In Another Life: The Decline and Fall of the Humanities Through the Eyes of an Ivy-League Jew

By Howard Felperin

In 1966, a young Ph.D. fresh from Harvard came down to New Haven to take up a teaching position in the Yale English department, then widely viewed as the best in the world. In Another Life focuses in lucid retrospect on that time, place, and career, and on that moment within it which would define his destiny. Would he succeed, through native wit, hard work, intense ambition, and sheer good luck, in rising through the ranks, pleasing senior colleagues, weathering the shifting winds of critical doctrine and storms of institutional politics, to achieve that most glittering, coveted, and rarely conferred of prizes: tenure at Yale? A campus novel, full of eccentric characters and bizarre twists and turns? Well, like his quest for tenure, its a case of yes and no. For all this actually happened.
Yet its more than a personal memoir. In Another Life reflectsand reflects onthe so-called crisis in English at a time when new doctrinesstructuralism, deconstruction, theorywere bending literary studies into unaccustomed postures, particularly at Yale. But it also reflects the powerful forces at work on higher education from the wider world outside: the political and economic pressures that were transforming an older elitist culture, with literature and the humanities at its core, into the more egalitarian societyeconomistic, technological, and bureaucraticthat we all now inhabit. The author, a self-proclaimed meritocrat, finds himself deeply at odds with both worlds, and without succour or support from either as he staggers between them.
But what a good read it is for those prepared to entertain the issues it raises! Trenchantly observed and written, this is the story of one mans effort to work out his separate peace with an institution he finds increasingly alienating and absurd. Its style alone will make any but the most politically correct of readers smile through her tears!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491897065

Howard Felperin

Educated at Columbia and Harvard, Howard Felperin has lectured on Shakespeare and literary theory on four continents, published several books on both, as well as a volume of his own poetry, An All But Perfect God, and a monumental verse translation Virgils Aeneid. Shakespearean and classicist, he lives on the Isle of Wight, where he walks the beach and continues to write. His first publication, more than fifty years ago, was a translation of Catullus for the Columbia Review. Its much improved on here.

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© 2014 Howard Felperin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   04/16/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9559-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9705-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9706-5 (e)

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Contents

I: A Blast from the Past

II: The Best English Department in the World

III: The Halfway Covenant

IV: The Savant Garde

V: Make It a Mai Tai

VI: Blame It on Sheik Yamani

VII: Nothing Will Come of Nothing

VIII: Loose Ends

IX: Rites of Passage

X: The Aftermath

XI: Make It a Memoir

XII: The Errors of Our Ways

The revelations of devout and learned

Who rose before us, and as prophets burned,

Are all but stories, which, awoke from sleep,

They told their comrades, and to sleep returned.

—Edward FitzGerald,

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

To the Reader: A Memo on Memoirs

I t’s a strange form when you think about it, not quite one thing or the other. Not the baggy monster of a full-dress autobiography nor the bag of bones of a diary, a memoir is more of a mixed bag, a bin-liner filled with recyclable contents. Bursting at the seams with opinions on this, reflections on that, confessions to the other; stuffed with outdated gossip, well-worn anecdotes, leisurely recollections of the time, place, and circumstances when, where, and how its author came by all of the above; and the whole miscellaneous lot drawn loosely together by a string of trials, tribulations, and—only too typically—triumphs.

Even the technical term for a first-hand account of this kind—récit—highlights its catch-all, faintly compulsive, character. Part history, part fantasy, part essay, it’s a hybrid of hybrids, a mongrel form without literary pedigree, a work of DIY, of improvisation, a one-off by its very nature. Its only coherence flows from the controlling consciousness of its author; its only integrity, from his unique narrative voice. Assuming he has some integrity left, is still conscious and coherent, in control and in voice, by the time he gets round to writing it. For by then he’s history, a has-been at most, waving and drowning in a final farewell gesture.

