The Development (13 page)

Oh, that not untalented, not unhandsome, undeniably dedicated, generally quite capable and personable forty-five-year-old who joined the Stratford faculty half a dozen years ago upon the publication, two years before
that,
of his first (and eight years later still his only) novel—as utterly conservative, conventional, and unremarkable an item as it's corduroy-jacketed author, but (to give the devil his due) not a bad job, really: issued by a bona fide New York trade house, not an academic press, and politely enough received by it's handful of reviewers. Long since out of print, of course, but who among us isn't? A second novel allegedly still "going the rounds" up in Manhattan, and it's author altogether mum about what, if anything, he and his strait-laced muse have been up to since.

In short and for better or worse, the guy's one of us, toward whom Mandy feels less animus and more colleagueship than does her spouse. "Frank Lee?" she'll tease when I get going like this on the subject. "Frank
-ly,
my dear, I don't give a damn, and neither should you." She's right, as usual, and I probably wouldn't, so much, except that it's been "Miz Klause's mizfortune," as that young woman herself puts it, to have Professor Lee as her official senior-year adviser, coach, and critic—and there, in her workshop mates' no doubt relieved opinion, go any hopes she might have entertained of so much as a long shot at this year's Shakespeare Prize.

But not in her own irrepressible estimation, nor in that of her FOF former coach. Shit, Reader (as Franklin Lee would never say): I'm no avant-gardist; would anytime rather read (or have written) the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, or Scott Fitzgerald, e.g., than those of Gertrude Stein or the later James Joyce. About contemporary "experimental" fiction—interactive electronic hypertext and the like?—I have only the most dutiful, professorial curiosity. Or used to, anyhow, back in my professoring days: used to urge my Stratford charges to keep an open mind and interested eye on the edges of their medium's envelope, reminding them that like the highest and lowest octaves on the classical eighty-eight-key piano—which, though rarely used, may be said to give a sort of resonant
optionality
to the middle octaves, making their use the composer's or performer's choice rather than a constraint—so likewise et cetera, you get the point. I therefore welcomed into my last year's workshop, after my initial startlement, the flagrantly unconventional "submissions" (misleading term!) of the apparently unscrupulous but actually strong-principled
faux-naïve provocateuse
"Cassandra Klause." The academic year that culminated last spring in
A Body of Words
, by Nom D. Plume
had kicked off in the previous autumn with such unconventionalities as the opening pages of
Don Quixote
over the name "Pierre Menard" ("Borges's story, you know?" she had to explain to her baffled classmates. "About the guy who recomposes Cervantes's novel word for word?" They didn't get it); cribbed pages of a Joyce Carol Oates story signed "Toni Morrison," and vice versa (the "point" being that those two eminent Princeton colleagues must surely feel some rivalry, and might mischievously [etc.]); followed by other pointed or pointless but always transparent "plagiarisms" signed "The Grace of God," "The Way," "A Long Shot," "Extension," or "Bye Baby," leaving the reader to supply the missing "by." Never a sentence of her own composing, but invariably a presentation more original than anything else in the room, even when flagrantly cribbed, chopped, and reassembled from the previous week's workshopped efforts of her classmates and re-presented as [by] "D. Construction" or "Tryst-'em Sandy." And then that
Body of Words
,
which she openly declared to be her trial run for the Bard Award ("Hey, it's for the quote 'most impressive
body
of work' unquote, right?") and "performed" for a handful of fellow workshoppers in her dorm room after it's preview by me and Mandy. And the "author" of these brazen stunts, mind, was an invariably unassuming, perky but shy-mannered young woman who also happened to be the most astute and candid yet diplomatic critic in the room (except perhaps for her coach) of her colleagues' literary efforts, so earnest but clunkily unimaginative by comparison.

