Dear Committee Members: A Novel (9 page)

You have asked for my candid assessment of Tamar Auden, applicant for the position of assistant professor, tenure track, with concentrations in British literature, rhetoric, and creative writing. And, yes, you are correct in assuming that Dr. Auden was, as an undergraduate, my advisee, though she went on to receive an MA in women’s history, an MA in rhetoric/comp, and a PhD in English (her thesis focusing on the Lake poets). But she began as a fiction/fantasy writer, and it was in my classroom where she first sketched out what would become the series of young
adult fantasy/sci-fi novels (volume one arriving in bookstores a few months ago) involving a fellowship of teenage aliens who infiltrate a Midwestern boarding school and perform social and intellectual experiments on its hapless young pupils. I suspect the series has inspired you to request this letter—presumably to head off querulousness within your department regarding the potential hire of a “popular” writer. In answer to your unasked questions: yes, I have read the first volume; and no, I am not intending to read volumes two, three, or four—but my lack of enthusiasm for extraterrestrial rapscallions is irrelevant to your search.

Here’s the pertinent question: Who in god’s name, given the ad your department placed, would argue to turn Dr. Auden down? DiCameron is a small college with limited means: you’ve clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women’s studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above. As for the aliens: picture the 3-D version of Dr. Auden’s first installment,
Experiment Nineteen
, at the multiplex. Has anyone outside the state of Florida heard of DiCameron College? They soon will if you hire Dr. Auden. And consider the financial benefits: she won’t need to argue for niggling raises every year, because she’ll be earning royalties that will put her faculty salary—and yours—to shame.

I don’t mean to be overly facetious, and frankly I salute Dr. Auden and anyone else who can procure a publishing contract during the era of My Personal Screen. The market is forbidding: my own new work has been met with a marked lack of interest by my agent—erstwhile colleague and friend—and most of my backlist is now out of print. (I am reduced to hunting for used copies at the local secondhand store, the proprietor, Alvin, taking sadistic pleasure in stashing my books on a grimy shelf behind the desk, bookmarking the title pages to reveal the inscriptions:
To Devon, in friendship. To Kim: hope to see your own book on these shelves soon! To Carole—Yours always, Jay
.)
*

You and your colleagues have nothing to fear from Dr. Auden and her otherworldly teens, who will not spell the demise of Wordsworth and Coleridge: they are dead anyway. Moreover, Dr. Auden is exactly the candidate you are seeking to hire. Working eighty hours per week at a minimum, eschewing hobbies and fitness, she will show up in class with a ribbon of toilet paper unfurling higgledy-piggledy from the sole of her shoe.
Her school-uniformed aliens will make her a hit with your students, whom she will lure into your department with the promise of sci-fi—signing them up along the way for any of your low-enrollment classes that require a boost.

Good luck to her and to all of us, Camilla—and congratulations on the tenure-track line. We aren’t hiring in the liberal arts at Payne, and as a result I fear we are the last remaining members of a dying profession. We who are senior and tenured are seated in the first car of a roller coaster with a broken track, and we’re scribbling and grading our way to the death fall at the top. The stately academic career featuring black-robed professors striding confidently across the campus square is already fading; and, though I’ve often railed against its eccentricities, I want to proclaim here that I believe our mission and our way of life to have been admirable and lovely, steeped with purpose and worth defending. But we are nearly at the tipping point, I suspect, and will soon be a thing of the past.

How I wish you were sitting at the edge of the red vinyl chair in my office again, twisting the hem of your skirt with your fingers (I’m sure you broke yourself of that habit), asking if I would do you the favor of writing a letter.

Feel free to excerpt this missive before sharing it with other members of your department.

Delighted to have had this chance to be in touch once more, I am pleased to call myself

Your former professor and advisor,

Jason Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English

*
I am always taken aback when students confide in me that beneath their desire to write lies a quest for permanence. It’s odd but touching, I think, that even during this disposable age, while consigning great mountains of refuse to landfills and to atolls of plastic in the Pacific, these young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

February 16, 2010

Office of Mental Health and Wellness Intervention Team Attention: Suzanne Gross, MSW, LP

Dear Ms. Gross,

I am referring to your office for the second time, and now with greater urgency, one Wyatt Innes, a member of my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop. I taught Innes a year ago in the American Literature Survey, at which point you may remember I alerted you to his penchant for observing pornography on his laptop during class. To the other students’ relief, his attendance faltered, and he eventually failed.

Now he is back, twitching and muttering in a windowless corner of my seminar room, a jumble of notebooks clutched to his chest, and if you could see his rigid, tormented expression you would appreciate how annoying I have found your office’s unctuous reminders about the importance of sensitivity to Mr. Innes’s and other students’ “diverse learning needs.” My remaining twenty-nine students’ needs presumably include not being terrorized by a psychotic maniac, a person who, in fulfillment of a “character sketch” assignment, turned in forty-five pages of rambling and meaningless gore.

As a professor of creative writing I am thoroughly accustomed to students’ depictions of haunted mine shafts, exsanguinations in graveyards, self-mutilation via power tool, sex between gargoyle and human, and illness and torment and abuse of both mundane and incongruous kinds. But Mr. Innes’s frenetic rancor is of another order.

I do not sound the alarm lightly, Ms. Gross. Please be advised that, for the second time, I am hereby raising the Flag of Warning; should Mr. Innes initiate a rampage, I will point my finger squarely at you.