That’s as it is, I’m afraid, inevitable; but not necessarily a drawback. Yes, everything flows from and returns on the author, flotsam and jetsam on the shore of his aging memory; it’s bound to be subjective, quirky, unreliable. But who expects a memoir to be objective? Unlike a work of history, its focus is on the feel, more than the facts, of the past. It lays claim to a truth without footnotes, one neither impersonal nor total, the partial truth of a distinct viewpoint. The author was there; he ought to know; his personal testimony is its strength. It carries a specific gravity, a degree of authenticity, unavailable elsewhere. Yet that’s also its vulnerability. As chief cook and bottle washer—narrator, protagonist, eyewitness rolled into one—its author is uniquely exposed, his motives open to question. In fiction, his address to the world and designs on the reader would remain in abeyance, partially eclipsed by the characters and events he sets in motion. In a memoir, he’s up close and personal, but is he up front? Caught up in the intimacy of his standpoint, the reader is bound to wonder. Why is he telling me all this? Am I being manipulated? Is it all in the service of self-aggrandizement? Or more cunningly still, the inverse self-aggrandizement of self-deprecation. For even if he comes across as a modest, no-nonsense sort of fellow, he’s not to be trusted. Caveat lector. From any angle, a memoir is a monument to egotism.

And why not? Hasn’t the egomaniac at the centre of it all, the washed-up Ancient Mariner who buttonholes you through the bookshop window, earned his place in the sun? So what if he’s the shadow of his former self, and his heroics already ancient history? Surely the plight of the literary academic, no longer—if he ever was—a household name in a culture engrossed in dreams of celebrity, the promises of technology and commerce, and above all, in stuff, in anything and everything other than higher learning. How can a life spent in the groves of academe before the fall into commodification that now consumes the globe claim the attention of contemporary readers? Perhaps reason enough to encapsulate that fading world before it disappears altogether, not into history, but oblivion. For that’s where it’s headed. Who knows, in the supermarket without walls we now inhabit, our high-tech bazaar of innumerable stalls so well set out, the life of the mind as it was once lived might itself become a marketable commodity, having taken on retrospectively the value of antiquity, curiosity, indeed rarity. Even a walking anachronism, cleverly re-packaged and marketed, could turn into a best-seller. If it comes to that, God help us all, for we really are in trouble.

Alas, it might already have happened, as an older generation of dons publish their memoirs at the very moment when the humanistic, high-academic culture in which they flourished is going to seed. Yet what witty reading they make—Sir Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, Alvin B. Kernan’s In Plato’s Cave, Terry Eagleton’s The Gatekeeper, to name but three. The last major public critic, a senior Ivy-League administrator, and a leading left-Catholic intellectual—all have a potential audience well beyond the shrinking readership of the academic lit-crit they once produced. True, none are exactly celebrities, but all were influential enough in their day to command attention even now. The quality of their writing alone, quite apart from the career inscribed in it, lifts them well above the ruck of more mainstream attention-grabbers, the usual self-celebrants of show-biz, sport, and politics. Of course, you’d expect no less from professors of English.

But what hope is there for lesser mortals? What if the academic in question was never influential, let alone famous, not a has-been but a never-was? What if he represents no wider constituency, no political movement or special interest group or ethnic minority (Jews somehow don’t count as such) clamoring for legitimacy, for rights, recognition, and of course riches within our multicultural, media-driven democracies? What if he never even served in the navy? Must he then be a case of narcissism, onanism, megalomania, or worse yet, Munchausen syndrome sans proxy, and his recollections better left unwritten? Let’s hope not, not if he has a story to tell. Mind you, it better be a good one. Not necessarily a ripping yarn; a revealing slice of life, even a finely traced wrinkle in being, will do. In the poetics of retrospect, small can be beautiful, and less, miraculously more. As long as it opens onto an interesting world—that, surely, is the minimum, entry-level requirement, albeit the hardest to meet. After all, as an act of memory, a memoir is, by definition, of or about something, above and beyond the big ego at its centre.

