LETTERS FROM AMHERST
1
TO ROBERT BRAVARD
February 21, 1989
• • •
Dept. of Comp. Lit.
South College Building
U. of Mass., Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
February 21, 1989
Dear Bob,
Well, here I am—at last with a little time to write.
Spent the morning at home, making out checks for $316.89 worth of bills. At the cafe on the corner, ran into our department’s junior-faculty-genius, Peter Fenves. At 28, he’s a respected and widely published Kantian and deep into a book on Kierkegaard. One of my graduate students, a 31-year-old Lesbian named Mel, with peach-colored hair, a couple of years his senior, said of him recently: “It’s really nice to have someone on the faculty who actually lives in ancient Greece.” Peter’s dark, skinny, bespectacled, tiny-fingered, distracted, curly-haired, delicately opinionated, and very good-hearted. Mel’s description is pretty accurate—though Peter’s Greece probably grants Walter Benjamin and Hölderlin honorary citizenship. He came here the same time I did, from Johns Hopkins. I’m in the midst of reading an article he published last year on George Eliot’s first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. Writing a bit clunky, but content fine.
Eliot’s monster, Dempster, is Peter’s antihero—because Dempster tells perfectly absurd and baseless stories and insistently sticks to them in the face of truth, the French encyclopedia, common sense, and everything!
A couple of nights ago, I took him and Don Levine (another professor) to dinner, and we’d yakked about Proust and Madame Bovary and modernism and drank Irish coffees till two in the morning in the lounge of a place whose name I can’t remember. Apparently a comment I dropped that evening sent him home to reread Hiawatha (I found out this morning). So we discussed boredom in poetry, in a most unboring fashion, in the crowded restaurant, while I drank decaf and he had coffee.
Then I bundled into my winter coat, while Peter went off to collect his laundry down the road.
Now I’m sitting in my university office on some mid-February holiday—I’m not even sure which one it is. The squirrels are running over the roof. Creatures whose identity I don’t want to speculate on rattle around in the walls. And the hallway outside my office is more or less deserted.
My classes are notably better this than last term. I guess people are beginning to hear I’m here—maybe some of last term’s students actually talked. At any rate, this time classes were preceded by half-a-dozen calls from particularly interested students who wanted to study with me. In general, the ambition and intelligence—and energy level!—of the classes is so much higher. Last term, though opened to graduate students, my modernist novel class (513) attracted only juniors and seniors. This term, I’ve got half a dozen graduate students. And the undergraduates who’ve enrolled seem a lot more there.
It’s strange to think that I’m here, already sunk in the second term of the rest of my life; the first was, if I’m honest, grim; though—as I look back—not grim in any surprising ways. Half of it was (as I knew it would be) just that the landscape was so new.
By “landscape” I mean something more complex than the physical layout of the town, with its central graveyard [around which my end of Amherst is built], or of the U. Mass. campus, ten minutes down the road from my house. But the bureaucratic landscape, coupled with the psychological landscape [and the social landscape on top of that—the place, as best I can figure out, doesn’t have a sexual landscape (at least not so’s you’d notice)]—has just been annoying, irritating, maddening to learn my way around in. But how could it be otherwise for someone who’s spent thirty years basically self-employed in NYC?
My 2nd floor apartment on Cowles Lane is still bare enough to make (my very rare) visitors, when they come in, look about a bit askance. There’s a bed in the main room. A large study table and a couple of benches are almost lost in the front room.
No rugs. No wall decorations. No other objects to speak of—oh, yes: three mismatching kitchen chairs1 move desultorily through the four low-ceilinged rooms. But that’s it. Books are worming their way along the baseboards, having overflowed the two built-in bookshelves.
Still, when I got back after intersession in New York, I actually had a surge of good feeling over the town; coming in my front door, I felt I was coming home. (Thank the Lord, since, for better or worse, it’s going to be home awhile.)
My office is only a little more homey than the apartment; but because the office has the word-processor in it, I spend most of my days here. One particular “landscape” absurdity is that, though I’m constantly being assigned jobs in which I have to contact other scholars out of state, my phone is not set up to make long-distance calls!
Why you’d give a 70-thousand-dollar-a-year distinguished professor a phone that can only make local calls inside the Amherst city limits is beyond me! I volunteered to have my own put in that I would pay for completely on my own.
No, said the university.
They like it this way.
Oh, well.
Bob, of late I haven’t been the correspondent I’d have liked to be. That goes for a couple of years, now. Looking back over things, I despair of how much has never made it into my letters. You probably noticed “Charles Solomon Coup” on the dedication page of The Motion of Light in Water. I met him back in ’87; he was a six-three, 26-year-old street kid, somewhat retarded, with a couple of stints in jail for not much of anything, who hailed from Western Pennsylvania’s hills, and with whom I had a pleasant summer-long affair that year, which straggled on and off over a year more. Once Iva came home from summer camp and the main part of Mike’s and my relation subsided (by mutual consent) into occasional visits (with friendly sex, if Iva was at her mother’s), a few months later he more or less settled in with another lover, a pleasant, hyper-talkative Puerto Rican artist in his thirties named Paul. Though the last time Mike and I ended up in bed together (Mike is Charles’s street name. In fact it’s “Mike Smith,” yes, after the Heinlein hero in Stranger in a Stranger Land: Mike can’t read, but someone out on the street gave it to him when he first got to the city; so he kept it) was the first time I came down to the city, after I started up here. And of course he’s twenty-eight or nine, now. I’ve had Mike and Paul over for dinner a couple of times, and—when the two of them were kicked out of Paul’s Brooklyn flat—I put them up for a few days.
I met Charles/Mike while he was sitting on the rim of a trash can, in front of the Burger King out on Broadway, about a week after my mother’s 2nd of July stroke. After drinking a couple of cans of beer together, on the bench in the island in the middle of Broadway, over a few nights, when I’d run into him in the street after I’d come from St. Vincent’s, and buying him a couple of Chinese take-out meals, one Sunday I found him in Riverside Park, during the sweltering New York summer heat. (He was standing by the large stone newel, just inside the 79th Street entrance, and looking a little confused about where to amble on to next.) Finally I asked him how he’d take to bedding down with me. He (a nail-biter to rival John Mueller) grinned and said: