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PARTISAN REVIEW
psychiatrist, or the absentminded professor. Generally speaking, this is not
a good formula for the richly nuanced characters we expect to meet in a
first-rate novel. And if you tally up the sheer number of academic novels
that have slipped down the memory hole, it is hard to escape the feeling
that this is a very minor minor form.John O. Lyons' scholarly study of
The
College Novel in America
(1962) confirms the suspicion by including a bib–
liography crowded with 215 titles, most of which nobody-with the
exception of Lyons himself-has ever heard of.
At this point I find myself rather in the position of those who hec–
tored Wilson about detective fiction. As it so happens, I am rather cool
about whodunits and even less inclined to think of most sci-fi as a good
late-night read, but academic novels are another matter altogether. Even
cardboard characters and all too predictable turns of plot can keep me
glued to the page. Why so? Because novels about academe are to college
professors what bodice-rippers are to the
hoi polloi,
and this truth increases
exponentially if the reader in question happens to work in an English
department. Which self-respecting lit. professor hasn't thought-either out
loud or in private-about knocking off a tale of the assorted troubles at his
or her version of Eyesore U.? After all, the formula seems simple enough:
plant a sensitive young professor in a garden of academic vipers, add a
fetching student here and a soused administrator there, and
voila,
yet anoth–
er novel about higher education on the ropes.
The rub, of course, is that the few American academic novels worth
rereading-one thinks of such classics as Mary McCarthy's
Groves
if
Academe
(1952), Randall Jarrell's
Pictures ]rom an Institution
(1954), and
Bernard Malamud's
A New Life
(1961)-were written by professional
writers rather than by frustrated academics. Taken together, these novels
become the standard against which subsequent forays into academe are
measured.
It
is, of course, quite another story across the pond, where British
writers have put aspects of the academy to good use since the days of
Chaucer.
If
his Canterbury pilgrims provided bawdiness and hypocrisy in
abundant measure, the scholarly Clerk (a man who would "gladly Ierne
and gladly teche") is the notable exception. He earns Chaucer's sympa–
thy as well as ours. But such admirable academics are rare, as are portraits
of the university as a kinder, more gentle place. Who, for example, would
Hardy's Jude be without his tragic dream of a university education? And
what does his travail tell us about the caste system, then and now, known
as Oxbridge? My point is that British higher education is rather like the
rolled lawns on which the rich smack at croquet balls; it takes centuries
for a tradition to take hold, and I suspect even longer for it to be dis–
mantled.