This one, for example, is about a small, cloistered, inturned world, the Yale English department of the sixties and seventies; yet it might still interest readers who weren’t around at the time and have never set foot in New Haven. It might even seem strangely familiar. If so, it’s a case not of déjà vu but déjà lu. For who hasn’t dropped in from time to time on the parallax universe of the academic picaresque, dipped into the little world made cunningly of the campus novel, stumbled about laughing in the surreal, seriously comic space opened up in the latter half of the last century through the pioneering expeditions of Amis, Lodge, Bradbury, Jacobson, and Roth? Well, here we are again, in another corner of it. Does it matter that this time we enter it through the wormhole of fact? Its ins and outs, twists and turns, nooks and crannies—and the odd creatures inhabiting them—make it as strange, surreal, indeed ‘novelistic’ as many a campus novel. Perhaps it needs to be, given its author’s obscurity, to interest any readers at all.

In fact, the time warp about to unfold first took shape as fiction. What else to make of a place already half way towards allegory—or its flip side, satire—long before I contemplated putting pen to paper? How else to describe an institution whose colleges bear the names of idealist philosophers and puritan divines, whose recent presidents—‘Angell,’ ‘Griswold,’ ‘Kingman,’ ‘Angelo’—sound like figures out of fairy tale, whose ivy-clad library was called ‘Sterling’? ‘Sterling’ too the Chairs held by its most exalted professors, who took tea among first folios of Shakespeare at the Elizabethan Club. Names to conjure with; the stuff of fiction surely; yet also matters of fact. My original title, The Best English Department in the World, made it sound more like parable than personal history. Yet that was only what the place was widely acknowledged to be. See what I mean? You can understand why fiction was my first recourse. Given its storied past and symbolic present, Yale had a mythic dimension above and beyond my personal experience of the place. As for that, what befell me in that wonderland, it was so improbable as to strain to its limit the suspension of disbelief fiction requires. It fell into the category of mythos Aristotle termed ‘the possible improbable’ and advised against. To this day, I can barely believe it happened—to anyone, let alone to me!

But it did. Larger than life, stranger than fiction, with a lesson in there somewhere—it was a kind of parable. My personal tragicomedy was a small but telling fragment of a much bigger catastrophe. Like a sailor at the eye of the perfect storm or a bystander at the epicentre of an earthquake, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up with many others in an unfolding disaster. A sea-change in culture was in the making, a seismic shift massive and far-reaching, a wrinkle in being on a gigantic scale. For that’s what it was, the displacement of the humanities from the centrality they enjoyed within the culture that threw them up the middle of the last century, and by the end of it, all but threw them out! The successive upheavals of pluralist politics, freemarket economics, and digital technology left us shaken, homeless, ‘marginalized.’ Those shockwaves have now been more or less absorbed; it’s business as usual, but not as before, when business, always there, was in the background. And the damage has gone largely unreported by journalists, historians, even by novelists, except in bits and pieces. You can’t blame them. The disaster was so big, it was hard to see; the fallout so widespread, its source impossible to pinpoint, especially from within. As the lights went out all over the newly global village and universal darkness buried us all, we can be forgiven for failing to notice the bulbs in the English department dimming.

