March 1, 2013--Chapter 28: The Passive Voice (First of Three Parts)

Separated and divorced within a year of his discovering Lydia’s graphic diary were Lloyd and Lydia.  And with that, he entered a period of life where the objects of his actions became more important than its performer.  Lloyd, in other words, found himself living life in the passive voice.

The Writers Workshop never again convened after the blackout because Bobby Richman of Kiddihood fame crashed his car on the way home; and though he escaped serious injury, he was found to have more than the legal limit of alcohol in his blood.  Any in his would have been damning since he was even too young to drink legally—and, to make matters worse, traces of non-prescription drugs were discovered in his system.  No perpetrator was old enough for a discovery of that kind to be ignored by the police or the administration of the Workshop’s college host.

Nor was their advisor Zazlo’s responsibility for this to be ignored. The dean of faculty at Brooklyn College suggested that it might be a good time for him to find another campus, or career, that could serve as his professional home. 

Which he miraculously was able to do by simply answering an advertisement on the Education page of the Sunday New York Times—Queens College’s English Department was seeking applicants for non-tenure track instructors in Composition and Literature.  Within a month of submitting his résumé and a well-crafted cover letter he was interviewed and the following day hired.  The chair told him it was his ironic and self-deprecating letter that drew attention to his application—otherwise it would had been ignored in the stack of the more than 100 that were submitted, most, the chair seemed to take pleasure in informing and tweaking Zazlo, from young scholars who had already completed their PhDs and had publications in refereed journals.  Lloyd realized from this that he had been wise not to make reference to the story of his that had been published in that rag, Black Sun. 

Thus assigned to him were two sections of freshman composition and one of the required genre course—The Novel, in which Pearl and His Brother and The Dirty Books was unlikely to be found on the reading list.

This move to Queens College also meant that though the college was quite near Patty Moriarity’s house in Flushing, without the Workshop there was no natural way for them to stay connected; and he did not want to make any active efforts to see her or continue to commit adultery while fighting with Lydia and her lawyer about alimony and the division of their meager assets.  With Lydia’s confiscated diary in his possession as evidence of her perfidy, however, his lawyer told him that he held all the strong cards and that he should “behave himself”—those were his words—so as not to give away any of this advantage by any “adulterous” activity of his own.

He felt the teaching at Queens went reasonably well.  The students were indistinguishable to Lloyd from those at Brooklyn—typically the first in their families to attend college, occupationally ambitious, and without much interest in or pretence about the value of learning for its own sake. When he took the risk to ask them, over a quick sandwich gobbled down in the college cafeteria, what they thought about his teaching, they told him they liked his ironic style and enthusiasm for the subject matter.  But because of all of the necessary racing about to maintain and support themselves, which interfered with anything resembling careful study, reflection, or leisurely lunches, they represented themselves, with averted eyes, as less “cosmopolitan” (some said “sophisticated”) than the students at Brooklyn.  There, they claimed, putting themselves down in more expansive ways, students were serious about their studies—“Not like us”—and, the wondered, hadn’t there been Nobel Prize winners who were Brooklyn College graduates?  Not, he thought, during the years he was on the faculty.  Not since 1943 when laureate in medicine, Stanley Cohen graduated.  But he did know that Dr. Frank Field, the popular local TV weatherman was a more recent Brooklyn College graduate.

When he attempted to counter this self-description—he in fact greatly admired their grit and drive--they clung to their contention that they were provincial, citing the fact that Queens College was geographically and metaphorically further from Manhattan than Brooklyn.  As he was still living after the separation in his connubial home in Flatbush, he knew that too was not true.  From the top floor of the Queens College administration building one could at least catch sight of the Manhattan skyline.  But from even the tallest building near where he continued to sleep and eat in Brooklyn (Lydia departed like a gleefull escaped prisoner to a sublet in Greenwich Village) all you could see were other undistinguished apartment houses and, if the air was clear, as it rarely was, the wooded hills of Green-Wood Cemetery.  How fitting, how ironic he thought.

Thus it came to him to attempt to make his professional way at an institution from which the metropolis could only be glimpsed, in a borough in which Patty had undoubtedly already forgotten him, a borough through which he needed to drive back and forth along roads laid over the ancient cinder fields of Flushing, under the ghost-image of the relentlessly judging eyes of The Great Gatsby’s Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.  