One can readily imagine how less than edifying, instructive, or even entertaining Professor Franklin Lee found this sort of thing. In conference before the opening classes of her senior fall semester (my ex-student reported to me by e-mail), he pleasantly but firmly let her know that
his
Advanced Fiction Writing seminar, "unlike some," was no theater for avant-garde gimmickry, but a serious workshop in "the millennia-old art of rendering into language the human experience of life": more specifically, in the less ancient art of "inventing and constructing short dramatic prose narratives for print, involving Characters, Setting, Plot, and Theme, in the noble tradition of Poe and Maupassant through Hemingway and Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, to such contemporary masters of the form as Jorge Luis Borges and John Updike." If she found too constraining for her unconventional tastes a genre so splendidly various and accommodating (though rigorous), he advised, she should drop his course and sign up for something in the way of Experimental Theater, perhaps.

And when I pointed out to him that the Stratford catalogue doesn't
offer
any such courses
[her e-message went on],
he smirked that tweedy little smirk of his and said, "Maybe Professor Emeritus Newett will be willing to do some sort of Independent Study project with you in his retirement, unless his wife objects. If he isn't willing, or if she says no, it might just be that Stratford isn't really the right venue for you."In
his
class, however, while we were free to write in the comic or non-comic mode, the realistic or
the fantastic, the traditional or the innovative, what we were going to make up and set down was STORIES, not "marginally interesting aesthetic points presented by non-narrative means.
"

So HELP!!!!! (me, God) (And why wd yr wife object to a few extracurricular sessions, just you&me&my rambunctious muse, either somewhere on campus or maybe @ yr place, while Ms. Todd's meeting her classes ?) (Just kidding, Ma'am ;-)

Adieu
¹⁰
/0 (= Much Ado Over Nothing),

Yrs (truly), "CK
"

"I personally think Frank has a point," opined Mandy when I showed her this message (she and I have no secrets from each other, that I know of). "And damn straight I object! She's so obviously coming on to you, whether she means it seriously or not." If I chose to celebrate my academic retirement by humping a coed forty-five years my junior, she added, thereby dishonoring our longtime solemn vow to keep hands off our students, I should go right the hell ahead, and there'd be "much adieu" indeed: adieu to our marriage and to my academic reputation, for starters. My call.

This-all said no more than half seriously, she crediting me with no such intentions. And of course I abandoned the notion of any such tête-à-tête tutorials, if I'd ever really half entertained it. But I maintained Cassie's and my e-mail connection, offering to show my wife any and all such communications if she wished to monitor them—which she hoped I was kidding even to suggest. Because, truth to tell, my previous year's exposure to "Nom D. Plume"'s "rambunctious muse" showed signs of stirring my own muse from her extended hibernation. During Klause's second junior-year semester with me, and over the following summer, I had found myself reviewing two decades' worth of George Newett story-scripts (most of them rejected after serial submissions), including a half-dozen comparatively recent ones that I hadn't bothered to show Mandy. After my experience of "CK"'s freewheeling, no-holds-barred imagination, they all struck me as, well, earnest but clunky; "not untalented" but nowise exceptional; the sort of stuff that a Franklin Lee might produce, with none of the sparkle that marked Cassie's more imaginative perpetrations. Pallid rehashes, they were, of "the 3 Johns" (her dismissive label for Messrs. Cheever, O'Hara, and Updike): the muted epiphanies and petty nuances of upper-middle-class life in a not-all-that-upscale gated community on Maryland's endearingly funky Eastern Shore. Not impossibly, I had come to feel, some infusion of "CK"ish radicality might goose that muse of mine into rejuvenated action in my Golden Years, and George Newett would be remembered as a once-conventional and scarcely noticed writer who, in his Late Period, produced the refreshingly original works that belatedly made his name.

