A New Life (6 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life
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“What I meant to say, is what brought you out this way? We hear from all over, true, but rarely New York.”
“I wanted a change—” Levin hesitated.
“From the city?—”
“That’s right,” he said with relief. “I’m grateful to you and Dr. Gilley for—”
“You’ve spoken to Gerald about the department, I take it? Our program and course offerings are limited. Have you examined the college catalogue?”
“I have, sir.” He had discovered a glut of composition, bonehead grammar, and remedial reading, over about a dozen skimpy literature courses.
“What did he tell you?”
“He said the people around were nice to work with. He—er—also mentioned your grammar text.”
“Did he say anything about the history and purposes of the department? We’re pretty much service oriented. Our school, for example, is called The Liberal Arts Service Division. Did he go into that?”
“Not exactly, sir. But he told me about the liberal arts, that they were—”
“Our main function, as I always tell everyone we employ here, is to satisfy the needs of the professional schools on the campus with respect to written communication. In science and technology men must be taught to communicate with the strictest accuracy, therefore we teach more composition than anything else in this department. Our literature offerings aren’t very diversified or extensive but they’re adequate to our purpose.”
“I was hoping to teach a lit course,” Levin said, “—that is, if it were possible.”
Professor Fairchild seemed not to have heard.
“There’s talk, now that the new dean is on campus—his name is unfortunate, Seagram—that we may in the future be called on for something more than we’re presently offering in the way of literature, perhaps even to produce English majors, but I’ve heard that false alarm several times in recent years and it hasn’t come to a hill of beans. I don’t put much stock in it, not because I don’t want it to come to pass—I do—but because I know intimately and practically the needs of this community. Ours is a land economy based on forestry—the Douglas fir and ponderosa pine for the most part; and agriculture—grains, grasses, flowers and some fruit. Our fishing industry is important too. We need foresters, farmers, engineers, agronomists, fish-and-game people, and every sort of extension agent. We need them—let’s be frank—more than we need English majors. You can’t fell a tree, run a four-lane highway over a mountain, or build a dam with poetry.”
He chuckled to himself, drawing on his cigarette holder. Levin bent to tighten a shoelace but the smoke blew in another direction.
“Certainly I’m for English majors—I was one myself—but there are other colleges in the state that do a good job of training them better than we can presently, with our orientation and limited resources. My own point of view is that we
ought to take pride in doing well a task that has to be done, though I’m frank to confess there are one or two in the department who don’t see it quite my way, but that’s their problem.”
He dipped the cigarette into an ash tray and left it smoking. The halo in his hair had faded, a trick of some passing cloud. As if conscious of that he ran a lacking hand through his hair.
“What was I saying? Well, I’ve made my point.”
Levin nodded.
The old man picked up a ball-point pen and ticked off something he had written on a pink pad. He nearsightedly scanned the paper.
“Oh, yes.” He turned to Levin. “Now I hope it won’t unsettle you if I offer you a word of advice or two as a young man about to embark on his first college teaching venture. A word now may prevent future misunderstanding.”
“Of course—”
“This department won’t ask much of you in the way of research and the publication of small papers on matters of varying degrees of useless information—that’s the headache of the big universities, to what effect I haven’t been able to determine—but we
do
ask you to teach conscientiously and well. Get to know
The Elements
and give your students plenty of wholesome, snappy drill. You know,” he said, “I’ve often wondered what we can expect of our American college graduates when so many of them don’t even know the rules of syntax of their own language.”
Levin agreed.
The professor scanned his pad and leaned back in his chair. “There are two kinds of people I deplore in the teaching profession. One is the misfit who sneaks in to escape his inadequacy elsewhere and who ought to be booted out—and isn’t very often; and the other is the aggressive pest whose one purpose is to upset other people’s applecarts, and the more apples, the better. We’ve had both types here, to our sorrow, and what’s worse, sometimes in one and the same person.”
The old man spoke sadly. “Leo Duffy comes to mind, a man no longer with us. Did Gerald tell you?”
“He mentioned him.”
“He was—God forgive me—a nuisance of the thirty-second degree, irresponsible and perverse. He came here just two years ago—no, three.” He coughed. “Two is correct, in ’48. It was when Henry Wallace was running for president, something that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. That was a disastrous year. I remember my wife’s brother, poor fellow, broke both legs in a tumble off his roof when he was erecting a TV aerial, the first in Easchester.”
Levin, slowly stroking his beard, listened intently.
“Duffy was an ex-Catholic or something of the sort, from the South Chicago area. He was a handsome man in his way, with a wild head of Irish hair, intense eyes and a prominent jaw. He gave the impression of being thin and loose-jointed, maybe he was. When he appeared in this office my first thought was, here’s an odd one now, get rid of him quickly; but his Gaelic charm was effectual and I neglected my warning to myself and later had to pay for it. He came to us very well recommended. Either he had forged his credentials, or he broke down here for causes unknown. In a short time he became a serious menace.”
His eyes examined Levin, who, though he itched, forced himself not to scratch.
“His first term here—a terrible reflection on his teaching ability—he failed more than fifty percent of his composition students, and it gave us all a pretty headache before we could get that mess cleaned up. Luckily, my secretary called my attention to what he had done before we submitted the grades to the registrar, who would have been fit to be tied. In the end, after much frantic work we managed to reduce his failures to less than half the original number, though a figure still much above the department average of from three to five percent. For the moment at least we had managed to prevent a scandal.”
Levin leaned forward. “Was he fired?”
