Dear Committee Members: A Novel (4 page)

The only other information I can offer you about Ms. Newcome is that during the semester she was enrolled in my class she was having a difficult time. Students don’t generally confide in me regarding their personal crises (I am not known for being particularly approachable or cuddly), but Ms. Newcome did, and I remember that in the interstices of our conversation she chewed at the lime-green polish—an unfortunate color—on her fingernails. A few weeks later I asked if her situation had improved and she said it had not, but she was “learning to accommodate.” I found that impressive, and remembering Ms. Newcome now—though my file drawer contains thousands of lives
*
for which I often find myself feeling accountable—I realize I am well disposed in her favor; in fact, I thoroughly urge you to offer her a job.

Why? Because, as a student of literature and creative writing, Ms. Newcome honed crucial traits that will be of use to you: imagination, patience, resourcefulness, and empathy. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

I believe Ms. Newcome eminently capable of the work for which she has applied.

With good wishes for your tiny charges, Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

*
By recent estimate I have penned more than 1,300 letters of recommendation, many of them enthusiastic, some a cry of despair.

November 6, 2009

Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Lefferts Hall

Attention: Associate VP Samuel Millhouse

Dear Associate Vice Provost Millhouse,

The purpose of this letter is to bolster the promotion and tenure case of Professor Martina Ali here at our esteemed institution of higher learning. I am not a member of Professor Ali’s Film Studies Program, but the Honorable Pooh-Bahs in your office have decreed that P&T dossiers be encumbered with no fewer than six missives of support, and Professor Ali is one of only three faculty members in her own modest department. Such is the wisdom that prevails at Payne.

I’ll get around to my evaluation of Professor Ali. But I have a few other things on my mind also, and it would be foolish of me, I think—it would be remiss—if I didn’t take this opportunity to address a few of them. After all, how often does a lowly professor of creative writing and English have the ear of the associate VP? Perhaps I should intercalate my own laundry list of items throughout my evaluation of Martina—she does stellar research—threading them into the fabric of this letter like stinging nettles. We’ll see how things go.

First—Professor Ali’s monograph on warfare in European film: While some members of her discipline have adopted an almost psychedelic approach to their choice of material, delivering conference papers and fashioning entire semester-long courses on the topic of toothpaste commercials or videos of tumbleweeds bounding along by the side of a road,
*
Professor Ali is invested in significance. Her work combines rigorous historical research, film scholarship, and psychoanalytic theory—and her goal is enlightenment, not obfuscation. She has justifiably won the Longfreth Prize (twice!), the panel of judges likening her scholarship to the work of Alperovitz and Harms, pioneers in the field.

Ali is publishing in some of her discipline’s top venues.
Comparative Film and Culture
in particular—a highly selective, peer-reviewed journal—is a scholarly coup.

Given her publications, her increasingly national reputation, and her teaching record (eleven advisees!), Ali is a shoo-in. We both know that. I hope her department chair musters the reams of paperwork needed to satisfy your army of bean counters in Lefferts Hall. A divagation here: Have you entered Willard Hall lately? In case, over there among the functional radiators and other amenities in Lefferts, you’ve forgotten that English faculty members are living in a construction zone, allow me to
give you a virtual tour. The front and back doors of our building are blocked—sealed and crisscrossed with yellow tape as if to indicate a crime scene—so you must enter through the basement. But don’t use the elevator, a nightmarish herk-and-jerk contraption known to hijack its occupants and leave them stranded midfloor. You can’t access the second (Econ) floor in any case: a silken banner advises you to
PARDON OUR MESS!
—a euphemistic reference to the fact that workers equipped with respirators are spilling toxins onto our heads in the servants’ quarters, where, once you overlook the chipped and ancient linoleum and the cracks in the wallboard, you will find a sign that welcomes visitors, eloquently, to the Department of
ENGLI_H
.

Professor Ali’s teaching record is, without doubt, superb. The only smudge on it results from the fact that some clueless sadist assigned her an introductory lecture course during her first two semesters on campus (which would have been an occasion for spectacular failure for most junior faculty—but Professor Ali’s evaluations were well above par).