But disaster has its upside, if you survive it. In the primeval saga of evolution, didn’t the extinction of the dinosaurs make room for mammals like us? And in the postmodern epic of higher education, hasn’t the decline and fall of the humanities that all but destroyed early-retired English professors like me, also granted us a new lease of life, a fresh challenge, a renewed sense of vocation, if only that of accounting for our own demise? Are we simply to obey the uncreating word of the culture around us—take our golden handshakes, go to the gym, surf the internet, aimlessly wander the world—when history, not to mention literature, cries out for an explanation? Don’t we owe it to ourselves, if no longer to anyone else, to recount those epoch-making events, at once so deeply personal and broadly cultural in their consequences? Who better placed, after all, to tell the tale of the politicizing, the freemarketing, the de-Platonizing of the academy than those who suffered it first-hand? Who better equipped, given the repertoire of forms at our disposal, than the humanists themselves? The forms of truth in particular—of memory, reflection, and personal witness—will come to our rescue, take up where those of imagination leave off. After all, they allow for greater improbability, the improbability of what shouldn’t have happened but did, the sheer implausibility of historical fact, the inherent strangeness, the inalienable and all but unfathomable weirdness, of existence.

As for the forms of imagination—the classics, the canon, the great tradition of poems, plays, novels that add up to the giant form of human possibility itself—it’s not as if their services could ever be left behind. Not just because we spent our youth among their serious joys, and our careers passing them on to future generations. After all, that project failed. We find ourselves in an age of digital reproduction, in which the aura of great books has all but disappeared in the glare of the thin, flashy, transient images that compete all around us for attention. Yet the classics remain central to this tale, its heroes as it were, even as they die before our eyes; as well as its muses behind the scenes, our silent collaborators in the telling. In a culture where literacy itself is fast going extinct, where else do we turn for inspiration in the act of commemorating its passing? For a memoir, for all its burden of lived experience, is more than a factual reconstruction; it’s the imaginative construct crafted of that raw material. A work of DIY, but no less than an epic poem or historical novel, a form of storytelling, an act of mythmaking, a dream of the past. Which is why we need the help of the mighty dead: through the models, figures, rhythms they’ve bequeathed us, they teach us by example how to write.

To acknowledge the influence of past masters, indeed to invoke the aid of their shaping powers, is to open this memoir of mine to an ancient suspicion, one that has shadowed the imagination in all its forms from the beginning. No, not aestheticism or antiquarianism or elitism—these are contemporary, populist, politically correct suspicions—and what ex-professor of English can avoid them? More worrying to the likes of me is the suspicion of lying. ‘A dream of the past’ is what I called it. Truth to tell, a memoir isn’t even that. Strictly speaking, it’s not quite a dream but the memory of a dream; more strictly speaking, not exactly a memory but its written form.

Somewhere in the regress of vanishing vistas it opens between the page and the age, there were real people and events. But the attempt to transfix them in writing—especially with the help of the classics—is doubly falsified: by the subjectivity of memory, of course; but also by the intersubjectivity of literary convention itself, the myriad devices that must be deployed for your story, for any story, to get itself told in the first place. In life, there are no beginnings, middles, and ends, let alone chapters with catchy titles; no one experiences flashbacks, intones internal monologues, or speaks from the dislocation of free indirect discourse. The panoply of narrative technique, all the artificial, yet indispensable, resources of fabulation, belong not to a life and times but to their tentative, eternally dubious construction at our fumbling hands. Better to admit it at the outset: a bag-full of tricks, a thousand sleights of hand, went into it.

Can you believe a word of what follows? Which is it to be, I hear you wondering, fact or fiction? Or some strange, mildly alarming hybrid of the two, call it ‘faction,’ ‘non-fiction novel,’ ‘creative autobiography.’ Call it what you will, there’s no call for alarm. Are memories, and the myths we make of them, true or false? Either way, they’re basic to our sense of self; at the end of the day, all we have and what we live by. So it might be strange, this fable of identity, but rest assured, it’s as true as I could make it. Not because a lot of research went into it—it says good-bye to all that—but because it took so long to write. Long enough for a kind of objectivity to emerge, a sense of perspective, a hard-won realism not only on historical events, but on the scribbling self at their centre, that one degree of inward separation we call self-consciousness.