*   *   *

Before Lloyd knew it, it was May.  Barely four weeks remained in the semester and he had nearly 200 papers to grade.  No one could say that at $12,500 per year he was being overpaid.  And, to make matters worse, he did have plans that he was hardly looking forward to for the long summer—he needed to get something published if he was ever to get shifted onto the tenure track.  Unless that were to occur, he would be doomed to a nomadic life of adjunct teaching, wandering among the colleges of the City University of New York, from Queens to the Bronx to, heaven forbid—Staten island, but not of course back to Brooklyn, in search of a course here and a course there.  In this way eking out a measly living.  If you could even call it that.  Measly, yes; a living, no.

That was a life that might even cause him to regret he had abandoned his plans to go to med school.  He was reminded of this potential life of regret every time he saw his mother who would invariably take his hands in hers and, while stroking them gently and adoringly peering at them as if they were sacred objects, would say, “It’s not too late for medical school, darling.  You have surgeon’s hands.”

But instead, he vowed he would drag himself each day to the library up at Columbia and attempt to crank out a publishable paper for the Modern Language Association on, of course, the Prophetic Works of William Blake.  If he could get enough of the latest hermeneutics worked into it or figure out how to approach the poems through a “gender lens,” he felt certain the readers, the referees, would find value there and agree to publish it, thus assuring that he would leapfrog over his junior colleagues who were still struggling to recover from the various traumas and humiliations associated with completing their doctoral dissertations.

So it was with these expectations, complicated and contradicted by feelings of an impending fate hanging over him that would upset them all, that Lloyd Zazlo found himself slouching in his tweeds (though it was May he had nothing more appropriate to wear that was of lighter weight), alone in the last row, at the final meeting of the year of the college’s nationally-ranked English Department.  He sat there bathed in the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the streaky windows, as if illuminated by deep musical chords in a minor key made visible. 

This was the meeting at which the faculty traditionally debated and theoretically voted on changes in the curriculum (theoretically since that hadn’t happened in at least a decade); and, more commonly, they discussed and voted upon the creation of new courses.  In truth this latter exercise was a virtual academic bazaar with the senior men (and men they were) shamelessly trading votes—“I’ll approve your new elective on Pound if you’ll vote for mine on Coleridge.”  This was not something in which those not on a track toward tenure dared to participate.  That was certain to prove fatal.  So all Lloyd was expected to do, needed to do, was be there as yet another way of showing deference, and to be sure not to fall asleep in the over-heated room.

In a halo of hair, professor and department chairman Hiram Greef tapped the lecture table with his gavel and all conversation ceased as if a shot had been fired.  “We will begin,” he intoned because he always intoned even during casual conversations, “as we always do at this last meeting of the academic year with remembrances of colleagues who are no longer with us.”  Lloyd wondered if at this very moment he was being remembered as no longer with them at Brooklyn College’s English Department’s equivalent end-of-year gathering.  “Louis Steely,” Professor Greef continued, “our beloved Chaucerian passed in April, how appropriately in the spring--Wham that April, with his shoures soote/ The droghte March hath perced to the roote.  He will be remembered for his gentlemanly grace by all assembled and by countless scholars trained by him who are tenured at prestigious colleges and universities, dare I say, throughout the entire English-speaking world, including Australia.

“And of course there is young Chauncey Edistow to remember and mourn, a scholar of great promise, our Wordsworthian, struck down literally before his time on a byway by a speeding motor coach while undertaking, during his sabbatical, an important study of the relationship between the design of Wordsworth’s beloved garden at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and the stanzaic structure of The Prelude--What dwelling shall receive me, in what vale/ Shall be my harbour, underneath what grove.  He is now but a spot of time.

“And finally,” Dr. Greef proclaimed, signaling that he was reaching his peroration, a proclamation which also signaled to Lloyd that is was time for him to button his jacket and sit up straight, “we have one more member to recall.”  In spite of himself, Lloyd had to admit that he was fascinated by these mini- quote-ladened eulogies while at the same time he wondered why he wanted to be tenured in a department where the mortality rate appeared to hover at about 15 percent per year--he had no idea sabbaticals could be so dangerous. 

