The Classroom Conservative

Wayne Johnston, A World Elsewhere

Margaret Atwood deserves the Nobel Prize.

I want to endorse an idea that I have heard frequently so that I may say something I have not elsewhere heard: I believe Wayne Johnson to be the best writer working in Canada today.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) and The Navigator of New York (2002), the sweeping, historical epics for which he is best known, truly are the cornerstones of his achievement, and with The Custodian of Paradise (2006) he demonstrated that he could sustain threads of the former and cultivate them to achieve a similar effect.  He loves grand scales in his historical fiction, ennobling St. John’s by juxtaposing it with grand cities of the United States or the stunning magnificence of the natural world.  With his earlier novels, like The Time of Their Lives (1987), Johnston crafted intricate stories of human interaction, exercises that served him well when he expanded the worlds of his novels.

A World Elsewhere tries, in its brief three hundred pages, to combine elements of both approaches.  The story deals with the dishonored, outcast Landish Druken, sent down from Princeton to his native St. John’s for helping his aristocratic friend cheat on his assignments.  His father, a famous sealing captain, has disowned him for going back on his promise to embrace the family business.  Landish is between worlds, shambolic, adrift, and living inside his own head.  This is manifest in the constant punning that defines Landish’s thoughts, a conceit that begins by grating on the reader but comes, miraculously, to charm.  This creative dexterity finds an appropriate outlet when he ends up with responsibility for Deacon Carson Druken, the sickly, orphaned son of the sealer killed by the hard-heartedness of Landish’s father.  His command of words enchants the young man, and Johnston endows Landish with the gift to heighten his gift of gab to mythological heights.  “The murk” is that early time in a child’s life remembered but fuzzily; “just mist” is the world of possibilities that never was.  It is in the murk that Deacon knows his birth mother and in just mist that he imagines a life outside the abject poverty he shares with Landish.

Johnston must move his story along, and because the relationship between these two is forged in a rented attic space on Dark Marsh Road, St. John’s is less a character than it has been in earlier works.  It might be by now too easy for Johnston to conjure up the Newfoundland capital at the turn of the last century, but the quick flashes of the Old City here are no less magical for that.  It, again, is a highly-structured society, the whole world in miniature, but it is not one in which Landish can engage fully.  He makes the stunning decision to seek the charity of the classmate he rejected with resentment, and he leaves Newfoundland for the United States, a world elsewhere that his cheating relegated to just mist.  His classmate is no ordinary blue blood; he is Padgett Vanderluyden, known as Van, the fictional manifestation of George Washington Vanderbilt II.  It is, perhaps, because Van is such a fiend that Johnston decides this once to coat his story with a thin veneer.  Landish and Druken move through New York, fleetingly, to Vanderland (not Biltmore), the Xanadu in North Carolina in which Landish could have been a prince but where he is doomed, now, to be no more than an English tutor.

The last half of the book is divorced from the Gilded Age settings through which Johnston has made his name.  Vanderland is, itself, a surreal world elsewhere drawn in great detail but in utter detachment from anywhere else, including Newfoundland.  As a result, the book comes to rely more and more on the connection between characters, and Johnston is successful in drawing his as complex, complicated beings.  Just when one is ready to dismiss Landish as a failure, he asserts his physical presence (too often conveniently underplayed to descriptions of his poverty) and his sharp mind.  Van is a monster, but piteous in his monstrosity.  I enjoyed “The Blokes,” the eunuch tutors with whom Landish and Deacon board at Vanderland.  Once again, Johnston distinguishes himself in drawing women: he does not pretend to understand fully their experience, as he never asserted in giving us Sheilagh Fielding, his greatest character, but they are both fully-realized and stunningly mysterious, the “other” at the heart of Johnston’s writing.  It is perhaps because Johnston’s women are filtered through the perception of the men that they achieve this careful, tantalizing balance.  The appear underdeveloped only in the most minor characters, like in Landish’s love interest here, who is little more than a beguiling physical being.  The most straightforward character in A World Elsewhere  is the cherubic Deacon, the object, inevitably, of so much affection, the obsession that sends us hurtling towards our conclusion.

Johnston reaches some considerable heights here.  He once again gives us vivid characters that we are unlikely soon to forget.  One finishes the book wondering what happened next to them all.  (This, incidentally, is one of the things I always look for in fiction.)  There are different kinds of worlds drawn sharply, and the reader can imagine inhabiting any number of them.  Other reviews quibble with this or with that, but my only hesitation is with a conclusion that seems hurried.  It is as if, in creating tension, Johnston mistakes this with heightened pace.  His recent books, so long, so engrossing, so leisurely, in a sense, provide him with the time to develop a tension that seems, to me, tacked on here.  I cannot imagine that Landish’s next world warrants its own story, but rather than ending this one Johnston seems to have been building towards an epilogue imagined and not realized.