For any autobiographical attempt that takes itself seriously, it’s a sine qua non, a last, fast-closing window of opportunity, the final crack at authenticity available to the author who attempts it. So, if anything so far rings true, read on. Remain on your guard. After all I’ve said, I expect no less. Yes, the odd date here or detail there might be slightly askew, despite my best efforts at recall. But I’m as sure as I can be that the essential, defining, qualitative contour of the wrinkle about to unfold will be instantly recognizable to those who were there. Some of them might now and then wonder, ‘Remember what’s-his-name? What really happened in his case, and what on earth became of him?’ They’ll find some answers here.

London, 2003; Revised, Isle of Wight 2013

I

A Blast from the Past

A re you the sort of person who likes to browse through other people’s books, preferably those of people you don’t know? You might seek, as in a bookshop or a public library, the odd, congenial title that strikes a chord, chimes with your discerning taste in fiction or studious interest in fact. Or are you drawn to the books before you, less out of curiosity in the various stories they set out to tell, than in the one they tell inadvertently, the story of their collector? For whatever they might have to say about their subjects, they always have something to say about him. Do you enjoy identifying a lawyer from a telltale copy of Prosser on Torts , or a dentist from the tantalizing title, Oral Implantology , on otherwise desultory shelves? I do. There’s self-satisfaction in it at the very least, the sense of superiority that comes from solving a puzzle. And the enjoyment deepens with the difficulty. It’s one thing to scan a bookcase and crack the superficial mystery of a profession; quite another, to probe the deeper mystery of the person half-disclosed by a collection of some singularity. Mind you, such things are harder and harder to find in a culture that has come to regard books in the way it once did buggy whips: as an obsolescent artifact in need of hard flogging. Why make a book—or anything else these days—except to make a buck?

If you can think of other reasons; if you seek from books a different kind of profit; if you belong to that dying breed of bookworm—half collector, half detective—just described, you should have been there when my own library, along with the rest of my worldly possessions, arrived in my new flat. You’d have found it a challenge. On second thought, maybe it’s better you weren’t there, so inhospitable was the scene. There were books everywhere, books in fantastic disarray on the living-room floor, books in and out of boxes at various stages of unpacking, higgledy-piggledy heaps of books all over the shop, books old and new, hard and soft, thick and thin. The detritus of thought deposited by the ages, monuments and middens to high historic cultures, burial mounds of once and future consciousness—books, to a bibliophile, are all these things. But these ancient hills of content are not called ‘volumes’ for nothing. They do take up space after all, lots of it. To a bibliophile moving house, they are so many millstones round your neck and rods for your own back. And if you happen to be a bibliophile recently retired to the cramped quarters of a London flat, your library is a veritable clog on your existence. Roll on the digital revolution! Until its apocalyptic triumph—virtually here—you are lumbered with your books in all their residual materiality, stuck for the nonce with their considerable dead weight.

Almost enough to make a Luddite like me long for the day when books as we know them—heavy, bulky, physical—will be things of the past, superseded by newer, sleeker, virtually weightless vessels of the world’s wisdom: compact disks, ‘e-books,’ and on-line downloading. Almost, but not quite, enough. For the arduous chore of stacking your books into some kind of order has its compensations. It’s hard work all right; each time I do it—more often than I care to recall—it reminds me of bricklaying. New bookshelves usually have to be built—where to put them this time was another problem—before the heavy labour of shifting and lifting can even begin. Don’t worry, that wasn’t why I wanted you there, to help build shelves and hump boxes about. Yet the physical exercise, if not the dust it throws up, is supposed to be good for you, and the sheer heft of all these volumes, not to mention their variegated hues, textures, even odours, is actually enjoyable, a higher form of bricklaying to be sure. All that rich tactility isn’t something to be blithely sacrificed to the smooth, featureless efficiency of electronics. But the experience is pleasurable—and heavy—in more than a sensory sense. For your books carry a kind of electrostatic charge, an intimate, invisible, almost fetishistic glow. When you handle them, a spark crosses the gap, a current flows, between you and your own past. Times, places, circumstances heavy with dread and enchantment, are galvanized to life. It’s a painful pleasure.