Dr. Greef pressed on, “We take a moment to recall [not “remember” Lloyd disrespectfully thought—he knew Professor Greef always chose his words with care and was taking great pains to distinguish between remembering and merely recalling] our talented [just talented? This promised to be interesting] Morris Lichtenstein, trained in Jerusalem [Ah yes, Lichtenstein from Israel] who was known for his idiosyncratic approach to Medieval texts.  Controversial though it was, as was his life, we recall him fondly and regret his death.” 

Two recalls, Zazlo noted, now wide awake, though old Professor Baliban was snoring away in the next row.  And what was that about Lichtenstein’s idiosyncratic and controversial life?  This was the English Department after all with enough idiosyncrasies to go around.  All poor Lichtenstein got for his send-off was unaccommodated death—not even a passing?  And just a regret sans mourning?  Further, why was not there not, as with the others, at least half a line, a phrase of text to recall him?   Perhaps something from his beloved Middle English period—from, say, Everyman:

Our lyues and endynge shewes

How transytory we be all daye
This mater is wonders precyous
But the entent of it is more gracyous
And swete to bere awaye

That would work.  But in the meantime, Zazlo, vowed to learn more about this seemingly intriguing Semite, whom he had never met.  Perhaps he had died just before Lloyd was hired.  To, perhaps, keep things in ethnic equilibrium?  It was that kind of department.

While musing about the life and times of the departed Lichtenstein, and his own place in the scheme of things, Zazlo was called back to the present by Chairman Greef’s rapid shift in tone, and the report of his gavel as he struck the podium to summon his colleagues back to the profane from the sacred--the former the more dominant side of a chairman’s bifurcated life at the college.  “As is the case each year,” he began in his departmental voice, “it is now time to deal with proposed new courses.  But before we proceed--Zazlo,” he snapped his fingers toward the rear of the room, “yes, sitting there way in the back,” Lloyd sprang to anxious attention in his chair nearly rendering himself sterile in the process by slamming his loins into the stiffly attached laminated writing tablet.  “Though I know it is hot in here, would you please close the window?  There is that racket outside on the steps of the library.  It is impossible for me to hear myself think.” 

Zazlo had been unaware of that racket, he had been so absorbed in thoughts about mortality, but did as he was told, glancing out at what appeared to be a large demonstration.  People seemed to be singing something, which he heard drifting in even through the now closed window—

We shall all be free, we shall all be free,
We shall all be free some day.

Dr. Greef said, “Much better.  Thank you.  Also better, I am pleased to report, that unlike last year, when we had four new courses to deal with, which took nearly an hour each to discuss, this year there is only one.  And it appears quite uncontroversial—you have the text, a copy was placed on your seat.”  There was the sound of rustled movement as some discovered that they had been sitting on it. 

“Professor Nichols is proposing an elective in Milton.  One which he refreshingly suggests will give equal weight to works other than Paradise Lost.  Nothing very upsetting about that I told him, and so I think we will be able to vote quickly on it and then adjourn to our sherry reception.  And after that it will be off to our sabbaticals—at least those of you who managed to convince me to approve them.” 

He winked exaggeratedly at Margaret Blank, the department’s only tenured female member who was eager to be off to Amherst where she was planning to spend a year engaged in Dickenson studies.  One day when they both found themselves at the card catalogue she had told Lazlo of her particular interest in the Belle of Amherst’s punctuation patterns, claiming that through the years Emily’s editors had largely eliminated most of the hyphens she employed.  Professor Blank’s thesis was that this was to feminize Emily Dickenson—that hyphens to her exclusively male editors represented too much masculine-like “thrusting.”  That was Dr. Blank’s phrase and word. 

And Dr. Greef directed a second but equivalent theatrical wink (his own specialty was Jacobean theater) toward the department’s only Lit-Crit specialist, Marcel Boyer, who was equally eager to be off, in his case, to Paris where for his leave-with-pay he had arranged to study with the already-legendary Jean-Francois Lyotard whose Postmodernist theorizing was beginning to lure American scholars away from their almost total dependence on the tools of the “outmoded,” Boyer’s word, New Criticism. 

