The Old College Try

It was in his 1919 poem “The Scholars” that William Butler Yeats savaged universities and the dry sticks who populate them: All shuffle there; all cough in ink. . . . / All think what other people think.

That criticism has echoed through the years in novel after novel about the academic life. Scholars, with bald heads forgetful of their sins, Yeats declared, merely edit and annotate the lines / that young men, tossing on their beds, / Rhymed out in love’s despair. In innumerable works of academic fiction — Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1953) in Britain and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) in the United States, to mention only two — young scholars, lured by the prospect of lifetime employment and respectability, are forced at last to choose whether to spend their lives thinking what other people think or to seek an authentic existence away from those who cough in ink.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, these academic tales were mostly comic in tone; indeed, jacket copywriters found it nearly impossible to describe them without using the word “satirical.” The stories were full of fusty and dim-witted deans, sycophantic assistants, tea and cookies, and ghastly, wine-soaked parties. And yet, though the life from which their heroes had to escape was stifling and conformist, its greatest sins were ineffectuality and impotence.

But something happened to the university novel at the close of the 1960s — because something had happened to the university itself. Following the revolution in consciousness wrought by the student movement, campuses no longer posed as elite cultural repositories for the best that had been thought and said. Instead, they became home to grand theories that rejected the very idea of elite cultural repositories: history from below, deconstructionism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-Marxism. Its teachers were young, charismatic professors who seemed determined to prove how effectual and potent — how unlike Yeats’s scholars — they could be.

Against all this, the academic novel developed a new satirical tone in protest, a tone both foreboding and elegiac. There grew a distinct sense that something good and noble about campus life was under threat, not from Yeats’s pedants but from theory-heads spouting the latest in designer gibberish. In David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), for instance, a British scholar of the old school finds his life, work, and marriage bed overtaken by a trendy, flamboyant American pseudo-scholar named Morris Zapp (based on the real-life theory-head Stanley Fish).

With The History Man (1975) and Rates of Exchange (1983), the English author Malcolm Bradbury took the academic satire to a new and more frightening level. In The History Man, a sociologist with a taste for Karl Marx decides his mission is “to prod the future into everyone you can lay your hands on,” and he succeeds, over the course of the novel, in purging and destroying a student who disagrees with his embrace of critical theory. In Rates of Exchange, postmodernism has even more dire consequences when a linguist on a trip behind the Iron Curtain is given a secret manuscript by a dissident whose terrifying reality doesn’t leave room for theory. In passing his manuscript to someone who isn’t even sure words have meaning, however, the dissident inadvertently consigns himself to a prison cell even as his book meets a fiery end at the hands of airport officials who mistake it for a bomb.

Farce these books certainly were, but they had a tragic undercurrent. Lives, great ideas, painful truths, even literature itself were being destroyed by the university’s embrace of the new. And in the years since books like The History Man first appeared, the academic novel has grown even more bitter — in part because even those (no-longer young) professors from the 1960s at last seem to realize the ease with which the monster they helped create can be turned against them. The rise of political correctness, that misbegotten handmaiden of postmodernism, has unleashed on campus the enormous destructive power of politicized accusations and the star-chamber methods with which they are handled. And now academic fiction is in full cry against it.

In Christopher Hill’s splendidly plotted Virtual Morality (winner of the Pushcart Prize), a dean long intimidated by his campus’s most radical professors goes along with their idea of establishing a “student oversight committee” to examine infractions of their university’s code of conduct with almost unlimited powers. When one of those professors takes offense at a frat boy’s giggles in her mandatory Women’s Studies class, she asks him how many women he’s raped and insults his father. The frat boy calls her a “fat old dyke” and is immediately expelled from the university by the new student oversight committee.

The frat boy’s lawyer thinks he has an open-and-shut First Amendment case, especially since the terrified dean was in the classroom at the time. But though he fancies himself a good man and fears perjuring himself after he is subpoenaed, the dean lies under oath anyway and finds it liberating: “He had walked through the doorway, and lightning hadn’t struck, his tongue hadn’t snapped. . . . He was on the winning team, now.”