At Your Service

First things first: full disclosure.  Defined as a senior administrator, I have three course reliefs each year.  As I prefer to consider it, I have been seconded to administration, but I still teach.  For some people, this is a distinction without a difference, and so I have no problem admitting that I benefit from a practice that I will now criticize.  Certainly, I have been awarded course relief for service.  When I coordinated a writing program here, in 2000-02, I taught one less course each year.  My chair argued, unsuccessfully, that I should have a course relief when I returned from leave, so that I might finish projects begun while away.  (That was a stretch, but who was I to argue?)  If I had been teaching more courses in the period in which I served SSHRC in Ottawa, I would have been relieved of those classes.  But, really, how can you teach less than one course and still be a teacher?

The issue I raise here is one that, far more often than research obligations, takes colleagues out of the classroom.  It is the practice of absolving teaching staff from classes so that they can undertake service to the university.  At my institution, you can petition for course relief if you chair a department; if your department is large and complex, you might even get more than one.  You can, of course, get a break for coordinating a program.  You might be relieved of classroom duties if you help adjudicate tenure cases.  There is also service to the whole institution – helping in recruitment, serving on various reviews, writing policy, or undertaking planning exercises.

You will remember that I have complained, here and elsewhere, about the professoriate standing (or getting pushed) aside to let bureaucrats do this kind of work.  So, on the one hand, I smile when I think of the parade of folks petitioning a dean for time to serve colleagues.  On the other, I observe that one-fifth of most of our contracts is supposed to be set aside for service.  If much of the service we undertake is deserving of course relief, what service fulfills our basic obligation?   I suspect that the problem might be that service is actually undertaken by a smaller number of overburdened colleagues, and that, if everyone pitched in, the burden would be lessened on those people who do not feel like they can serve and still fulfill their responsibilities as teachers.

I read often the complaints of individuals, usually commentators from outside the academy, who believe that professors do not teach enough.  As they see it, we are chasing esoteric research topics that distract us from our commitment to undergraduates.  But I wonder if the larger problem might be caused by the frequent assertion that any duty owed our institutions, as a whole, must be “rewarded” by a break from the classroom?

Trading Places

A colleague joined us, recently, from a university located in a Canadian city I love.  “You’d pull my cold, dead body away from that place,” I joked.

Academics suffer a great deal of geographical envy.

To read American scholars tell it, everyone wants to live in the same city or two, would settle for working in one of a couple of dozen fabulous institutions in smaller communities, but will likely end up in some place they must abide.  As I have observed previously, the issue is a little different in Canada where our university sector is less hierarchical and most of our cities and major communities have awful weather.

But, in our hearts, we each harbor idiosyncratic longings.  I have friends in wonderful cities longing to be elsewhere.

Less than two years after I arrived in Lethbridge, the university had money to make another appointment in our department, perhaps at a senior level.  The university from which I had come was short of money, and one of my undergraduate advisors was spending his sabbatical in Southern Alberta because his wife had found an administrative job with us.  Why, we wondered, was it not possible for universities to make trades, as do sports teams?  Why could I not simply go home to draw my modest, pre-tenure salary there while he brought twenty years of experience to my new department?

I have been thinking about that question as I work through Naomi Riley’s The Faculty Lounges, a deceptively narrow-minded assault on tenure, dressed up as a comprehensive interrogation of the institution.  I hope to write in greater depth about the book, but I cannot – for the time being – transcend Riley’s first concern with what she sees as unwarranted protection for wasteful research.  Tenure surely needs some renovation, but one wonders, as Riley imagines it away on the grounds that contemporary workers are quite migratory, how a world post-tenure might work for us.

Is it possible that universities could be run through a series of rolling, five-year contracts?  Would we, like professional athletes, have stellar performances in our “contract” years and then worry about slumping after being renewed?  Would these contracts be more effective than present measures for ensuring that so-called “deadwood” pulls its weight?  Or would we fear, like professional athletes, that we would be regularly replaced by less experienced (and, hence, less expensive) new labor?

