Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1999/07/08/trying_and_failing_to_go_home.php
Thursday, July 8, 1999
The Dartmouth Alumni Office lost track of me 25 years ago, and I would imagine that it suited them about as well as it suited me, since I never sent them checks for more than a token amount, and one of those bounced.
After I left graduate school and changed careers, I thought about Dartmouth hardly at all. As you get older you de-emphasize your education on resumes, since it's in the past, out of date, and gives too much of a clue about your age. I didn't start thinking about Dartmouth again until late last year, when a Silicon Valley company was interested enough in hiring me to fly me up to talk to them, and for some reason—several of the people there had spent time in New Hampshire—they wanted to talk to me about Dartmouth. We chatted a little about Hanover, and the only recent development I could think of was the fifteen-year-old flap about The Dartmouth Review and vexatious oral exchange. So we chuckled a little about that. Not long afterward, I relented in letting the Alumni Office know my whereabouts.
And a few weeks after that came an announcement in the mail: two of Dartmouth's Superstar Professors (their words) were going to come to Los Angeles and give a lecture on Norman Maclean, Dartmouth Class of 1924, author of A River Runs Through It. I had long since decided I wasn't going to spend time or money on my 30-year class reunion, but this was local and a lot less expensive, and it was time for me to revisit Dartmouth in some way. The day before the lecture, the news was full of an Army general who was called back from retirement to face a court-martial on sex charges. I wondered to my wife whether, if I asked a bothersome question at the lecture, Dartmouth might call me back from alumnus status and suspend me for vexatious oral exchange. I said this because I had had classes from other Superstar Professors at Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate, and I was never much more than ambivalent about the experience. 'Be careful,' said my wife, who sees many things clearly.
In fact, I went to graduate school in part as a way to make sense of the education I got at Dartmouth. I wound up almost getting a Ph.D. in English at a second-rate university, studying with professors who were highly intelligent and profoundly disillusioned about what they were doing. None of them was a Superstar. The better ones had become disaffected for reasons beyond simple boredom. You could boil a lot of papers down to something like 'Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is a typical romantic poem because a typical romantic poem is a lot like Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.'' And they weren't going to put themselves out to line up tenure-track teaching jobs for us, so I lost interest, too, and left.
I hadn't completely wasted that time, because I learned much about what I'd seen at Dartmouth. I stayed out of trouble at Dartmouth and I graduated, but I didn't do especially well. I mostly got B-minuses on my English papers, and the Superstar professors were never impressed with me. My classmates would get little notes on their papers like, 'You certainly handle Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' well. Do you plan to do advanced study in this field?' but I never quite got the knack of putting the razzle-dazzle into my work. And in reaction, I was a little like the child who sees someone performing magic tricks and gets the urge to see how it's really done.
Norman Maclean '24 was in fact a Superstar Professor himself, but at the University of Chicago. Maclean is in the stolid tradition of Dartmouth writers who, like Robert Frost, have little or nothing to say about the place. The D word simply does not appear in Maclean's small corpus, which is odd, because the University of Chicago is all over it. The film version of A River Runs Through It does mention Dartmouth, but the writers had to do something to make a film-length script out of the very slim volume that is Maclean's novel, and they twist the chronology around and add a great deal else that isn't in the book.
Don Pease began his lecture with an account of Maclean's last lecture at the University of Chicago, which Pease had heard. I found this especially interesting, because the apparent content of Maclean's lecture, on King Lear and Cordelia's silence, was very similar to a paper I had written at Dartmouth that had earned the usual B-minus from a young Peter Saccio. I guess I just hadn't put the razzle-dazzle into it that Maclean had. And Don Pease had the razzle-dazzle as well. In content, he and Bill Cook did what you expect any competent doctoral candidate to do with A River Runs Through It. It was written, after all, by a professor of English who taught Shakespeare and the Romantics, and not surprisingly it contains lots of allusions to Shakespeare and the Romantics.
So we went through them and the other things you would expect to see cited as well, like Robert Frost, the pastoral genre, and the sublime. I could see each point coming, and I mentally ticked each one off my list as it came along. Listening, I had whatever satisfaction I could get from knowing that even at this remove, if the Maclean book was a question on my Ph.D. orals, I would still have passed. But in addition, there are more allusions by far to the Gospel according to John than to anything else in Maclean's books. Pease was able to get rid of them with a few references to 'John of Patmos,' which most listeners probably wouldn't have recognized. It was a little like a putative Victorian trying to find a delicate locution to avoid using the word 'leg.'
Onto the predictable agenda, Pease superimposed the same Superstar moves that I remembered from the now-comfortably-retired Superstars in my undergraduate years. He strode strenuously up and down the front of the lecture hall. He messed up his hair. His words gushed out passionately. He waved his arms. He exuded blustery charisma.
