Dear Committee Members: A Novel (7 page)

Enough. Moving on. Here’s what I’m asking, TV: let Browles unwind at Caxton for a month or two, longer if that’s feasible on your end. Offer him solitude, and let him be shielded from the shit and the failures to come. I vouch for him completely (alter ego, you ask?), and I promise he won’t set off firecrackers under a fellow resident’s cabin. You could probably include him in some of the therapeutic sessions; I’m sure he’d benefit, as would anyone—myself included, god knows.

Apologies for the rant and the nostalgic detour. Like Scrooge, less than a week before the clamor of Christmas, I’m making
this last-minute request with every scrap of human warmth I’ve got left to muster. I’m the tide propelling a shipwrecked man to your doorstep. Please take Browles on. I guarantee he’d be amenable to periodic tasks around the compound—groundskeeping and whatnot—if that would be useful.

With admiration, and wishing you a peaceful holiday, I remain

Your friend,

Jay

P.S.: Have you heard from Troy? He’s stateside again, and I know he always had a soft spot for you—I’m bewildered and a bit chagrined that he’s reached out to
me
…

^*1
I should have warned him that Eleanor played Lady Macbeth in college.

^*2
NB: Because of my obsession with
Jude the Obscure
, Janet still calls me “Jay the Obtuse” now and then, but it doesn’t sound as cruel when she says it.

January 4, 2010

Kathleen Quam

Associate Chair, Comp/Rhetoric Lattimore Community College

16 Fountain Place

Lattimore, IL 60491

Dear Professor Quam, Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move to Lattimore, wherever that is. You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.

How do I know Alex? During the early years of his doctoral studies in English at Payne, he was assigned to me as an RA; this was back in the precrisis era, a dulcet time in our university’s
history when faculty were allotted luxuries such as research support, access to a working copy machine, and paper and pen. (Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.) In any case, Alex. I leave to others the task of evaluating his thesis
*
and will limit myself to discussing his performance as my RA, which was more than adequate. Ruefle is highly capable, efficient, and independent. I confess that some of the assignments I gave him might have been easy to misinterpret, based as they were on episodes of my own life and experience. (At that time I still indulged in sweet dreams of success, blissfully ignorant of the relentless downward drift of my career, my
novel-in-progress, when published, to be greeted by a sphinxlike silence in the press, the wrath of my [now] ex-wife, and the near universal condemnation, on campus, from readers who failed to understand the concept of satire.) But Ruefle seldom lifted an eyebrow. Like a waiter committing a lengthy order to memory, he would listen and nod, hands in his pockets, and then disappear, presumably heading home to work by himself, in his footie pajamas, uninterrupted by the demands or neuroses of his supervisor. He always got the work done.

I urge you to hire Alex Ruefle and to offer him a position commensurate with his multiple decades of education and his abilities—that is, a position well above, both in salary and rank, the one your college has posted.

Hoping the New Year inspires conscientious behavior in one and all, I remain Jason Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

*
I assume he listed me as a reference because of the retirement and demise, respectively, of his two thesis advisors: it took Ruefle fourteen years to earn the doctorate. During that time he became a fixture here at Payne, beginning his studies as a vigorous man and, after marrying and acquiring multiple children, staggering across the PhD finish line in late middle age.

January 7, 2010

Sellebritta Online

C. R. Young, Communications Coordinator Dear C. R. Young,

Ms. Tara Tappani knocked at my office door this morning and, with the air of a woman wearing diamonds and furs, entered the icy enclosure in which I work, perched at the edge of my red vinyl chair, and urged me to respond to your second e-mail request for a recommendation, as she dearly hopes to be hired as assistant editor of
Sellebritta Online
.

I demurred. Pressed, I reminded Ms. Tappani that, a year ago, I gave her a well-deserved F in my Intermediate Fiction class. She chuckled and put a manicured little paw on my forearm, as if the two of us were sharing a wonderful joke. “Don’t worry about that,” she assured me. “I just need a letter.”

So be it. Why did I give Ms. Tappani an F? For plagiarizing an entire short story, namely Irwin Shaw’s widely anthologized “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It always startles me anew—though I have nabbed dozens of plagiarists—to realize that the student cheater is amazed at my powers of discernment, my uncanny ability to detect a difference in quality between his or her own work and, for example, Proust’s. I
have caught students who faithfully reproduced (or cut and pasted, sometimes forgetting to remove the author’s name) the work of Hemingway, Cather, O’Connor (both Frank and Flannery), and Virginia Woolf. The Woolf copyist, wide-eyed with distress and admiration, told me she didn’t think I would catch her because Woolf, a European writer no longer among us, was “so obscure.”

Back to Ms. Tappani. There is a particular art to accusing a plagiarist, which necessitates first and foremost that I prop my office door open and keep a full box of tissues at hand. But in Ms. Tappani’s case the tissues weren’t needed. Having confronted her with the Irwin Shaw story prominently featured in several bound volumes on the flat of my desk, I sat back and waited. Visibly unperturbed, she sipped at the froth of a cappuccino. It seemed there was a reasonable explanation. She must have read Shaw’s story a few years before. Yes, that must have been it. She had read the story and clearly enjoyed it, to the extent that she had copied it, verbatim, into a notebook reserved for that purpose. Then, finding an assignment due for my class, she had paged through said notebook, stumbled across Shaw’s narrative, and forgotten that Shaw, rather than Tara Tappani, was its rightful author. A simple mix-up. She smiled.

