Published Fall 2006
 
Academic Memoir
(on Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005])
Elaine Showalter wants you to know that she has been the model for at least two characters in academic novels—once as a "luscious Concord grape" and once as a "withered prune" (1). As Showalter explains, it is (almost) considered an honor in a star-studded academic marketplace to appear within the pages of this "small but recognizable subgenre" (2). She blushes at not naming names, and reserves for Stanley Fish top accolades as the model for David Lodge's jet-setting Morris Zapp—"the only acknowledged doubles" in academic fiction, identified by Lodge, Fish, and Fish's editor at Harvard UP, Lindsay Waters (65). Showalter's blush in deferring such identification points to a persistent movement in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, which is not so much a sustained analytical study of the academic novel genre, but a version of Showalter's academic memoir. Part of the University of Pennsylvania Press series "Personal Takes," Faculty Towers offers an example of this other small but recognizable subgenre that at times feeds into the academic star-system as much as TLS or NYT profiles and that may even compete with the academic novel itself as the new window into the academy.
Showalter's book ostensibly joins an increasing number of scholarly studies that identifies the academic novel as a significant genre commenting on issues of the academy. Early studies such as Mortimer Proctor's The English University Novel (1957), John Lyon's The College Novel in America (1963), and John Kramer's exhaustive bibliography of The American College Novel (1981) essentially established the parameters and scope of the genre. Later, studies including Janice Rossen's The University in Modern Fiction and Kenneth Womack's Postwar Academic Fiction presented theoretical approaches to it, Rossen analyzing the representations of power, Womack approaching through the lens of ethical criticism. As the titles of these now-exemplary studies indicate, there exists a distinction in the genre between the "academic novel" and the "college novel." If popular "undergraduate handbooks" such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale demonstrated proper student conduct (and mis-conduct) for generations of college students, the academic novel has in many ways become an advice book for faculty. Showalter relates how these novels taught her "how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, succeed, or fail" (2). She limits herself to what she calls Professorromane, maintaining the important distinction between the two types. Doing so allows her to construct a narrative of academic life in the university from the fifties to the present—from the faculty perspective. Her history, because of this limitation, is one-sided, and thus becomes what all memoirs are, personal stories. Faculty Towers was critically anticipated and touted as almost a definitive statement on the genre—after all, it is Elaine Showalter, so one might expect A Genre of Their Own. But to follow her titular allusion to the BBC's Fawlty Towers, are we hearing from John Cleese's Basil or Connie Booth's Polly (or is it Prunella Scales' Sybil)?
Showalter's history begins with two Victorian novels that function as precursors, Trollope's Barchester Towers and Eliot's Middlemarch ("the supreme academic fiction" [5]), and Willa Cather's modernist example The Professor's House. Although outside her scope, it is revealing to note that during this extended period, the college novel flourished with Fitzgerald and Johnson as well as Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm. Statistically, as the academic novel rose, the college novel fell, suggestive of the shifting role of the university. Showalter's precursors lead her directly to the fifties and the accepted birth of the academic novel with C.P. Snow's The Masters, Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, and Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe. Showalter then divides her account by decade, describing the transformation of the university (or at least the English department) from "ivory tower" (50s) to "tenured towers" (90s). This transformation echoes William Tierney's argument that the academic novel shifts from an attention to an idealized sense of academic freedom to the bureaucratic malaise of tenure in the second half of the twentieth century: "in a mere fifty years tenure has moved from the protector of academic freedom to the protector of the status quo and the enabler of academic high jinks" (171). Showalter is also up front in focusing primarily on the rise and dissemination of feminism in the academy, so the eighties are in her account labeled "Feminist Towers."
Between lengthy summaries of classic (and some not-so-remembered) academic novels and the life of the university, Showalter interweaves her own life. Following a six-page summary of The Masters, C. P. Snow's tale of an election of a Cambridge master, Showalter asks about the verisimilitude of Snow's depiction of Cambridge life. To answer, Showalter recounts her first visit to Cambridge as "an awed faculty wife" dining at the Trinity College High Table (21). We even get the details of the menu as she had scribbled it down in her paperback copy of A Room of One's Own (in case you want to know, the menu included "chef's salad, chicken Washington, new potatoes and peas, Trinity College burnt cream, savory crab on toast, followed by port, Madeira, sauterne, claret, biscuits, cheese, fresh peaches, coffee and cigars, brandy and seltzer" [21]). She then relates how the Victorian historian George Kitson-Clark dismissed her scholarly questions (it is "taboo to discuss one's work at dinner"), but readily demonstrated how to break the crust of the crème brûlée (22). Despite disavowals by the faculty, Showalter finds evidence for the accuracy of Snow's portrayal when Ralph Leigh criticizes how the current master, Rab Butler, passed the port and claret: "Leigh hissed into my ear, 'The fool is passing the port the wrong way round!'" (22). Showalter began her academic career as a faculty wife (married to Professor of French Literature English Showalter in 1962, she received her PhD from UC-Davis in 1970), which gives her an interesting perspective on both the academy and the academic novel.