“Not quite. Another characteristic of Duffy’s was that he was unable to fit himself to the most elementary demands of a schedule and was constantly late to class, conference, meeting—you name it. Regularity, with respect to time, meant nothing to him. He graded papers, accumulated in a pile on his desk all term long, in one mad week at the end of each quarter, staying up nights with the assistance of pills; then returning hundreds of themes and quizzes in ferocious batches a day or so before the d.o., having deprived his students of the benefit of learning from previous papers what errors to avoid on later ones. I subsequently learned that he threw away, ungraded and unrecorded, more than one set of themes, because his dachshund, which had been trained to react on paper, wet on them. He apparently did his grading on the floor.”
“Tst-tst.”
“Where do you grade your papers, Mr. Levin?”
“Strictly at my desk, sir.”
“That’s as it should be. He wasn’t a bad sort in his way but he became a problem with his numerous complaints against what he called, as if it were a dirty word, ‘the status quo.’ He wanted to reform us all in the shortest possible time—I’d say a week. I can stand legitimate criticism; as a matter of fact I invite it every time I prepare a new edition of my grammar, but the criticism of a man who is against you every minute of the day, who challenges everything you do, your ability and sincerity, even your purpose in life, without considering his own, eventually grates on people’s nerves. Gerald—” he paused—“well, Gerald hated him.”
“Was that why he was fired—if I may ask?”
“It all added up. I had a good deal of patience with him. He had, as I say, a certain charm. Still, there was no slowing him down or changing his erratic course. You thought you had repaired some harm he had done, and he promised to be careful and considerate, then a new incident occurred. For example, during the spring term—I beg your pardon, it was the
winter—no, I’m wrong, it was the spring—after campaigning for Wallace he embraced another lost cause; but that was after a period of radicalism during which he asked his freshmen to write on the Moscow Trials, Lenin and Trotsky, the Lysenko theory and other controversial subjects I’m sure they knew nothing about. Some of the students who complained about him said he encouraged discussions of Marxism in his classes. Now I would like you to know, Mr. Levin, that I have no objection to an honest discussion of these subjects, though they certainly don’t relate to our
Science in Tech
reader, but I’m sure you’ll agree Marxism is specialized subject matter that ought to be confined to mature history or political science courses and not be intruded into freshmen composition. To give you some idea how far astray he went, Mr. Gallegher, our book store manager, called me one morning to tell me that Duffy had placed an order for one hundred and twenty-five copies of
The Communist Manifesto
as supplementary reading matter. I can tell you we soon scotched that.”
The professor’s cigarette ash dropped on the desk blotter. He blew it away and Levin sneezed.
“Don’t you smoke?” the old man inquired. “Would you care for a cigarette?”
“I gave it up.” Levin blew his nose.
“That shows will power.”
“Not much, sir.”
“Nevertheless,” said Professor Fairchild, “towards the end of the academic year he was engaged in collecting funds on the campus for some radical group or other, I think they were called ‘The Committee of Anti-Fascist Scientists’ or some such name. You may remember that group, or one with a similar-sounding name, is on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. In fairness to all, I’ll say I proceeded in this matter with the patience of a saint, because Duffy sometimes seemed to me to be like an overgrown boy challenging authority—but finally my patience wore thin.”
He rubbed out his cigarette, detached it from the holder,
flipped it into the wastebasket and leaned back in his creaking chair. For a minute his eyes were shut.
Opening them, he said, “You’ll have a good idea what I went through after I tell you the following incident, although it’s embarrassing to me.”
“Please don’t, if—”
“One Sunday afternoon about a week before Commencement I was relaxing in my tub. My wife was entertaining Mrs. Feeney, our former dean’s wife, at tea, when Leo Duffy rang the door bell and had the effrontery to solicit a contribution for his radical scientists’ group, but of course Josephine refused. Apparently annoyed, he demanded to see me. She foolishly let him in. Spying Mrs. Feeney there, either out of perversity, or malice, he asked her for a contribution. Now this lady is nobody’s fool. She was raised in New England and is head of our local Anti-Liquor League, where Josephine is the first vice-president. Mrs. Feeney told Duffy that if he tried to collect good American money for bad foreign causes he might soon find himself without a position at CC. This was nothing more than an informal warning; she obviously had no authority, either direct or indirect, since her husband was retiring, to cause him to be fired. Let’s just say she was giving him a bit of motherly advice.
“But Duffy was infuriated. He said he wouldn’t stand for that kind of talk from anybody. His gestures were violent, he was practically shouting. They were afraid he might physically attack them—that is to say, with his fists. Half asleep in my tub I was awakened by the commotion and thought the house was burning down—he was loudly repeating the word ‘fired.’ Naturally I jumped out of the tub, and before I had thought twice, ran out into the living room in my birthday suit—”
Professor Fairchild chuckled.
Levin brought out his nail file, wondered why, and quickly returned it to his pocket.
“Mrs. Feeney passed out. My wife, without thinking, threw
a cup of tea at me, the tea not the up, and Duffy went into a fit of maniacal laughter, the like on which I had never heard before. I then determined he would thereafter laugh out of the other side of his mouth.
“‘Mr. Duffy,’ I said as calmly as I could—I had by this time a bath towel around my middle, and Mrs. Feeney had been revived with Josephine’s smelling salts—‘I hereby give you notice that you will be asked to leave this college as soon as the Administrative Regulations permit.’ Well, you should have seen his expression. I can’t exactly describe it, though to this day I still clearly recollect it. It combined anger, haughtiness, and comprehension of defeat, although I will say he looked more deplorable a few days later when he was publicly discharged from his position by Dr. Marion Labhart, the president of this college.”
Levin, on the edge of his seat, asked, “Because of the incident—?”

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