A convert to the new postmodernist faith, the dean tells a skeptical friend, “I reject the premise that truth is an absolute.” To which his friend responds, “That must have been very convenient for you when you were giving your deposition.” Throughout the process, it never occurs to the dean that there is a person whose future has been placed in jeopardy by the actions of a committee he knows to be unjust and unfair. This is not an attractive kid, Hill makes clear, and his father is a tyrannical bully. But even so, the kid doesn’t deserve the ruination of his future.

Virtual Morality is being marketed as satire, which is to be expected, but this suspenseful and intelligent book reads more like a bulletin from the front. Christopher Hill is a graduate student outraged by the collapse of standards and principles on campus, and in his righteous anger he cannot resist ending his book with an exclamation point — a scene in which one of the radical professors delivers a mustache-twirling sermon of evil that makes far too explicit the connection between postmodern ideology and totalitarianism. “The fascists had some good ideas,” the professor says. “Many of the early deconstructionists were fascists. Did you know that? It’s true. Even old Paul de Man never apologized for writing propaganda for the Nazis in Belgium.”

Truer words were never spoken, but Virtual Morality suffers from its author’s didacticism. A better book is Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, which embraces the ambiguity in human behavior that Hill rejects. Prose’s agonizingly effective novel tells the story of Swenson, a forty-seven-year-old creative-writing professor at a second-rate New England college filled with eager but nearly illiterate students. He is the model of late-century American academics: He has contempt for his students but will not instruct them, for “he wants the students to see him as generous, giving — on their side.” Rather than explaining why little good can come from short stories like the one featuring a boy having sex with a chicken carcass, Swenson lets his students tear each other apart while he, the author of a single successful novel years earlier, remains patronizingly above it all.

But then a painfully shy, multiple-pierced nineteen-year-old named Angela Argo gives him chapters from a novel she is writing called “Eggs,” about a painfully shy high school girl’s affair with her science teacher. Swenson believes that at last he has uncovered a true talent (though the excerpts of “Eggs” that appear in Blue Angel are nowhere near as good as Swenson thinks they are) and begins to encourage her.

Self-satisfied to the point of stupidity, Swenson heedlessly marches down the path to his own destruction. He does everything wrong: lies to his beloved wife, ignores his alienated daughter when she comes home hoping for a rapprochement, even appropriates Angela’s novel as his own when asked what he’s working on. Finally, he and Angela end up on the bed in her dorm room, and only the shattering of a rotten molar inside his mouth aborts their affair.

Swenson loses everything. But the story of his relations with Angela is far more complicated than the school’s disciplinary code can admit. She may be nineteen and inarticulate, but she is a knowing and Machiavellian creature who manipulates her teacher throughout the novel. No innocent, she has spent time as a phone-sex worker. It is Angela who maneuvers him into her dorm room and locks the door. And she does so, it turns out, for a pragmatic reason: She wants him to present her novel to his editor at a New York publishing house. She gets everything she wants, while Swenson finds himself falsely accused of molesting his own daughter. Euston College, the setting of Blue Angel, is a bucolic nightmare world in which ignorance and corruption walk hand in hand through the picturesque trees and rolling hills. But though Blue Angel is a painful book, it is a comedy. Swenson is a low character who gets what he deserves, even if he doesn’t deserve what he gets.

That is not true of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker-Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, the story of another self-satisfied literature professor who sleeps with a student and loses everything — but in the process finds his lost soul. At first it seems that Coetzee is attempting something new: a tragic academic novel, rather than a comic one. But it turns out that the book is really an allegory about South Africa, Coetzee’s homeland. In Disgrace, the professor plays the role of the old South African order. His stubborn insistence on the rightness of his own behavior in the face of universal condemnation casts him into the wilderness, where he is forced to confront the rage of the black majority. That rage takes the form of the rape of his daughter — a rape she refuses to tell the police about. And when it turns out that she is pregnant, she decides to give birth to the child as an act of expiation and reconciliation. Only when her father embraces his own powerlessness is he saved from the wreck of his life.

Disgrace is a powerful but strange book — brilliantly spare but, in its own way, as wooden in its moralism as Christopher Hill’s Virtual Morality. It has fallen instead to Philip Roth to attempt the full-blown academic tragedy that has been lurking in the novelistic mists since the late 1960s. Roth’s The Human Stain is half a masterpiece — the half having to do with the life and secrets of an elderly classicist named Coleman Silk. Silk shatters the reclusive Berkshires existence of Roth’s alter-ego and the novel’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, by storming into Zuckerman’s house one day with a tale of infamy and woe.