In her chapter on the sixties, she concludes her summary of Alison Lurie's Love and Friendship, set at Princeton, by assessing the accuracy of the novel's description. Again, she recounts arriving at Princeton in 1965, the "high-rise barracks for junior faculty down by the lake," the "houseplant tour," and the "anxious entertaining of the department chair and his wife" (40). She also reproduces a letter sent to her by a faculty when Showalter received her PhD, parodying the expected behavior and activities of faculty wives: "contract bridge, needlecraft, and sewing" versus the "fairly aggressive and unfeminine career girls" (40). Showalter concludes this chapter with Gerald Brace's The Department, and yet again, Showalter essentially argues the truthfulness of the depiction. Describing the novel as "quaint," she contrasts the novel's description with what was happening in the profession in the late 1960s (47). From her vantage point working in the support group answering phones for the emerging Radical Caucus (noted parenthetically), Showalter remarks that the MLA had become a "hotbed of radicalism" in politics, race, and gender (47). What Showalter sees in the novels of this period, along with her personal experience, convinces her to assess the period as "wan and bleak," particularly for women—"feminism took a long time to seep into the academic novel" (41).
Showalter rose to critical prominence in the seventies, particularly with her groundbreaking work A Literature of Their Own (1977) and essential essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics" (1979), establishing the term gynocriticism in the literary lexicon. Her chapter on the seventies in Faculty Towers reflects the ambivalence of the period toward women and feminism. She opens with an interesting, anecdotal collage of images:
caped sociology professors piping students into lecture-happenings on the recorder; religion professors holding love-ins during which we lay on waterbeds and watched porn films projected on the ceiling; English professors joining cults of many kinds; art professors holding a Black Mass in the chapel at which they sacrificed a sheep, much to the annoyance of the ag school. (49)
Sometimes, life is stranger than fiction. By the eighties, Carolyn Heilbrun could write the Amanda Cross/Kate Fansler mystery Death in a Tenured Position, which, according to Showalter, was the first to discuss the "problems plaguing women who had made it in academia and to caution those who had not" (69). Despite some nit-picky reservations on accuracy, the book struck a chord with Showalter and epitomized the place of women in the university. When Showalter writes about Heilbrun, Joyce Carol Oates (Showalter is "not exactly a character" in her novel Nemesis), David Lodge, Stanley Fish, et al., it is easy to pick up on the familiarity and friendships she has with these other literary stars (119). Despite refusing to name names in her own literary reflections, she is quick to identify Heilbrun's "colleague" mentioned in her essay "Bringing the Spirit Back to English Studies" as Nancy K. Miller. Of Fish, she notes that "I have heard from friends that Fish often proffers financial advice to other professors, gratis, for the sheer love of bargaining" (85). This is actually the appeal of the book. The autobiographical details pop up consistently throughout Faculty Towers, as if to keep the reader engaged. And it works. While certainly not a complete autobiography of Showalter, we get enough detail to see her as a real person, as opposed to the anthologized, published star-critic. That is, of course, the allure of memoir—the personal, idiosyncratic insights, underneath the official, institutionalized curriculum vitae.