Indeed, it seems to me that, rather than the job market as a whole, this world of professional athletics provides the best analogy for a post-tenure world.  Right now, only extraordinary programs like the Canada Research Chairs allow tenured scholars to shop their talents elsewhere, albeit in a limited way.  Would universities, with scholars “expiring” every five years, use this era of greater mobility to invest in the continued professional development of those of us at mid-career?  Could you imagine a future when, like LeBron James, English professors held press conferences to announce that they would “take their talents,” say, to Saskatoon, or North Bay, to Hamilton, or Fredericton?  Or would we, like most professional athletes, enjoy a short academic career before transitioning into some other job – hopefully before experiencing a debilitating concussion?

On the weekend, I watched a segment on the Suze Orman Show with a mid-level athlete at the end of his career.  Both he and his wife hope to return to school to earn another degree.  If I lost my job in a cost-cutting measure, I guess I would have to seek to do the same.  But who would be left in the professoriate to teach me?

Ebert Presents: At The Movies

I teach my students that the greatest failure of modernism was its penchant for drawing attention to the differences that divide us while offering no effective strategy for overcoming them.  My complaint with contemporary culture, on the other hand, is that it often imagines away our differences.

One sees this in all manner of relevatism.

For resisting the tide of its culture, I have become a big fan of Ebert Presents: At The Movies, the worthy successor of programs Roger Ebert hosted, first, with Gene Siskel and, then, with Richard Roeper.  Disfigured and left unable to speak by a well-publicized, decade-long battle with cancer, Ebert appears in short segments where other people, usually Bill Kurtis, voice his reviews.

The bulk of the air time is devoted to dueling reviews from Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, in the time-honored format.  The two critics have an acceptable chemistry, developed further as they have honed their on-air personas.  By now, we have concluded that the more populist Lemire prefers movies with pace; Vishnevetsky leans towards foreign films with subtitles.  Thirty-year-old clips from Sneak Previews remind us that lengthier and more detailed discussions of the art were once more common, and Ebert Presents toys with the format in defiance of contemporary culture’s predilection for short, snappy sound bites.

But it is Roger Ebert, himself, who most persistently challenges the new status quo.  He has lamented how much time we waste hiding illness, and his appearances on camera never hide the limitations imposed upon him by his cancer.  To be clear: illness has not blunted Ebert’s critical acumen.  All that has changed is his appearance and his ability to speak.  To work around a handicap, he has enlisted able collaborators, and that – for me – is the lesson.  Roger Ebert’s cancer altered him; it did not diminish him in essence, but it rendered him different, without doubt.  While I would wish for him that it was not so, the grimly practical fashion in which he confronts his difficulty accomplishes something that one often encounters as a postmodern cliché.  His program is actually better for the contribution of all the people who seek to help him mitigate the differences he must confront.

Ebert Presents, on PBS, is on a summer hiatus, showing clips from the work done through the eighties with Gene Siskel.  These are well worth your time.  Here is hoping the program is back and stronger than ever in September.

I Will Be Back In Fifteen Minutes

... is a sign I encounter frequently in offices and stores where one person is working -- and that person is taking a break.  The problem, of course, is that I cannot know whether that person has been absent for thirty seconds or for thirteen minutes.

Listening To The New Yorker Poets

A few weeks ago, I saw one of my retired colleagues in the local bookstore.

“Do you know what I miss about the university?  The only thing?” he asked me.  “I miss reading poetry aloud to people.”

I had to admit that the ability to speak in rhyme in front of people is a unique feature of professing literature.  There are not too many other jobs in which this is permitted, let alone encouraged.  I do not suggest that you try it, say, on a sales call.

The importance of hearing poetry was reinforced for me, once more, as I explored my New Yorker iPad app.  Recently, I wrote in this space about how canny is Conde Nast by including a digital subscription as part of its packages.  Simultaneous subscriptions will help wean me off paper where weaning is absolutely necessary.

But, as many of you will know, the digital New Yorker includes some very interesting additional content, including audio files of contemporary poets reading their poems.  As I read and played the poems, listening or following along, I enjoyed the poems more and, I feel, got more from them.  After all, as my retired colleague would attest, hearing a poem is how the work should be encountered.  This takes us back to the roots of the oral tradition in literature.

Again, I have described my approach to technology as “conservative,” in the sense that ideally it should help us recapture something that we have, for various reasons, lost along the way.  I have no interest in having things read to me so that I can put less effort into concentrating on them – like those condensed books-on-tape marketed to executives who are, supposedly, too busy to read but must have content to drop into polite conversation.  But I acknowledge fully that we have lost the ability to sit around reading poetry to each other – outside the classroom, at least – and so I take some solace in my digital subscription as I hear, in delicious accent, how things are meant to be spoken.