THE ACADEMIC COMEDY
531
respectability and ultimate worth that is ascribed to the academy,
as in traditional fiction's treatment of marriage, really depends on
covert obscenity-the obscenity of covert sex in the sentimental
marriage novel becomes the obscenity of covert power in the senti–
mental academic novel. A law of the academic novel (to paraphrase
Lawrence on obscenity)
is
that where educational ideals are most
emphatically asserted, intellectual corruption is most advanced.
In partial contrast, Stringfellow Barr's more perceptive comic
melodrama in
Purely Academic
(1958) of a social scientist's savage
in-fighting to achieve a university presidency titillates us with
direct appeals to sex and power. But Barr, too, manages to stay
within the bounds of genteel edification; by an educationist's
didactically quick reversal, marriage and the magical toga of
academic idealism undercut the cynical treatment of a middling
Midwestern university. As with almost any other aspect of the
American experience, disenchanted dialectics run aground on the
undeniable (even if intermittent) presence of ease, affability and
openness. The American academy is not nearly so good as it is
supposed to be, but also not nearly so bad as it might well be.
When reduced in proportion, the question of power becomes
the lowly professor's cringing, farcical or crafty struggle for tenure,
a subject treated mawkishly in Mary Jane Ward's
The Professor's
Umbrella
(1947), wittily in Mary McCarthy's
Groves of Academe
(1952), with rococo pathos in Vladimir Nabokov's
Pnin (1956),
and with cornball cliches in Mark Harris's
W ake Up, Stupid
(1959). Add to this a third academic political theme, the novels
turning sententiously about the "subversive" issue, from James
Linn's
Winds Over the Campus
(1936) through May Sarton's
Faithful Are the Wounds
(1955) . "Academic freedom"-more free–
dom of the academy from the wrong sort of politics than freedom
of the intelligence turned critically on styles of life, sex or teach–
ing-comes out as one of the few "ideas" in the academic novel.
Now the game of power, appropriate as it is to academic life,
shows marked relevance to literary criticism. It is not incidental that
academic novels and stories largely come from those who are
known primarily and essentially as critics (Randall Jarrell, William
Van O'Connor, Theodore Morrison, Carlos Baker, Lionel Tril–
ling, Mary McCarthy, Robie Macauley, Leslie Fiedler, Stringfel-