Boyer, who like Zazlo was born in Brooklyn, had taken his junior colleague aside one winter afternoon to rail against the limitations of that New Criticism, established, he asserted, by the regressive “ultra-bourgeois,” his phrase, “so-called” Fugitive Poets—Ransom, Tate, Brooks, and, “ugh,” Robert Penn Warren—he had literally spat out all three of his names.  These “crypto-Fascists” theories still held sway, he said, over almost all Lit programs, “including ours right here in working-class Queens,” with their “elitist ideas” about Art, “with a capital A,” ideas which hold that Art is an “autonomous, self-contained universe of discourse,” when in truth (though Boyer didn’t believe in “truth”), as Lyotard affirmed, the “grand narrative” has, “thank God” (needless to say Boyer saw “truth” and “god” in the same disbelieving way), finally “collapsed.”  Renaissance modernism and notions of historical and scientific progress are thankfully over, “fini, kaput” (clearly in Germany as well as in France).  Objectivity is an “illusion”; everything therefore is subjective.   “Subjectif.  You understand, no?”  Lloyd noted that Marcel, in spite of his name, was finally making good progress with his French. 

And though he knew that Zazlo was as yet untutored in these Postmodern matters, he also knew Lloyd had been to Paris as recently as last summer; and so he asked if he knew about the four-star Hôtel Pont Royal where he would be staying.  “Sur la Rive Gauche, bien sûr.”  Lloyd said that he knew it because he had walked by it frequently to get from the Metro to the Eugenie, where he had stayed, a very nice two-star hotel in the same 7ème arrondissement.

Zazlo was brought back from the memories of these rare and fleeting encounters with his colleagues by Professor Nichols’ monotone reading of the text of his new Milton course—Zazlo’s strategy through the year had been to say little, keep his head down, shut windows when directed to, and thereby perhaps slip though unnoticed, unscathed, and unanimously recommended for the tenure track.

Dr. Nichols raced along through the course description since sherry awaited:

. . . Through a study of the major poetry and prose of John Milton, focusing on  Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes the course considers Milton in terms of the literary and historical forces that affected his work and continue to affect his reputation. . . .

Professor Greef, even before Nichols reached the end, again using his gavel, said, “All those in favor indicate so by saying aye.  All those opposed . . .”

“I rise for a point of clarification, Mr. Chairman.  A point of clarification.”  It was ancient and doddering Professor John Graham Bell, the department’s esteemed Rhetoritician and octogenarian, who in his age and bulk and tweeds was unable to hoist himself from his seat, as Robert’s Rules required of someone raising such a point.  But considering that he was the only Rhetoritician left on any English Department faculty in all of Greater New York—Columbia’s had retired or passed on nearly a decade before—and in spite of the fact that his course in the Rhetorical Analysis of Cultural Artifacts invariably failed to attract any enrollments whatsoever, various rules were waved for the Great Man; and because he had tenure, he was thus allowed to collect his salary until retirement or his mortal—whichever occurred first.  So it was not much of an exception to waive for him even Robert’s Rules.  

“Yes, Mr. Bell,” Greef said—referring to a colleague as a Mister, as at Oxbridge, rather than either Doctor or Professor was considered to be the ultimate sign of academic respect.  Especially in America.  “You have a point of clarification?”

Zalzo thought he heard--

We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace,
We shall live in peace some day.

“I indeed do.  I do.”  His voice quivered from both his years and the extent of his concern.  “It is about that piece of description of Professor Nichols’.”  He emphasized the “professor” by pronouncing it as if it was made up of four, not three syllables.”

“Not a problem, I hope.”  Dr. Greef was thinking anxiously about the sherry and softening cheese.

“Well, yes, I have two or three.  Two or three.”  Mr. Bell was also famous among his colleagues for these random repetitions.  Some, with concern, thought this a neurological symptom; more took delight in competing to see who could do the best imitation, with one, Dr. Carleton Ames, who taught Creative Writing and published an occasional sonnet in Daedalus Magazine, after many drinks, always prevailing.

All members of the department strained forward in their confining seats so they could hear more clearly the potentially delicious details of this unusual challenge—for certain Harvey Nichols had not adequately done his political homework to have anyone, especially Mr. Bell, raise any questions, much less points of clarification.  But what he might have offered in return for Bell’s support was not easy to fathom—Mr. Bell never had any new courses to propose; the ones he offered did not run; and thus in many ways he was on a version of permanent sabbatical.  As a result, there was nothing Professor Nichols could dangle before him as a quo or a quid to secure his vote or, equally desirable, indifference.

“And the problems are?”

“I will ignore the giving equal weight matter.  Is that the metaphor he employed?” he asked of no one in particular, placing extra weight on the “he.”