A note here—excuse the indelicacy—on the men’s room in Willard: a subtle but incessant dripping from a pipe in the ceiling (perhaps from the Jacuzzi or bidet being installed for our Economics colleagues) is gradually transforming this previously charming depot into a fetid cavern. The tile floor is often slick with liquids and, because desperate citizens have propped the door open, odors now regularly waft out into the hall. I might as well set my desk next to the urinals.

In sum, Ali’s is an open-and-shut case, yet another occasion for faculty members to set their work aside in order to cobble together encomiums and tributes like train cars chugging in an endless loop through campus. If faculty were able—even encouraged—to dedicate the same amount of time to our research and writing, we might stop sinking like a stone in the national rankings and have a chance to be a reasonably respectable school.

Finally, as for your recent memo on financial prudence: Good lord, man. We know about the funding crunch, we aren’t idiots; but we also know that your fiscal fix is being applied selectively. For those in the sciences and social sciences, sacrifice will come in the form of fewer varieties of pâté on the lunch trays. For English: seven defections/retirements in three years and not one replaced; two graduate programs no longer permitted to accept new students; and a Captain Queeg–like sociologist at the helm. The junior faculty in our department will surely abandon their posts at the first opportunity, while the elder statesmen—I speak here for myself—may exact a more punishing revenge by refusing to retire.

I thoroughly endorse Professor Martina Ali’s bid for promotion to associate professor with tenure.

Cordially and with the usual succinctness,

Jay Fitger

*
See Professor Jorg Masterson’s infamous class, Dis/guise and Dis/gust, to which students are invited to bring “rancid food and a costume or mask.”

November 11, 2009

Bentham Literary Residency Program P.O. Box 1572

Bentham, ME 04976

Good Afternoon, Committee Members—with cc to Eleanor Acton, Director: This is the third letter I have written on behalf of Mr. Darren Browles, who recently received from your office a computerized notice that, of his three required letters of recommendation, only two have been received. Why each application to Bentham necessitates
three written
LORs I leave to sages and philosophers to decipher. As for the letters in Mr. Browles’s case (your office has refused to identify their authors): let’s count them.
One
is mine, dated September 3 (with a follow-up/coda on October 5).
Two
is the letter from his foreign language advisor; I just wandered across the quad and spoke to Herr Zimmunt to secure his
jawohl
in regard to this endorsement.
Letter # Three
, Browles informs me, was originally to have come from Helena Stang, who led him on an e-mail goose chase for over a month until finally reporting, as if from her satin fainting couch, that she was “too busy.” He had no choice at that point but to turn to his administrative advisor, Martin Glenk, who (unbeknownst to poor Browles) wrests fleeting moments of joy from the opportunity to denigrate my students.

Armed with these bitter herbs of information, I undertook this morning the short but unhappy stroll past the men’s room (the toilets of which send their constant flushing sound through the vent in my office) to the literature wing of our department. Typically I am loath to poke about in that arm of the building, around the corner from the
WELCOME TO ENGLI_H
sign and the faded sofas on which, after hours, the undergraduates presumably enjoy one another’s favors. To be blunt: many of the literature faculty and I are no longer speaking, and a third of their number, due to a construction project in our hallowed hall, have moved their offices to remote outposts of campus, delighting in the knowledge that their colleagues will be unable to find them. Logically, one might suggest that I solicit the assistance of my department chair, but he is a professor of sociology, appointed by the university’s warlords to rule our asylum until the inmates exhibit greater pliability and calm.

In any event, I did ultimately locate the elusive Glenk, who, after wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve, refused to confirm or deny the existence of his LOR on Browles’s behalf. In case he sends or has sent a letter, allow me to provide some context for it: Glenk is a merciless and vengeful chucklehead—an Eliot scholar suffering from the delusion that he is a poet, though he hasn’t written a word of any significance for a dozen years.