Meanwhile, however (not having lost my marbles altogether), I respected Frank Lee's ultimatum, sort of, or at least his right to declare it, as Amanda most certainly did as well. But I was determined to come to my former student's aid somehow or other. With some misgivings, therefore, I confided all the above to her by e-mail as her senior-year registration date approached, and we came up with a plan, mostly but by no means entirely hers, to kill several birds with one stone. So to speak? I would supply her with drafts of those unpublished and abandoned later stories of mine: the ones that not even Mandy had seen. She would then edit, revise, and/or rewrite them as much or as little as she chose and submit them to Professor Lee's workshop as her own, perhaps over such Klausean pen names as "John Uptight," "(Over A-)Cheever," "Scareless O'Hara"—surely Professor Lee wouldn't object to
that!
The payoff for me would be fresh input (including his) on those old efforts, for whatever that might be worth, which I could perhaps then re-revise and present to some book publisher as a story collection. For "Sandy," the reward would be her baccalaureate and a shot after all at the Shakespeare Prize (one of whose judges I still was, along with Mandy, Frank Lee, another literature professor, and the head of the English Department). In competition for which she would submit ... what? Perhaps a "body of work" comprising specimens of her provocative junior-year stunts, her senior-year experiments with conventional forms and straightforward realism, and some sort of capstone piece embodying both, to demonstrate her "Hegelian evolution" as a writer (her term for it), from Thesis versus Antithesis to a Synthesis triumphantly combining and transcending both.

Yes, well, reader of these strung-out pages: We did that, my star ex-coachee and I—unbeknownst to my wife, to Franklin Lee, and to my other Stratford ex-colleagues—and all parties were impressed. Ms. Klause had been, remember, the ablest critic in my workshop; now she showed herself to be by far the best editor/rewriter as well. Those ho-hum scribblings of mine took on a resonance, texture, and sparkle that they'd formerly manifested only here and there, if at all—on the strength of which example I dared hope to return to my long-abandoned second novel and CPR it back to new life. "Best damned writing student I ever had," Frank Lee marveled to Amanda and me over a colleaguely lunch one April day in the Stratford Club, "by a factor of several!" He would never have guessed, he went on, that those jim-dandy stories that she had come up with for his workshop were Crazy Cassie's, if not for their jokey pen names—"which of course we will get rid of before she sends them off to
Harper's
and
The New Yorker.
"

That winking, almost conspiratorial "we": So surprised and delighted was Fussy Frank by "our problem child's metamorphosis" that he generously included among it's causes my earlier patient encouragement of her, along with his own "less permissive" standards. "Like Thesis and Antithesis, right?" he actually remarked to Mandy. "And she's our Synthesis." Hence the lunch-in-progress (his suggestion), to which he'd also invited my wife on the strength of her having rescued me a year ago from that
Body of Words,
by now a campus legend.

"I'll drink to that," she allowed, and raised her glass of faculty-club merlot to mine and to our colleague's de-alcoholized char-donnay (he had a class to teach that afternoon, he explained—but then, so did Mandy). As we nibbled our smoked-turkey-and-bean-sprout wraps, he even hinted, shyly, that if our joint protégée needed some extra cash this summer, he might actually hire her to review the typescript of his second novel and make editorial suggestions, so impressed was he by her acumen in that line. "Not that she'll likely be short on funds," he added with a chuckle—inasmuch as he would soon be presenting to the Prize Committee her assembled portfolio, which in his candid, considered, and confidential opinion need consist of nothing more than those half-dozen first-rate contributions to his senior seminar to make her a shoo-in for the Bard Award. "Who'd've thought, last September, that I'd hear myself saying that?"

I could have raised my hand, but of course did not. Among the things of which my lunchmates were unaware was that our Triumphantly Synthesizing student's senior-year output included two items that would not appear in her portfolio: a story of mine that she had submitted under her name to three good quarterlies simultaneously, without editing or revising it, as what she termed a "control" (all three had rejected it, as then had she), and one of her own under
my
name, programmatically imitative of my style, subject matter, and thematic preoccupations, but evidently superior to her model, as it was promptly accepted for publication by a lesser but still worthy periodical.

Consider it a thank-you for all you've done for me,
the girl explained by e-mail when I (1) received the lit mag's baffling acceptance letter (she'd supplied my Heron Bay Estates address on the obligatory self-addressed stamped envelope), (2) made a puzzled inquiry of the editor, (3) quickly surmised what was afoot, (4) canceled the publication (at least under my name), (5) provided the actual author's name and address in case the magazine was still interested (it was, but would need to Inquire Further), and (6) demanded from that author an explanation of this latest jaw-dropper.
XOXO Mwah!,
her message signed off,
[email protected]
.