Dear Committee Members: A Novel (12 page)

Perhaps it’s a godsend you and I never had a child.

Did I tell you I wrote to HRH? You may find that a ludicrous gesture, but it occurred to me that he might use his (waning) influence to benefit Browles.
*
And, by the by, where does Eleanor get off, telling you that Browles’s “Bartleby” excerpt was “an
unholy mess”? He hasn’t had adequate time to revise, and he feels like an orphan now that the safety net of the graduate program’s benefits is being sliced out from under his feet. Say what you like about the Seminar: we were all funded back then, and we may not have lived high on the hog, but neither were we plunged into financial crisis. I tell you, Janet, I am becoming soft and sentimental; I spend more and more time thinking back to the group of us hungering around HRH and the Seminar table: our yearning kept us alive and enriched us. And now that our bowls have been filled and we’ve been sent off with our dollops of gruel—what enriches us now?

I so enjoyed our lunch back in February. It was good to hear that you’re writing again. I have a vision of myself from the early days of our marriage, hunched like a bullfrog at the paint-splattered table overlooking the Welligers’ garage, concocting a supposed work of genius and barely mumbling an acknowledgment when you knocked at the door to tell me you were going to accept the job at the law school. You’d sealed your manuscript into a series of manila envelopes and filed them on a shelf in the closet. And there I was, typing like a madman (I used to allow myself a shot of Prairie Vodka after every five pages; I should have smacked my skull with a plank instead), imagining myself a Brilliant Young American Novelist. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Could we schedule an additional lunch this year? Why should we limit ourselves to two?

Louise promised me she would contact you ASAP. Prepare yourself: She used to be stoic and unruffleable, but given the arrival of X (I’ve urged her to file for a birth certificate and lengthen his name), she has become a weeper. Keep an eye on the trembling lower lip.

Forever your ex-spouse,

Jay

P.S.: How did you end up with a copy of the LOR I wrote for Carole, to Shepardville? I agree it was somewhat draconian—and I’ve tried to apologize to Carole, but she won’t answer my e-mails and no longer allows me into her office. Realistically, though: Was I supposed to stand by, twiddling my thumbs, while on my account she threw her career down the toilet? If my LOR outraged you so much, I suppose you could write her a letter yourself. But would Carole interpret that gesture as solidarity? Or as your own (subconscious) desire to see her leave town?

*
As for your suggestion that Browles appeal for emergency funding to the grad student council: that body is commandeered, as per usual, by a group of unshaven Stalinists—still, I passed the idea along.

April 13, 2010

Peter B. Andrews, Executive Editor Folkstone Publishing

26 Ulysses Avenue, Suite B

Chicago, IL 60618

Dear Peter Andrews,

In response to your e-mail query received this morning, I’m delighted to endorse Ken Doyle’s recommendation that Folkstone reissue Troy Larpenteur’s exquisite debut,
Second Mind. Second Mind
was an underappreciated landmark when Folkstone took a chance and premiered it almost seventeen years ago; now, of course, it’s a cult classic, copies of which are jealously traded and difficult to find. I thoroughly agree with Ken’s suggestion regarding the William Gass remarks—they should be prominently displayed on the front cover—and the reuse of H. Reginald Hanf’s original blurb on the back. You might also solicit a paragraph of praise from Eleanor Acton, who has, as you probably know, offered Troy a coveted teaching-free residency at Bentham. And finally, yes, I can vouch for academic interest in the book, which will be assigned here at Payne and at other universities in both creative writing and contemporary literature classes.

Folkstone’s timing on this reissue is truly fortuitous: Troy’s long-awaited and groundbreaking second volume (sworn to secrecy
about its content, I’ve read only a few remarkable excerpts) will more than live up to and increase the buzz surrounding his first.

Please keep me apprised as to the (re)publication schedule, as I generally complete larger orders of required books for classroom use three months ahead, and let me know if there is anything I can do to help promote the work of this very talented man.