I asked if she might show me the notebook into which she copied by hand the works of the masters. Ms. Tappani sighed. She wished that were possible, but only a week earlier she had
lost an entire satchel full of journals—including the notebook of literary classics rendered in her own curlicued style—on a city bus. I told her I admired her bravado and gave her the F.

If
Sellebritta Online
is in need of an editor/copywriter who refuses to allow the demands of honesty or originality to delay her output, it will have found one in the unflappable Ms. Tara Tappani.

Guilelessly yours, Jay Fitger

Professor-at-Law Creative Writing/English, Payne University

January 14, 2010

Associate Vice Provost Samuel Millhouse Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Lefferts Hall

Dear Associate VP Millhouse,

I write this letter in support of my colleague Karolyi Pazmentalyi in the Department of Slavic Languages, which your office has seen fit to eliminate in its most recent purge. (I am not the only member of the faculty to note that several equally obscure departments, perhaps relieved to have been spared the knife for now, have been gathered together in small ethnic clumps, presumably in preparation for future pogroms.) Pazmentalyi unfortunately chose this difficult moment in the life of the university to publish the brilliant monograph on which he has been laboring, alone, for the better part of a decade, holed up in a corner of the library, his craggy profile visible in the fluorescent glare of the overheads when everyone else was uncorking a beverage at home. At any other time in the university’s history this pathbreaking and exhaustive work of scholarship would immediately elevate its author from the doldrums of associate professordom to the rank of full professor. But now that Slavic Languages is to be summarily flushed down the drainpipe of unprofitable programs and departments (what
do we in the Midwest care about Russians, Poles, Serbs, Croatians, Bulgarians, and the denizens of other countries we can’t find on a globe or pronounce?), Pazmentalyi is suspended in limbo. He can’t be promoted within a department that’s being cut; therefore (the logic appears to be), why promote him at all? Why feature photos of bearded brontosauri on the university brag sheets when there are younger, more handsome whiz-bang faculty (perhaps … yes! in the Economics Department!) who will attract more financial interest, instead?

Pazmentalyi, it should be noted, has been reluctant to press or appeal his case. He is the sort of old-fashioned, self-effacing scholar accustomed to hours of painstaking archival research—and, lacking a background as a cage fighter, he will probably take your office’s rejection seriously and abide by your suggestion that, forgoing a well-deserved promotion and a minuscule raise, he should lumber off to the newly incorporated “Languages Unit” and soak his head.

But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears.

To wit: What would you ask of Pazmentalyi? The reason for denial of his promotion was “narrow scope of research/limited field.” Good lord: he’s a scholar of Slavic languages—fluent
in nearly a dozen—do you want him to coach the volleyball team?
*
Pazmentalyi is not versatile or charming. He doesn’t tell jokes during class. And he won’t fight your refusal of his promotion because—brace yourself—he isn’t suited for any other job, and he knows it. Very few people read his work; fewer comprehend it. Your office’s stated desire for greater “scope” and “accessibility” (would you have Stephen Hawking go back to the nine times table?) will end up turning scholars like Pazmentalyi into TV hosts, forced to incorporate online dating options into seminars previously dedicated to European linguistics.

Faculty acknowledge your need to save money: like most universities, Payne is rapidly pricing itself into oblivion, not by giving modest raises to nationally respected scholars, but by starving some departments while building heated yoga studios and indoor climbing walls in others. To afford the amenities inextricably tied to their education, students need wealthy financial backers or a mountain of loans—and so many on-and off-campus jobs they barely have time to go to class.

Writing this letter has thoroughly depressed me, but it hasn’t made me less determined to see Pazmentalyi promoted. You want to sweep out his office and deport him to “Literature” or
“Cultural Studies” or ask the Mortuary Science Department to find a place for him—so be it. But give him the measly sum he deserves and reward him for superbly performing the work he was hired to do.

Irritated and restless, but not as fractious as I can be, Jay Fitger

Professor/Agitator/Slum Dweller

Willard Hall

*
Admittedly, an absurd suggestion: I’m certain the volleyball coach earns three times the salary of a literature professor.

January 20, 2010

Aaron Young, Human Resources Kompu-Metricka, Inc.

77 Laguna Avenue

Bloomington, MN 55420

Dear Mr. Young,

Ms. Vanessa Cuddigan has asked me to submit a letter of reference to your poorly spelled organization on her behalf. While I have only praise for Ms. Cuddigan, who graduated two years ago with a major in English, I had expected her to ask that I recommend her for graduate school. Instead, having completed a stint with Teach for America, she is now apparently desirous of some sort of data-entry position with your firm—clearly a soul-squelching enterprise. I have asked her to explain herself but she is evasive, leading me to wonder if something unfortunate happened during the past two years to destroy her ambition.

Should you hire Ms. Cuddigan you will find her thoroughly impressive. She is extremely bright, her insights are fresh, and she has a talent for synthesizing heterogeneous ideas into compelling interpretations of the assigned material. Were she applying to graduate school as I have repeatedly urged her to do, I would take the time here to describe her thesis, a sterling examination of the concept of secrecy in the work of two contemporary
novelists, Louise Erdrich and Jonathan Safran Foer, but she has made her Faustian bargain and pinned her newly constricted hopes on Kompu-Metricka, so I will limit myself to recommending her on the basis of her brilliant analytical imagination, her invariable originality of approach, her open-mindedness, and her impeccable character.