442
PARTISAN REVIEW
One can, I suppose, point toward Thomas Wolfe's pantingly romantic
Eugene Gant or to others who move through college on their way to some
special destiny, but the truth of the matter is that when we think of col–
lege novels we tend to think of their more permanent residents-facul ty
members who grumble and plot insurrections, deans (and sometimes, pres–
idents) who dream about signing their dismissal notices, and increasingly,
flashy academic superstars who liven up a ITlOribund campus
wi
th insider
gossip and the latest trends in literary theory. [n short, what makes the lit–
tle wheels of plot invention turn in an academic novel is academic politics,
a phenomenon usually described as being particularly nasty because the
stakes are so low. I prefer to think of such outbursts of pique in Conradian
terms-that is, as a "fascination of the abomination"; for nothing (not
ideas, not library research, and certainly not correcting student themes)
provides the same adrenaline rush as efforts to humiliate one's academic
enemies, or the fear that they might well return the favor.
In this sense, a novel set on a college or university campus is not unlike
one that sets out to describe the day-to-day life of a professional wri ter. It
may well be true that writers worth their salt spend an inordinate amount
of time hunched over a wri ting desk, turning sentences around and around
in an effort to get the overall rhythm and individual words down right; but
this "truth" is likely to fare badly on the page and even worse on screen.
Far better-and certainly more profitable-to dress the writer in a safari
outfit and have him blast away at rhino (Hemingway springs to mind, but
he is hardly the only example of a writer who never lets you see him
sweat, much less struggle with a dangling participle) or to chronicle the
drinks, drugs, and affairs that presumably come wi th the terri tory of being
an American novelist.
The same argument can be applied to a novel in which professors are
hardly ever seen preparing lectures, teaching classes, or grading papers. The
merest hint of verisimilitude is quite enough. Why so? For much the same
reason that movie audiences in the 1930s preferred escapist fare (gangster
sagas or lavish musicals) to grimly realistic portrayals of the Great
Depression's quotidian life. Even longtime professors will not turn pages of
a novel that moves
too
realistically through the semester. Rather, they insist
on excitement, be it infighting over a disputed tenure case or all-out war–
fare against a damnable dean, in ways that people addicted to pulp
Westerns want to see shoot-outs. And, that said, nothing makes the heart
of an academic beat faster than the threat of some imminent, cataclysmic
change: a new building, a new curriculum, a new chairperson. The opera–
tive word, of course, is
new,
something that even the most radical professors
abhor, especially if it means altering one whit of their lives (the lives of
others, often large groups of others, are a very different matter) . [n this
