Academic Nuttiness: Here And There

Early resignation from academe (in 1982) saved me from the diverse nuttinesses associated with deconstructionism and its associated hip strategies. Semiotics was just creeping in on padded Francophile feet via film courses when I parked my mortarboard for good. Whew. Close.

Most of the time I haven’t the vaguest ideas what the polyslobbic neologists are driving at. Every once in a while, a patently useful insight will emerge out of these verbal fogs. But no one ever makes as much sense of the murk as the British academic critic and novelist David Lodge, whose send-ups of Rummidge University (rhymes with rubbish) are among the comic joys of our intellectually dark decade.

Now, suddenly, there are two other contenders: one British—Possession, by A.S. Byatt (Random House, $22.95)—and one American—The Crown of Columbus, by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich (Harper Collins, $21.95). Juxtaposed, the novels highlight the differences between the two national systems without losing track of the paradox that the corruption of the best (the clerisy we subsidize to make sense of our heritage) is indeed worst.

Byatt’s is the more intellectual, centering on the creation of two literary figures, a Robert Browning dramatic monologuist wannabe named Randolph Henry Ash, and his hidden lover, Christabel LaMotte. We not only get the “mystery” (shall I call it an academic thriller?) of academic failure Roland Mitchell and his unintended feminist colleague and ultimate lover Maud Bailey, but we also get swatches of the “creative work” by the two.

Christabel appeals to the new feminist cadre because of her closet lesbianism. It complicates their plate to discover the depth of her passion for Ash. All of this bravura intellectualism is unreeled against the subject of a dementedly acquisitive Ashite from New Mexico name Mortimer Cropper, with a Croesus of a checkbook.

There’s even a climactic grave-robbing episode blipped by a most Gothically opportune windstorm. As the romance closes, Roland mulls where he’ll carry his academic viruses—Amsterdam, Barcelona or Hong Kong. The sun will never set on the academic sins of British expats. At least Mortimer has come a Cropper. Brit wit outmaneuvers Amways. If you read only one academic novel this year, make it this one. It will possess you with its intelligence and verve.

The Crown of Columbus, by that most famous of Native American literary couples, is good enough but not nearly as plausible as Possession. Vivian Twostar, who runs a Native American studies program at Dartmouth, is up for tenure as the Columbus Quincentennial approaches. Implausibly, across a crowded carrel, she falls helplessly in love with a WASPish poet who aspires to write the most important epic on the Columbus history.

Harassed by a broad-minded alumni magazine editor who wants her opinions of the QuinCen, Twostar comes across a two-centuries-long series of indigent alumni letters from the Cobb family demanding that the phlegmatic librarians return letters which are a key to a great treasure.

Henry Cobb, rusticated for suspected securities fraud to the Caribbean island where Columbus is supposed to have hidden his treasure, gives Twostar and lover a free ride to the tropics.

You won’t believe how they finally come upon the treasure. Or the A-Team kind of TV adventure that leads up to the “discovery.” Well, hell: If Columbus lusted for the Orient and only came up with the spicy Indians, why not an Indian professor stumbling on the publication that will confirm her tenure?

The neatest ironies derive from the fact that one of Dartmouth’s earliest self-assumed responsibilities was to civilize the local Indians. Dorris / Erdrich make a good deal out of that. Vaccinate your body and soul against the impending tsunami of Columbus-watching with this intelligent gloss on the contradictions in American academic life.

It’s striking how different the U.K. and U.S. academics are. The flaming bisexual lesbian from Tallahassee is as inconceivable in a Brit Lit redoubt as the very tight, focused Women’s Studies lady would be in the Am Lit acres. The petty jobs British academics put up with as they wait patiently for a tiny sliver of an opportunity (maybe) to open up are sinecures Americans could never last at. (They’d say “Fuck it,” and enter Law School!)


A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf, $23) is a stunningly rich “academic” novel in two very different senses. They used to cavil that letting creative writers into academe would divorce them from reality, engendering a generation of hermetically-sealed seminar writers. Man—not in Smiley’s case.

Reared in L.A. and St. Louis and educated at Vassar and the original Writer’s Workshop venue—the University of Iowa—Smiley is as rooted in the particulars of Iowa as the quilt that graces her book’s jacket. Yet her ingenious variations on the themes of King Lear are breathtaking in their brilliance.

Larry Cook, by hook and (we sadly if slowly discern) by crook, has amassed by 1979 a mortgage-free thousand acres of prime Iowa corn land. He’s riding on top of his tiny Zebulon County world. Inexplicably, he decides to give the acres to his three daughters.

The youngest, a lawyer in Des Moines, flinches at this unlawfully spontaneous act and unleashes the mindless anger of the father. The son of his closest neighbor (and principal competitor) returns from seven years of Vietnam-fleeing expatriation in Vancouver, full of new-fangled ideas about organic farming. The eldest daughter’s husband, a plodder, dreams of using the millions of dollars in equity to finance a 5,000-unit hog farm.

The old man has second thoughts (if you can believe him still capable of thinking as his mind unravels). The lawyer daughter takes the other two siblings to court to retrieve their dad’s title, as Smiley ingeniously and tragically plots the disintegration of this one big “happy” family.

The book is so steeped in the particulars of the Heartland farm economic boom-and-bust that you marvel at how Smiley keeps the psychological and sociological in such precarious balance. Alas, there’s a dark secret at the rotten core of this family, and the pathos of its revelation is heartbreaking.

So don’t talk to me about English professors necessarily alienated from their surroundings. Smiley demonstrates that with diligence and grace, even academics can illuminate our universal truths from particular instances deeply understood.

I’m sure that this kind of marvelously resonating fiction is just what Paul Engle dreamt of when he founded the Writer’s Workshop more than 50 years ago. And such benign viruses spread: Smiley teaches at Iowa State, the aggy sibling up the highway at Ames.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, December 11, 1991