Yours in the trenches of academe, Jay Fitger

Crisis Management Team/Creative Writing Program

February 17, 2010

Maladin IT Associates Sarah Goodlet, Director, HR

2115 Princeton Avenue

Woodbury, MN 55125

Dear Ms. Goodlet,

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT.

As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help—aka Mr. Napp—only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the “save” button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one’s only recourse—unpalatable though it may be—is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one’s limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the
inner organs of neighbors and friends—all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed.

Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former mason or carpenter or salesman—someone over the age of twenty-five—is at this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will, upon taking over from Mr. Napp, refrain (at least in the presence of anxious faculty seeking his or her help) from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs to both colleagues and friends. I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences—perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm.

As for Mr. Napp: you are welcome to him.

Your sincere correspondent, Jay Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English

February 22, 2010

KBPZ Payne University Radio “The Sound of Payne”

Butler Union, 4th floor Attention: Brian Lefkowitz Salutations, Brian!

Having just learned of KBPZ’s recent windfall—every campus radio station should have an aging millionaire alum—I am delighted to come to your aid by recommending for one of your soon-to-be-expanded programs a graduate student and future blockbuster novelist, Darren Browles. Browles is not just a cut above the usual palaverers and symposiarchs of the airwaves; he’s three cuts above and would be an ideal anchor for enhanced arts and literature coverage (currently scheduled at an hour when no sane or well-adjusted person is awake to hear it), or for film reviews, or editorial work behind the scenes. Browles is exceptional—bright, articulate, and extremely well read. And in case you’re concerned that he might resemble his advisor: be assured that he would sooner elicit others’ views than spout his own.

If you could hire him by the end of the month, I’d appreciate it. To be honest, Brian—honesty is my new ambition, a belated New Year’s resolution—Browles is in a troublesome place. He
owes back rent, he’s staggering under his student loans like Atlas with his sphere of the heavens, and I need him to finish this blasted book and sell it so I can argue for the continuance of our graduate program. For god’s sake, give him a job that will help him keep the wolf from his door. If I had research money (those days are long gone), I’d pay him to do something: to purge my file drawer of incriminating correspondence or starch and iron my cap and gown. I’ll send him over to your office in Butler this week. He may look a bit gaunt (these twenty-somethings love to dress as if each day required their presence at an Irish wake), but I assure you he is diligent, quick, modest, clearheaded, and thorough—and he will be grateful for any manner of work. I’ll owe you one, Brian.

Planting yet another bright seed in Payne’s fertile soil, Jay

P.S.: I hope the minor dustup you and I experienced last fall during KBPZ’s coverage of the arts fair is well behind us.
I
bear no grudges …

February 26, 2010

Thank you for responding to the Pentalion Corporation’s request for a reference for
David Cormier
.
Pentalion values confidentiality and will not share your answers to it’s inquiries with the applicant
.

1. In what capacity and how long have you known the applicant?

David Cormier is an English major and my advisee, due to receive his BA degree at the end of the current semester. I have known him for approximately two years.

2. Describe the applicant’s skills and preparedness for a career with Pentalion
.

Mr. Cormier, a survivor of my expository writing class, will assuredly not—as the Pentalion Corporation has done above—confuse “its” with “it’s,” the latter to be used only as a contraction for the two words “it is.” Nor will he ever again confuse “lie” and “lay”: these are two distinct verbs.

3. Can you think of any reasons why the Pentalion Corporation should not hire the applicant?

Yes. Pentalion is a subsidiary of Koron Chemical, a government contractor known to be a major producer of
weaponry used overseas. I would not wish any current or former student to be employed by Pentalion; once
its
leadership masters the basics of punctuation, it should be closed down.

Thank you
.

March 1, 2010

Eleanor Acton,
Frau Direktor

Bentham Literary Residency Program P.O. Box 1572

Bentham, ME 04976

Dear Eleanor,

Before you consign this letter to the shredder that surely waits, voraciously humming, at the edge of your desk for any sign of correspondence from me, let me assure you that I write today not on my own behalf or that of my “protégé” (your word), but to ask you to create a spot at Bentham for Troy. You saw the William Gass essay in the latest
New York Review of Books
? Gass called Troy’s
Second Mind
a “work of acute intelligence, beautifully formed and undeservedly neglected.”
WILLIAM. GASS
. I made three copies of the essay and sent them to Troy. I’ve asked for his street address but he still admits only to the P.O.

Here’s my question for you, as director of Bentham: Do you intend to invite Troy for a residency before the literazzi find out how to reach him? Or are you planning to wait until after he’s (re)discovered and his dance card is filled? Yes, I know that Bentham residents are admitted or invited based on a written proposal; but Troy is constitutionally incapable of promoting
his work, and if you ask him to submit a sample he’ll claim he’s given up writing, which is completely untrue. Do you remember how self-effacing he was in the Seminar, even with HRH busting his chops—
Mr. Larpenteur, do you have work for us or don’t you?
And Troy absently finger tracing a burl in the wooden table, his Tennessee voice soft like thick syrup,
I don’t believe I have much to show for myself this week, Reg, I’m not certain yet whether I …
until someone threatened to ransack the canvas bag that always slumped like a dog at his feet, at which point Troy would finally distribute a handful of pages. And whatever he had written was un-fucking-believable, we’d reread it later with our mouths half open because he was so brilliant, his work so staggering, he made you want to run your fingers through a table saw and never pick up a pencil again.