With genuine as well as vicarious pleasure, J. Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

Author,
Stain; Alphabetical Stars; Save Me for Later;
and
Transfer of Affection

April 16, 2010

Office of Mental Health and Wellness Intervention Team

Attention: Suzanne Gross, MSW, LP

Dear Ms. Gross,

Having disposed of the budding psychopath, Mr. Wyatt Innes, I am sending to your office with this letter in hand a human bath of tears named Ida Lin-Smith, who tells me she called your office for an appointment and was turned away. I did not inquire as to her malady, but a simple glance in her direction suffices to inform me that she requires attention. Please offer her something more lasting and substantial than guided breathing or twenty minutes with a golden retriever.

I sometimes wonder, Ms. Gross, about the source of such widespread unhappiness. I imagine a manufactory of anxiety and sorrow belching out clouds of discontent on the north side of campus. (Some miseries, of course, are self-inflicted. You are probably aware of my e-mail fiasco at the end of last summer, my “reply to all” message disclosing to every member of the faculty, staff, and administration my desire to rekindle a relationship with my ex-wife, Janet Matthias—a blunder that inspired the good Carole Samarkind to sever forever our romantic ties. I am increasingly prone to mistakes of this sort,
perhaps because of the ticker tape of LORs that travels ceaselessly through my pen.
Please admit this woman into your program. Please give this unsocialized person some funding. Please offer this mediocre student a chance to improve his condition. Pleasepleasepleaseplease
.) Never mind, Ms. Gross. I advocate here for the lachrymose Ms. Lin-Smith—still weeping patiently in my office chair—and not for myself. I am fine, I assure you.

Yours in this watery chasm, Professor Jay Fitger

April 19, 2010

Theodore Boti,
Kapellmeister
and Chair Department of English

Dear Ted,

In response to your clarion call for nominations for the four-hundred-dollar summer research fellowship for undergraduate majors (can’t we locate some wealthier donors? over in the business school, bronze plaques are crowded with the names of benefactor alums), I hereby forward the application of Gunnar Lang.

Lang has done a knock-up job in the department this year, mastering the enigmas of copying, stapling, and filing; furthermore, you may recall that he was nearly decapitated back in December by a chunk of plaster that fell from the ceiling onto the fax machine while he was standing beside it—this only twenty-four hours after the engineers chuckled away our anxieties about the crevasse that had opened like a kraken’s mouth above the mailroom door.

Lang is proposing next year to produce an exegesis of Tim O’Brien’s
In the Lake of the Woods;
if awarded the funds he will presumably put them to use in July and August by availing himself of the foul-smelling vending machine sandwiches
in Appleton Library while immersing himself in a study of narrative uncertainty and violence: a summer well spent. Furthermore, Lang is unflappable about the near beheading and has not yet sued us. The four hundred dollars seems a small price to pay for his silence.

I can vouch for Lang’s integrity, having seen him deposit fifty cents in the till in exchange for the liquid our department elects to call coffee. (Franklin Kentrell, on the other hand, has been known to regard the coffee till as a personal scholarship fund for his lunch.) Please bestow the fellowship on Lang.

Signing off with the usual commitment to righteousness and justice, Jay Fitger, Winner’s Circle

American Letter of Recommendation Society P.S.: I assume it was someone’s idea of a joke to insert in the minutes from last week’s budget meeting the idea of my serving as associate chair? Given your three-year mandate to “turn English around,” I presumed that—if you needed assistance quelling the rabble—you’d search for some hapless junior faculty member who lacked the clout to refuse. As for me, I am probably the least likely associate chair you could find. No one would listen to me; I seldom listen to myself.