Eleanor, I appeal to you: Darren Browles doesn’t need three LORs, and his “Bartleby” novel needn’t be subject to the sordid
aspersions of a cretin like Glenk. Don’t let him be punished for my lack of popularity among my colleagues, present or past. (I include the word “past” to encompass any rivalry or unpleasantness between the two of us during the Seminar; our personal discord has no bearing on Browles, and I’d like to spare him the politicized trauma of our earlier years.) Seeking to bury the hatchet or at least dull its blade, Jay

P.S. (to Eleanor): Speaking of our Seminar years, I got a letter from Troy Larpenteur last week—resurfaced at last, somewhere in Ohio. His tone was cautiously upbeat, but I suspect he has been unwell for a very long time. He needs a recommendation, of course. Do you know if he’s been in touch with anyone else? Would Madelyne TV have kept track of him?

November 16, 2009

ITech Solutions

271 Riverview Way

Dubuque, Iowa 52003

Attention: Maxine Wells Dear Ms. Wells,

I am overjoyed by the opportunity to recommend Mr. Duffy Napp to your firm. Mr. Napp currently serves as the sole remaining member of what used to be the “Tech Help team” in our Department of English, and he clearly suffers under the burden of our collective ignorance. Mr. Napp demonstrates all the winsome ebullience one expects these days from a young person more inclined to socialize with machines rather than human beings. His approach to problem solving is characterized by sullenness punctuated by occasional brief bouts of good judgment.

Whatever I can do to assist in your—or any other firm’s—hiring of Mr. Napp I will accomplish with resolution and zeal.

Hopefully, and with fingers crossed, Jason T. Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English

November 20, 2009

Gar Canfield

Zentex Corporation

8591 Taylor Boulevard

Panama, Ohio 45807

Dear Mr. Canfield,

This letter very warmly endorses the application of Troy Larpenteur, who has informed me of his desire to secure a position as sales associate in the Zentex Corporation.

I have known Troy Larpenteur for twenty-three years: we attended graduate school together. Troy was widely acknowledged to be one of the most gifted and original writers to pass through the infamous Seminar under the tutelage of H. Reginald Hanf. (If you don’t know Hanf’s work: please head straight to the library or bookstore—I give you leave to put this letter aside and come back to it later—to find a copy of
Testimony in Red
, a finalist for the National Book Award, which, in the absence of cronyism among the judges that year, would have won.)

Though he appears not to have mentioned it on his résumé, Troy Larpenteur published a brilliant lyrical novella called
Second Mind
, which was showered with praise but underappreciated,
as are many pathbreaking works; it is now out of print. Subsequently he labored for the better part of a decade on his magnum opus, a novel, which was lost along with his pregnant wife when the cabin lent to them by a friend, a cabin in which they were taking a long-awaited vacation, was struck by lightning during a storm. The randomness of his wife Navia’s death—the vacation had been urged upon them; Troy had driven to the store for supplies before the storm’s scheduled arrival; the car got a flat tire and Troy stumbled back down the flooded road to find the cabin in flames—defeated his belief in art and quelled his aspirations. He never returned to the novel. He moved to India, where Navia had spent her early childhood, and wiped himself off the grid for a dozen years.

You may be searching this letter for references to Troy’s “relevant experience.” (Troy asked me to limit myself in this recommendation to the qualities and attributes that will make him an asset to your firm.) Let me suggest that, no matter the variety of employment, there is nothing more relevant or crucial than an aptitude for original thought and imaginative expression. When I think back twenty-three years to the sight of Troy across from me at the Seminar table, his hair looking as if he had slept on the floor of the library by the vending machines (he usually had), his face alight with intelligence and anticipation, I believe the best years of my life will be the ones in which I had the privilege of hearing him read his work aloud to our group. Even HRH—Professor Hanf—fell silent when Troy slid his pages from
the battered portmanteau in which he liked to keep his writing; we waited on tenterhooks, knowing that whatever Troy read would alter something within us, changing the way in which we understood language and its cumulative power, the way it made our lives feel capacious, infusing us each week during our three-or four-hour-long sessions with the sensation that we were at long last about to apprehend … what? Unlike many of his peers, myself included, Troy was free of egoism. He cared about his work, and others’ work, as opposed to “success.” He was, and remains, an intellectually nimble, brilliant, generous man.