Dear Committee Members: A Novel (6 page)

Perhaps you’ve familiarized yourself by now with the faculty’s areas of concentration and are wondering why Ms. Hoch-Dunn is laboring away on this particular project under my direction rather than Albert Tyne’s, given that Tyne is a Wharton specialist. The fact is that Tyne, never appealing in person, has become a lecherous eyesore avoided as a matter of course by all female (and most male) students, one of whom informed me back in September—you may want to check in on this, Ted, at your earliest convenience—that instead of visiting the urinals in the men’s room Tyne has been pissing into old wine bottles, then
(thank god for small favors) replacing the corks and arranging his collection in a foul gold ring around the perimeter of his office. I don’t doubt the truth of this accusation: I haven’t seen Tyne in the men’s room for years. Not being paid an administrator’s exalted salary, I have no intention of violating the sanctum of his uriniferous lair in order to do anything corrective, and it occurs to me that this particular duty might appropriately fall to a sociologist …

Poor Ms. Hoch-Dunn. Her other advisory options, subtracting those who have entered phased retirement or sabbatical, those who always refuse student requests for assistance as a matter of course, and the clinically insane, were Donna Lovejoy (now circulating her CV like a blackjack dealer at every conference in order to extricate herself from our department), Sandra Atherman (as am I, she is laden like a burro with advisees every semester), and me. Lance West advises the rhetoricians (and having, inexplicably, been turned down for the Campiello Award, he will probably be gone by the end of this year). Technically, yes, Ms. Hoch-Dunn might have queried Zander Hesseldine, but he is currently interested only in postcolonial theory, whereas I am—the students understand this—not afraid or ashamed to be a dinosaur, a person who reads and teaches novels (not “texts”), and who instills whenever possible during class sessions a fast-fading (and, to the students, possibly retrograde or endearing) humanistic agenda, emphasizing literary inquiry into the human experience and the human condition. As far as period and subject matter, my tastes are eclectic, but
I remain generally unmoved by floating houses and mythical grandmothers returned from the dead, which are—let’s be honest here—the contemporary equivalent of elves and unicorns.

Ms. Hoch-Dunn is, I believe, one of the best undergraduate students we have been fortunate enough to count among our majors in recent years. She is a bright spot amid the intellectual and moral decay of our department, a decay now physically manifested in our surroundings (the fax machine is broken again; a large chunk of the ceiling fell and crushed it while Gunnar was attempting to use it this morning) at the behest of the dean, the associate vice provost, and their brutal band of incompetent henchmen.

Give the award to Hoch-Dunn, and God save us all.

In dire camaraderie,

Jay

P.S.: I’m sure you read the campus newspaper’s article about our venerable colleagues in the Economics Department? Not only do their salaries make ours look like an eleven-year-old’s allowance; they will now be able to offer funding to every student admitted to the econ major. An idea here, Ted: Why don’t you inquire in the dean’s office if—once they close our department down for good—we might be rehired to clean, perhaps with cotton swabs dipped in olive oil, the gold leaf surely to be installed in the brand-new fiefdom on the Econ floor?

December 15, 2009

Torreforde State University MFA Program Admissions

77 Welshire Hall

Torreforde, MI 49004

Dear Readers and Committee Members,

Iris Temple has applied to your MFA program in fiction and has asked me to support, via this LOR, her application. I find this difficult to do, not because Ms. Temple is unqualified (she is a gifted and disciplined writer and has published several stories in appropriately obscure venues), but because your program at Torreforde State offers its graduate writers no funding or aid of any kind—an unconscionable act of piracy and a grotesque, systemic abuse of vulnerable students, to whom you extend the false hope that writing a $50,000 check to your institution will be the first step toward artistic success.

Do not suppose that I object to writing programs in general (I myself am a proud graduate of the Seminar) or that I indulge in the all-too-tiresome hand-wringing about the proliferation of MFA programs and the pseudo crisis of “too many writers.” If every member of the human race evinced a fondness for literature and even a moderate level of dexterity with the written word, I would be a happier, if not more well-adjusted, man. The
trouble arrives when students are led to expect tenure-track jobs (those days are behind us) or champagne and caviar parties at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They might as well invest in Powerball tickets: book sales continue their downward spiral, and the launch of a first or a subsequent volume is rarely the occasion for the unbridled hoopla that, in earlier days, it once was.

A quick outline of my own publication history will perhaps be instructive.

My first novel,
Stain
, sold twice as many copies as did my other three books combined, either because the marketplace, twenty years ago, was still romantically invested in the idea of a debut author, or because no one else had written an R-rated (if fictionalized) tell-all about H. Reginald Hanf and the Seminar. My literary doppelgänger, George Fitzgerald, was zealously reviled, and the novel feted, and I assumed that my success had just begun.