April 23, 2010

Leticia Alistair Flanders Nut House

771 Glass Lake Road

Glass Lake, WI 54153

Dear Ms. Alistair, This letter recommends to you my student, Oliver Postiglione, who informs me that he has applied for a summer job at Flanders Nut House at the south end of Glass Lake. In a strange coincidence, I spent one summer—during my teenage years, but indelibly impressed upon me—in the timeless village of Glass Lake; and as if I were at this very moment standing on the cracked sidewalk in front of it, I can envision the screen door of the Nut House slapping shut in the breeze and recall the smell of my favorite purchase, the roasted almonds wrapped, still warm and lightly salted, in a paper cone. I hope for the sake of Mr. Postiglione’s dignity your establishment no longer requires its most junior employee to dress as a human cashew.

You will want to ascertain that Mr. Postiglione is trustworthy, hardworking, and of pleasant affect: he is all three. A member of my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop, he is currently writing a one-act play about a serial killer/scientist who saves humankind from a world-ending virus by discovering a method
of harvesting corpses to create a vaccine. The concept is gruesome and not very original, but Mr. Postiglione’s workmanlike approach to the project’s completion is to be admired.

I hope the gold lettering continues to grace the façade of the Nut House, its broad front window perfectly reflecting the water’s stillness. Though I have not returned to Glass Lake for forty years, one never forgets the places in which one felt pure.

As for Mr. Postiglione: he will learn quickly, whether waiting on customers behind the pristine white tile counter or assisting with packages in back. I recommend him to you warmly and without hesitation, in part because writing letters of reference such as this one allows me to reinhabit, if only fleetingly, the pensive, knock-kneed person I once was and to advocate for that former version of myself as well as for Oliver Postiglione. Please do hire him; I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life.

Commemoratively, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

April 29, 2010

Philip Hinckler, Dean

College of Arts and Sciences

1 MacNeil Hall

Dear Dean Hinckler,

Firmly situated between the proverbial rock and its opposing hard place, I am in this letter recommending that your office, in its infinite wisdom, renew and continue the provisional appointment of Theodore Boti, social scientist cum litterateur, as English Department chair. In my wildest nightmares I never imagined that I would make or endorse such a recommendation, akin to Hamlet naming Uncle Claudius counsel (
Hamlet
is a play by a writer named William Shakespeare; I’ll send you a copy on some other occasion)—but these are desperate and difficult times.

Mindful of your office’s infatuation with all things pithy and straightforward,
*
I offer below a cogent list of reasons why Boti—duck out of water that he is—should continue as chair.

1. A single year of any administrative responsibility is pointless. Boti hasn’t yet reached the first fat dot on the learning curve. As chair, he will most likely fail—after which my colleagues and I will condemn him—but subsequent to a traditional three-year term, our condemnation and Boti’s failure will be seen to occur on more solid ground.

2. In the context of the hiring freeze—purportedly imposed on all departments but inflicted mainly on English and the Lilliputian units—and in light of our diminution via recent retirements, we can’t afford to sacrifice even one teaching colleague to the funeral pyre of administration. You want undergraduates who can write, think, and read? Stop pretending that writing can be taught across the curriculum by geologists and physicists who wouldn’t recognize a dependent clause if it bit them on the ass.

3. Boti’s a sociologist. And yes, sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet’s surface; still, Boti was a student once, drawn during some primeval past to the study of human communities and social organizations, and as such he is likely to possess an albeit long-buried interest in the operation of a collective. If nothing else, he may get an academic paper out of the experience (though who’d want to read it?).

4. Boti loves protocol and detail. Your office loves protocol and detail. Nuff said.

5. Finally and perhaps most important: despite himself, Boti lately evinces an incipient understanding of the dilemmas of our woebegone department, and this dawning knowledge may eventually lead him to advocate for its health and well-being. Witness, for example, his mild amazement when informed that English has shrunk in the past eight years by more than 20 percent. See the wrinkle in his snowy brow upon learning that our student fellowships have been slashed, our graduate programs defunded, our classroom sizes increased, our faculty research and travel funds canceled, the student literary journal paid for by donations collected on street corners in aluminum cans, and on and on. You may have intended his installation as outside chair as a punitive wake-up call for our department, but I am not sure the arrangement has resulted as planned.