Only material objects, part and parcel of your past, seem to possess such powers of evocation, the capacity to put you quite literally in touch with it. So your books might be millstones, but they are also milestones, enduring witnesses to the itinerary that brought you to this point. Which is why their arrival is so unsettling. The burden they impose, and compel you to unpack, is more than that of their sprawling presence; it’s the karmic burden of your past catching up with you, coming home, as it were, to roost. Take my lot. (Please!) The classics of English literature were on display in scholarly, some in original, editions. So too were thick reference books, classical and foreign-language dictionaries, and many bulging anthologies. There were hefty works of historical scholarship and criticism: Mimesis, The Mirror and the Lamp, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, not to mention the elephantine Literary History of England, by A. C. Baugh, et al., once obligatory for doctoral candidates in English Lit., and now ubiquitous among their libraries. Sandwiched in as well were slimmer volumes, works of contemporary poetry, and of modern, indeed post-modern, critical theory, the latter sporting provocative, quasi-poetic titles like Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, S/Z, The Pleasures of the Text, The Anxiety of Influence, Superstructuralism, Beyond Deconstruction . . . .

But most, by far, of the books in evidence were by, on, or related to Shakespeare and identified their owner as a professor, or former professor, of literature, indeed pinpointed him as a Shakespearean scholar. Some actually bore my name, as author or editor, on their spines. My library was the clear distillation of a career, all the clearer because I’d seized the initiative of previous moves to purge it of extraneous material. I’d given that away, most of it, to former students. Their need was greater than mine. After all, did I really need five paperback reprints, examination copies sent to me gratis by publishers, of Great Expectations? Or eight of Paradise Lost? Add all the other duplicates, dross, and duds I’d acquired over the years, and you have an idea how much space I saved as a result. On one such occasion twenty-five years ago, facing the biggest, most wrenching move of my life, I actually sold a large part of my library to a second-hand bookshop in New Haven, ‘Whitlock’s,’ on Broadway, next to the Yale Co-op. I wonder if it’s still there. Sold them for a pittance. It lightened my load at the time, but their absence has burdened me ever since. For humanists of an older generation, books retain a semi-sacred status; an academic who sells his books, like a priest who sells his crucifix or rosary beads, commits sacrilege. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Have I given away the game? Unless you’d actually heard of me, or even more unlikely, read one or two of my books, you might have suspected that I was an antiquarian book dealer, until I revealed myself as a reformed academic. If you did, you wouldn’t have been far wrong. My father was a dealer in second-hand books, and I nearly followed in his footsteps. For me, it was a road not taken. That must be where my own book-fetishism began. When he died, he had ten thousand—yes, ten thousand—books in his house, most of which he had read, scanned, and certainly handled. I grew up literally surrounded by books. Every summer, to help make ends meet while at university, I used to work in Boston for an old friend and comrade of his, George Gloss, the owner of the Brattle Bookshop, ‘The Oldest Continuous Antiquarian Bookshop in America,’ as he never tired of advertising it. It went all the way back to revolutionary days. (There’s a history to be written of the intimate relations between book-selling and radical politics in the modern world.) Under George’s expert tutelage, I acquired the knack of buying cheaply the right—i.e., ‘saleable’—books, most often from deceased estates, and flogging them dearly to customers from every level of nearby Beacon Hill and beyond. George took pride in naming the Cabots and Lodges, some of them ‘Right Honourables,’ among his clientele. He wanted me to join him on a permanent basis when I completed my degree. I could have done worse; by most lights, I probably did. In those days, people still read and collected, and it was possible to make a not-so-small fortune out of out-of-print books. But I had other, less lucrative fish to fry. Young fool that I was, my interest was not in the commerce, but the contents, of old books.

By nature as well as name, George Gloss was straight out of Dickens, a real character in whom Marxist