If the academic novel supplanted the college novel since the fifties, the nineties witnessed a genre that is making headway in supplanting the academic novel in terms of being a window into the academic's office. While Showalter's Faculty Towers may be a disguised or subtle memoir, other academics have capitalized on the popularity of the genre. Nancy K. Miller begins But Enough About Me by aligning the vogue in academic memoir with the general explosion of memoir in the nineties, noting some of its other names, such as "autocritography" and "new belletrism." Miller points out that memoir's appeal is that it engenders an "attachment" between writer and reader: "a bond created through identifications and—just as importantly—disidentifications" (2-3). This desire is the same as the one identified by many readers of the academic novel: the desire to read about someone like oneself, someone else who has experienced graduate school, the job market, departmental and university politics, the conference scene, teaching, tenure, and post-tenure, although perhaps someone who is unlike oneself, tenured or launched into the galaxy. If the outside world (parents, taxpayers, legislators) views academe as at best a solipsistic ivory tower, at worst a schizophrenic radical hotbed/country club, many insiders (particularly new assistant professors) view it as a mysterious enclave with secret rituals, rooms, and shibboleths. As the number of PhDs continues to rise, the number searching for guidance grows too. The academic novel has been a guide for many, but for various reasons may have run its course. As Showalter notes, "contemporary academic fiction is too tame, substituting satire for tragedy, detective plots for the complex effects on a community of its internal scandals, revelations, disruptions, disappointments, and catastrophes" (119). Now, instead of reading Lucky Jim or even The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career, one often turns to a memoir.
Academic memoir falls into four types, roughly corresponding to the academic career. The first is the life history, told from the retrospective vantage of post-tenure or retirement. This type begins with the standard life history, sometimes in negative terms, opining for a past time before the university became corporatized or theorized. In such a way, William Pritchard's English Papers (1995) becomes an elegiac memoir, showing an idyllic academy where Robert Frost comes and goes. Somewhat more acerbic, Paul Fussell's Doing Battle (1996) relates the stormy education and career of the author of Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and The Great War and Modern Memory. In these, readers see a strangely different world than their own. Both Pritchard and Fussell recount, for instance, that they benefited from the old-boy network in receiving their first jobs, albeit in a job market that was barely competitive—almost everyone had a job offer, often before completing the degree. In a more critical vein, Alvin Kernan (In Plato's Cave [1999]), Frank Lentricchia (The Edge of Night [1994]), and Frank Kermode (Not Entitled [1995]) use the memoir mode to follow transformations in university structure and curriculum. Writing in the nineties and coming from some of the major figures in critical theory, these particular memoirs become insightful assessments of the state of literary studies and the culture wars.
The second type, including Terry Eagleton's The Gate Keeper (2001), Mark Edmundson's Teacher (2002), and Edward Said's Out of Place (1999), are essentially childhood memoirs. Eagleton, for example, concludes with his acceptance as an undergraduate at Cambridge; Said's ends with the completion of his PhD at Harvard. These particular children, however, grow up to be academic celebrities. The draw of this particular type of memoir lies in the discovery of the social, cultural, and economic forces that shaped a particular critic's views and work: Eagleton's working-class Catholic childhood in Protestant England, for instance, or Said's childhood in the Middle East.
The third type focuses on the day-to-day life of an academic. James Phelan's Beyond the Tenure Track (1991) recounts fifteen months in the life of a tenured professor. Phelan does not look back from retirement or celebrity status, but provides the daily, if not banal detail of life of a professor. Similarly, Jim Lang recounts his first year on the tenure track in Life on the Tenure Track (2005).The minutiae of semester and daily scheduling, research projects, and grading comes to the fore in these works (Showalter's discussion of "academic time" is revealing here—academics are governed by a strange calendar). These memoirs function as how-to manuals for graduate students as well as established academics, minus the trappings of a fictional narrative (say, a giant pig hidden in the middle of campus, as in Jane Smiley's Moo). The Chronicle of Higher Education's popular "First Person" series often falls into this category, whether it is a tale of the tenure track or the job search.
In contrast to the first two types, which feature some of the most influential critics, and the third, which features the Everyman/woman beginning teacher or mid-career professor, the fourth type of memoir recounts the academic career that didn't make it. Don Snyder's The Cliff Walk (1998) offers a poignant portrayal of an increasingly common academic denizen—denied tenure or contract renewal; in Snyder's case, the official explanation is "simply because the English department was already top-heavy with tenured professors" (14). The Chronicle also occasionally runs a bitter (or not-so-bitter) farewell to the academy in its "First Person" column. The last two types of academic memoir suggest an intriguing turn in the genre. While at some point, memoir draws on the "celebrity" nature of the writer—the rise of academic memoir in the nineties echoes the establishment of the academic star system in the same decade—the appeal often becomes that of the regular person, in which we see a more representative figure, one that more readers can identify with.
Works Cited
Miller, Nancy K. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
Tierney, William G. "Academic Freedom and Tenure: Between Fiction and Reality." Journal of Higher Education. 75 (2004): 161-77. |