“That, in fact was me.  Not Professor Nichols.”  Everyone appeared shocked that their chairman had so quickly accepted responsibility.  He was a legend for assigning it to others.

“Well, that was unfortunate.  Both the idea and its expression.  Both.  I would have thought that someone trained at, where was it again, the University of Michigan, which is not that bad a place at all,”  it was where Nichols had taken his doctorate and everyone knew that Mr. Bell would think of it as decidedly second-rate, “anyone trained there would have thought more about this.  But I will let that pass.”

Zazlo felt a collective sigh of disappointment—no one much liked old Harvey:  he came from a wealthy Boston family and with his trust fund was able to live in a nine-room apartment high up on West End Avenue, in the midst of the Partisan Review crowd, while the rest of them, including those with tenure, had to make do with one- or two-bedroom places in, at best, the West Village, with not enough space for their books. 

“I am not at all sure about giving much weight to the Agonistes,” Mr. Bell continued—weight was emerging as a theme, “but as I previously indicated, I will let that pass.”  Too bad, everyone continued to feel.  Considerable juice was being drained from the fun the confrontation promised.  “But what is certainly not acceptable in an English department, and here I stress the English, is a course description that is more doggerel, doggerel than anything resembling even American English.  And here I stress the American.”  At that there was muttering and some muted chuckling. 

While Zazlo heard—

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe . . .

“I say,” it was Nichols, now roused and himself sounding very Oxbridge.  The Agonistes we can debate, but doggerel indeed.”  Turning to Dr. Greer, he said, “I propose we call the question, or I may be forced to raise a point of personal privilege.”

“I am not sure we have a motion before us.”  This from Professor Baliban who had slept through the eulogies but was now palpably excited by the discourse.

“I so move.”  This from Dr. Alexander Fassle, the department’s expert on 18^th century prose.

“Move what?” snapped Associate Professor Zito, who taught the department’s only popular courses—the year-long Shakespeare sequence.

“Nichols’ course description, of course.  I move that.”  Things were becoming heated.  Even reopening the window would provide no relief.  “Is there a second?”  This from Assistant Professor Dawson Hawkins, the department’s diffident specialist in Anglo-Irish literature, whose diffidence it was anticipated would cost him his chance to gain tenure next year.   He had made the fatal error of displaying this aspect of his personality before rather than after being awarded the certainty of lifetime employment.  Diffidence after, of course, would present no problems.  In fact, in later years it might contribute as much to his chances for promotion as his publications—it was that highly prized.  

But to his motion, nonetheless, there were an immediate three seconds.  The chairman did not move to correct that slight parliamentary breech—only one was required.

Calmly in the face of this brewing academic storm, intensifying less from schaudenfreudian impulses than by the thought of the wine that would be warming and cheese that would be spoiling, in spite of this Mr. Bell still pressed on, “I do believe I still have the floor—for my points of clarification.  Do I not Professor, Professor Greef?”

“Yes, you do,” the chair ruled with an iaudible sigh.  “Please continue.”

“Well, I object.”  This again from Professor Nichols.

“Overruled.  Please continue Mr. Bell, Mr. Bell.  I hope you will be brief,” he urged, showing the beginnings of annoyance and a tendency himself to do some repeating.

“I will indeed.  All I need to do is draw to your attention to one especially offensive clause, and then I will be seated.”  Everyone noted that he indeed already was and that there was little likelihood that he was capable of doing otherwise.

“Proceed.”

Zazlo heard—

We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome some day.

“I can barely make myself speak it; but if you insist, it is, it is—‘the course considers Milton in terms of the literary and historical forces that affected his work.’”  He paused to allow the effect to gather; and when he sensed it had, he delivered what he assumed would be the death blow—“I do not recall ever hearing about a course doing any considering.”  And with that he sat.  Actually, sat back, nearly toppling the fragile chair.

And then without any pause, the chairman intoned, “All those in favor?”  There was a unanimous mumbling of aye.  Mr. Bell did not offer a nay.  “In that case I will entertain a motion to adjourn until the fall, when hopefully we have no one further to remember or recall.” 

To that there was a hearty chorus of “Here-here’s.”

Then turning to Mr. Bell, Dr. Greef said, Professor Bell, can I help you to the sherry?”

                                                           *   *   *

To be continued . . .