“There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a week or feeble person,” Zuckerman writes of Silk, who has kept his youthful boxer’s trim and fighting spirit in his years successfully struggling to end the domination of nearby Athena College by the sort of scholars Yeats loathed. After long service as a dean, he had returned to the classroom to teach Greek drama, and when two students he had never seen repeatedly failed to show up for his class, he asked, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”

The two missing students were black. And so began the cycle of politically correct protest. Silk’s assurances that he was referring to “ectoplasm” availed him nothing. “Spooks” was “the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athena.” And worse than the controversy it engendered, “spooks” was “the word that, as Coleman understood things, directly led to his wife’s death.” Silk’s troubles had “blotted out the million difficulties of the Silks’ marriage. . . . [They] were side by side again, waving their fists in the faces of people they hated more profoundly than, in their most insufferable moments, they could manage to hate each other.” One morning Iris Silk awakened with a headache. She died the next day.

“Those people murdered Iris!” he rages to Zuckerman. Silk had made enemies in his time as dean, and so no one cared or dared to stand with him after he uttered the word “spooks.” In his fury he quit the college, and when the novel begins, he has just spent two years writing a memoir of the incident — a memoir he decides to shelve after beginning an affair with a cleaning woman thirty-six years his junior named Faunia Farley.

Faunia wants and feels nothing but sex, and through her, Silk has reawakened to the erotic: “I’m taking Viagra, Nathan. . . . Without Viagra none of this would be happening.” But then comes an anonymous letter that destroys his new-found equilibrium and reawakens the rage. “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age,” the letter reads, and he recognizes the handwriting as belonging to a young postmodernist on campus named Delphine Roux. Silk again goes on a rampage, demanding that his lawyer sue her for slander. And when his young, well-spoken, patronizing attorney tells Silk he would be better off if he forgot the suit, the classicist erupts: “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug . . . lily-white face.” The lawyer cannot help wondering: “Why lily-white?”

Silk is repeating the last words spoken to him by the brother he has not seen in more than forty years. For the secret no one has known about Silk — not his wife, not his children — is that while the world believes Silk is a Russian Jew, he is in truth a light-skinned black man who decided after his exacting father’s death to reinvent himself. Not for nothing had his educated father, whose favorite play was Julius Caesar, named him Coleman Brutus Silk — because Coleman’s decision to live as a white man means he must betray his mother by telling everyone that she is dead.

Roth has borrowed this astonishing twist from the real-life story of the literary critic Anatole Broyard. But just as he borrowed the skeleton of another true story for his magnificent 1997 American Pastoral, Roth has transmuted the Broyard story into something somber and grand. By making Silk an expert on Greek tragedy, Roth has found a way to explore a peculiarly American form of hubris: the idea of self-invention. For decades, even through the birth of four children whose own skin color might reveal the truth about him, Silk has experienced the thrill of having kept his secret. But as any Greek hero could have told him, there is no escaping cosmic justice for an act of hubris.

The story of Coleman Silk’s fall is a triumph, as is Roth’s description of Athena College: There’s a priceless scene, for instance, in which the deconstructionist Delphine Roux spends hours trying to find the right words for her personal ad in the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, the rest of The Human Stain is an abject failure, stilted and false. Roth sadly resorts to the most hackneyed cliche of recent times in his portrait of the novel’s working-class villain, a Vietnam War veteran who is, of course, psychotic and deranged.

Despite the book’s profound weaknesses, Roth has succeeded in bringing the academic novel full circle. Yeats may have been disgusted by the academics who drained the life-force from great and dangerous works: Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way? But at least Yeats’s despised classicists knew the erotic Latin works of Catullus, knew who Catullus was.

What would Yeats make of today’s universities, where scholars don’t just misunderstand high art, but argue that the very phrase “high art” has no meaning — and where inconsequential television shows and rock songs are paid the same kind of respect once afforded Catullus? Perhaps, instead of composing a savage poem like “The Scholars,” a Yeats reborn in the year 2000 would instead offer up — as Philip Roth has done in The Human Stain — a rueful tribute to those who still believe in grappling with greatness.

John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the New York Post.