He ran a scene from the film as part of his lecture. It was a scene that wasn't in the book. And, full of bluster and bombast and charisma, he began to explicate, in passionate detail, every element of the scene in the film that wasn't in the book, the scene that Maclean hadn't written, that Maclean hadn't had anything to do with, because by the time the film was made, Maclean was dead. 'NOTICE,' declaimed Professor Pease, striding about, shouting, waving his arms, messing his hair, 'that when young Norman LEAVES home, Paul is THERE on the station platform to SEE HIM OFF! And NOTICE that sweeping wave, that GESTURE OF BENEDICTION, that Norman gives Paul from the STEPS of the COACH as the TRAIN PULLS OUT! But when Norman RETURNS from DARTMOUTH—an ELITE INSTITUTION—while Paul has STAYED HOME—Paul is NO LONGER THERE ON THE PLATFORM TO GREET HIM!' His voice fell. His arms reached out, half-bent, palms turned back toward his face like Oedipus about to stab out his eyes. He became barely audible, but he had the attention of the whole lecture hall. 'There is—there is—a separation. Norman has left, and he has come back, but he is different. It can no longer be the same between him and his brother.' Everyone in the hall was wiping away tears.
After lunch the schedule called for discussion. I was looking forward to it. I thought I had seen some things in my reading that the professors hadn't touched on in their lectures. It interested me greatly that the material Maclean used most from his life was the summers he had spent working for the Forest Service, before he became an English professor. It reminded me of a few other writers, like Joseph Conrad, who had held responsible jobs and done something other than teach and write in their lives. And Maclean's interest in character and youth also reminded me of Conrad. Maclean alluded to romantic poets, but his was no 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' detached estheticism. Maclean had had a life, and I liked that. I wanted to talk about that.
Somebody else beat me to the discussion. Somebody in the back of the room. He could well have set this up with Cook and Pease beforehand, for all I know. It was the kind of razzle-dazzle I could never get right. In a voice heavy with portent, he announced that he had arrived at a Freudian interpretation of A River Runs Through It. And sure enough, he had. It sounded like he was reading from a little paper he'd written just for this chance. Paul was killing fish as a substitute for killing his father. Paul and his mom were pretty darn affectionate, too. And Paul's refusal to eat the oatmeal—whew! I briefly wondered what Pease and Cook would do to dispose of this tactfully, but I didn't need to wait long. They didn't dispose of it at all. They both thought this was a good idea. They started asking who else had something to add to that. I blurted, 'Well, maybe I would back off that a little. After all, there's nothing in the text to support an interpretation like that.'
'WELL,' roared Professor Pease. 'I suppose SOMEONE has to keep the ENGLISH professor honest here. AFTER ALL, WE'RE SOMETIMES ACCUSED OF OVER-READING TEXTS!' My response here would have been something along the line of 'Yes, and...', but from the heavy sarcasm in his voice it was clear that no response would be brooked.
By way of further explanation, he said, 'There are TWO ways an author can allude to something in a text. ONE way is by saying something. The OTHER way is by LEAVING SOMETHING UNSAID.'
The rest of the people in the class took that as the signal to go ahead and do what they'd probably been waiting for all day—the best Ivy League nostalgia trip of all, to let it go and murmur freely about Freud in English class. After a while they took a departure at least from Sigmund Freud, because they began to talk about the mother's desire to kill the father, which must be in the writing of Al Freud or some other Freud I hadn't heard about. At this point every person in that room was wasting his or her time, listening to his or her own prattle and that of his or her peers, encouraged by Pease and Cook, who must certainly have known better. The alumni class was a joke, a feel-good session for the ones who came in wearing their old Dartmouth sweatshirts. And no matter whether I raised my hand politely or tried to slip in a word edgewise, neither of the Superstars would acknowledge any longer that I was in the room. I might have been an overweight Saint Bernard that wandered in from the dining hall with a napkin around my neck and squeezed into a lecture seat, books and paper hilariously around me. But I did get in one comment, in response to the question, 'WHY is Maclean allowing himself to be UNGRAMMATICAL here?'
Somehow, Pease slipped up and let me catch his eye. I was near the front. 'Longinus says it's OK to be ungrammatical,' I said. He paused for just the tiniest fraction of a beat. I saw it; I doubt that anyone else did. His face looked at first—very, very briefly—like he was thinking, 'What did that overweight Saint Bernard just say?' But then, in that very short flicker, he realized what I had said. I had said something about Longinus, the first classical author on the sublime and a major starting point for any such discussion, and the last thing Pease wanted to do was open that particular door, because it looked very much to him, in that particular instant, as though I could take a ball like that and start to run with it, and I could potentially, without even meaning to do it, make him look bad. I was just a mediocre doctoral candidate who didn't finish at a second-rate university, and that was over twenty years ago. He didn't know exactly that, but he must have surmised something close. And since no one else had noticed that brief exchange, he ignored it.
I have a feeling that the next time he gives a class on Maclean, he's going to add a comment. 'LONGINUS says it's OK to be UNGRAMMATICAL,' he will boom. In fact, he'll probably find a way to work it into Melville or Hart Crane next term. I'll let him have it. There won't be a student in any of his classes who'll be able to take that one and run with it, so he'll be safe, and he'll still be a Superstar who can lord one more resounding ponderosity over them. He wasn't ready to do that just yet. I was still there, and I could still grab it and run with it. 'NORMAN maintains the NORMS,' he began to boom instead.
I decided I had waited a polite enough interval, gathered my books and coat, and made moves as politely as I could to make it look like I had to leave to make an appointment. 'NORMAN maintains the NORMS,' boomed out again. I guess Pease had just thought of it, and he liked it. It was the last thing I heard as I left the lecture hall.