Alphabetical Stars
and
Save Me for Later
manifested my attempts to “stretch myself” and to demonstrate my range as a writer: I didn’t want to be typecast as a gossipy satirist limited to the material in his own backyard. But what did I know about cold war defectors and their families, or about NASA in the 1960s? Not enough: the
Chicago Tribune
called
Save Me for Later
a “poor choice of subject, a sort of weird homage to the
Stasi,” and
The Boston Globe
claimed that
Alphabetical Stars
portrayed John Glenn as “emotionally deformed.”

So. I returned in
Transfer of Affection
to familiar ground—to
Stain
’s handsome protagonist, George Fitzgerald, and to the petty rivalries and comic (and sexual) misalliances in an academic milieu. Most readers think
Stain
is my best book, but
Transfer
is more sophisticated, more nuanced, smarter. Even so, it failed to move off the shelves. It also hastened the demise of my marriage, poor George Fitzgerald’s romantic blunders hinting too clearly at a few of my own. As for current and future projects, I have been working somewhat halfheartedly on a new novel, the early chapters of which my agent greeted with all the enthusiasm of a farmer presented with a bucket of dung.

The point of this little digression, in regard to Ms. Temple, is not to discourage the practice of writing: What, after all, is a writer’s life without a dose of despair? The point is that literary endeavor has always been riddled with frustration but in recent years has become increasingly formidable; ergo my revulsion for programs like yours that, under the false pretense of support, function as succubi draining the bank accounts and lifeblood of unsuspecting students like Iris Temple, whom I (warmly) recommend to you only on the condition that you offer her free tuition, at a minimum, as well as a frank disclosure regarding a. the job market encountered by your recent graduates;
b. the dismal state of publishing; c. declining literacy rates and plummeting support for the arts.

Should Ms. Temple matriculate at Torreforde State under these conditions, I shall wish her well and be the first to welcome her to “the writing life,” which, despite its horrors, is possibly one of the few sorts of lives worth living at all.

Collegially,

Jay Fitger

Professor, Creative Writing and English—Payne

December 16, 2009

Internship Coordinator State Senator Pierce Balnearo’s Office The Halls of Power

Honorable Internship Coordinator: This letter’s purpose is to recommend to you—in the capacity of unpaid labor, presumably licking envelopes and knocking on doors—Malinda Heisman, a student in my Multicultural American Literature class. Malinda is an A student, a wide-eyed earnest individual who will undoubtedly benefit from a few months spent among the self-serving pontificates in the senator’s office.

Malinda is intelligent; she is organized; she is well spoken. Given her aptitude for research (unlike most undergraduates, she has moved beyond Wikipedia), I am sure that she will soon learn that the senator, his leathern face permanently embossed with a gruesome rictus of feigned cheer, has consistently voted against funds for higher education and has cosponsored multiple narrow-minded backwater proposals that will make it ever more difficult for her to repay the roughly $38,000 in debt that the average graduate of our institution inherits—along with a lovely blue tassel—on the day of commencement.

Malinda’s final essay in my class—here it is on my desk, among a cast of thousands—is a windy but assiduous reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s
At the Bottom of the River
. The essay demonstrates strong writing skills and rigorous thinking. Allow Malinda the privilege of laboring in your office for nothing (she’ll probably continue to work nights as a barista in the coffee empire), and I am confident you will be making, though perhaps not in the ways you might have intended, a remarkable contribution to her education.

With all best wishes, I remain Your devoted public servant, Jay Fitger, Professor of the Lost Arts Payne University

December 21, 2009

Madelyne Tort-Verona, Director

Caxton Retreat Center

Caxton, WY 82201

Dear Elegant Madelyne, aka MTV:

It’s been too long—ten years?—since we ran into each other at the Western Writers conference in Denver. I remember sitting with you at the hotel bar, each of us (all right, yes, full disclosure, it was mainly me) unpacking the sordid facts of our professional and then our personal lives. Janet and I were still together then, but not very happily, and you had just gotten married, and you had come to the conference for a panel on writing about trauma and disability because you were interviewing for the job at Caxton, in the High Plains of Wyoming. I take my hat off to you, truly. I hope you’ve forgotten most of what you learned, that weekend, about me.

You may already have guessed that I’m writing to ask you a favor. I know that Caxton is designated for PTSD sufferers and survivors of military violence (I remember you telling me about the phantom pain in your husband’s leg and the way he used to wake at night, convinced his foot had returned, his missing toes scrabbling against the sheet), but my understanding is that you occasionally treat civilian PTSD as well. And so I’m wondering
if, out there on the plains, perhaps midwinter or spring, you might find yourself with a vacancy and be inspired, for the sake of that evening at the conference or in memory of our Seminar days, to accept as a working client an exceptional student and advisee, Darren Browles. I wouldn’t bother to plead his case with you under ordinary conditions—that goes without saying. Of course he’s working on an unprecedented novel (I’m including the opening chapter here so you can see for yourself)—but more germane in this case, he’s in dire need and probably meets 90 percent of the criteria for a posttraumatic classification. May I explain?

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,
^*1
and 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,
^*2
and 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
.