another about female faculty, tenure, sharing some joke they’d heard or whatever scandal had turned up in TLS that week. What they did, how they conducted life, was every bit as I would’ve done if I was them — treated the world like an irrelevant rib-tickler, and their own comfortable lives like an elite men’s club. I never once felt a sense of superiority, and would be surprised if they did. I didn’t object to the fisherman’s sweaters, the Wallabies, pipes, dictionary games, charades, the long dinner party palaver about “sibs” and “La Maz” and college boards and experimental treatments for autism, the frank talk about lesbianism and who was right in the Falklands (I liked Argentina). I even got used to the little, smirky, insider mailbox-talk passed between people I had just eaten dinner with the night before, but who, the next morning, would address me only in sly, crypto-ironic references from whatever we’d talked about last night: “… put this memo in The Cantos, right, Frank? See if Ole Ezra can translate that. Haw!” Live and let live is my motto. I’m at home with most interest groups, even in the speakers’ bureau at the magazine, for whom I occasionally journey into the country to talk to citizens about the philosophy of building-from-within, or to deliver canned sports anecdotes.
To the contrary. These eternally youthful, soft-handed, lank-shouldered, blameless fellows — along with a couple of wiry lesbians — were all right with me. They could always give in to their genuine boyishness around me, which was something their wives encouraged. They could quit playing at being serious and surrender to giggly silliness most any time after a few drinks, the same as real folks.
And deep down, I think, they liked me, since that’s how I treated them — like decent Joes, even the lesbians, who seemed to appreciate it. They’d have been happy to have me around longer, maybe forever, or else why would they have asked me to “stay on” when they could tell that something was wrong with me, with my life, something that made me melancholy, though all of them were careful enough never to say a word about it.
What I did hate, though, and what finally sent me at a run out of town after dark at the end of term, without saying goodbye or even turning in my grades, was that with the exception of Selma, the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core — men and women both — all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs, and finally I couldn’t stand their grinning, hopeful teacher faces. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible — time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
Everything about the place was meant to be lasting — life no less than the bricks in the library and books of literature, especially when seen through the keyhole of their incumbent themes: eternal returns, the domination of man by the machine, the continuing saga of choosing middling life over zesty death, on and on to a wormy stupor. Real mystery — the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book — was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they’re sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away — live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can’t do anything else.
Explaining is where we all get into trouble.
What’s true, of course, is that they were doing exactly what I was doing — keeping regret at arm’s length, which is wise if you understand it exactly. But they had all decided they really didn’t have to regret anything ever again! Or be responsible to anything that wasn’t absolutely permanent and consoling. A blameless life. Which is not wise at all, since the very best you can do is try and keep the regret you can’t avoid from ruining your life until you can get a start on whatever’s coming.
Consequently, when these same people are suddenly faced with a real ambiguity or a real regret, say something as simple as telling a sensitive young colleague they probably like and have had dinner with a hundred times, to go and seek employment elsewhere; or as complicated as a full-bore, rollicking infidelity right in their own homes (colleges are lousy with it) — they couldn’t be more bungling, less ready, or more willing to fall to pieces because they can’t explain it to themselves, or wanting to, won’t; or worse yet, willing to deny the whole beeswax.
Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature’s consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don’t know that and who can’t forget, and for whom such knowledge isn’t a cornerstone of life.
Partly as a result, Selma Jassim and I gave ourselves up to the frothiest kind of impermanence — reveled in it, staved off regret and the memory of loss with it. (Muslims, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.)
A person with a cold eye might say what happened between Selma and me — after our romantic dinner in the starchy fireplaced Vermont Yankee Inn the very night I put X and the children on the bus — was simply an example of the usual shabby little intrigues visiting firemen in small New England colleges are expected to get embroiled in, since there’s nothing else to do from bleary week to bleary week, and you’re not really into the swing of things. And my answer is that in the grip of desperate dreaminess even the most trivial of human connections can bear a witness, and sometimes can actually improve a life that’s stranded. (Beyond that, you can never successfully argue the case for your own passions.)