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KINGSLEY WIDMER
the grand manner deserve laughter, both as characters and authors.
Comedy, the usual argument goes, ends by resolving its
dilemmas in some affirmation of the social and moral order. Most
academic comedies, however, covertly express escalator anxiety:
they suggest that one must go all the way
up
to the presidency
or out
into the cold, cold world. One recurrent kind of affirmative
escape might be called the rich-uncle-fadeout, in which a secular
deity pays off the discrepancies and rewards the grubby hero for
his institutional pathos.
In
that bland farce set in a class society,
Kingsley Amis's
Lucky Jim,
the bemused satire of a provincial
English university ends with the young instructor disgraced but
hired as a secretary by a wealthy man. A cruder farce set in a
mass society, Barr's
Purely Academic,
ends with the aging pro–
fessor disgusted but hired as an administrator by a wealthy
foundation. Logically enough, Amis achieves more style than Barr.
American fantasies rely upon yet another escape route.
In
Helen Howe's
We Happy Few
(1943) the heroine enlisted easy
patriotism to flee into the American heartland, away from the
cultish ethic of
Ivy
League academe.
In
a number of other
academic novels, which may be decently represented by Gerald
Brace's Gothic romance,
The Spire
(1951), flight from the cor–
ruption of the eastern liberal arts college ends in Academic Siberia,
an obscure college in the virile West. And since Mary McCarthy's
heroines always discover themselves by saying goodby (to Utopia,
to Bohemia, or to whatever past they can dredge up), the lady
writer of
Groves of Academe
rather earnestly rejects the progressive
foolishness of the more arty liberal college. Randall Jarrell,
in
his
wry
Pictures From An Institution
(1954) , can only finesse around
the same farewell by employing the sentimental malice of suddenly
finding profundity in acknowledged foolishness. Except for ad–
ministrative candidates, the emphatiCally repeated moral appears
to be that individual fulfillment and academic life run contrary,
and the more prestigious the school the more firmly pathetic the
truism. The primal sin for the literary intellectual in the academy
is not his presence but his allegiance. Whether it be in relation to
a college or a department, a pedagogical or a critical doctrine, he
has fallen among thieves when institutional identification takes the
place of intellectual identity.
