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“I’m pretty sure —”
“Always.”
I stirred my tea, silently conceding the point.
“All the stuff in here, what is it?” I asked, trying a different tack. “The leather and the glue?”
“It’s my work. I’m an antiquarian and a bookbinder.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Does it? I have to think about old books all day.”
“So do I. I study English.”
Helen scrunched her nose, either because she didn’t like English or because her tea was too bitter.
“At Collegiate, I guess.”
Usual reactions included feigned indifference (“Nice place, I hear”), eager networking (“Do you know …”), harsh oneupmanship (“Princeton said no?”), and classist disdain (“State school was good enough for my kids”).
“I’m not surprised. You have that look,” she said, indifferently disdainful. “Anyway, your relationship with old books is not like mine. Academics care about the ideas inside a book. Antiquarians care about dustcovers and bindings.”
“Don’t the contents matter at all?”
“Reputation matters. Famous books cost more than forgotten ones. Basically, though, we’re materialists, or fetishists.” Helen grinned as if she’d said something adorably naughty. “Our clients are fetishists too. They don’t buy books they want to read. They buy books they consider physically special because they’re rare or unusual: first printings, books signed by the author, books once owned by a notable politician. If they really cared about the contents, they’d just find a used two-dollar paperback.”
Helen’s delivery was fluid and monotone, almost as if she’d given her speech many times before. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she often had to explain how antiquarians were different from scholars. I was struck by her dismissive characterization of her chosen profession and by the pleasure she took in making it seem unintellectual. She was proud of her fetishistic materialism in the way a certain sort of American was proud of never having traveled to a foreign country.
“Maybe you know my uncle,” she said.
“Is he in the English department?”
“In a manner of speaking. He was a writer. Freddy Langley. Frederick, in print.”
I would never have guessed. Langley was a common name and Helen seemed, to me, unartistic: the sloppy scene at the supermarket, the orange trench coat, her line of work. This woman? That man?
Once the initial shock passed, I felt titillated by the connection, even a little flushed, and then, immediately, ashamed by my reaction. I looked down on people who texted their friends if they happened to sit next to a celebrity at a restaurant. Yet I felt something like self-importance because I was sitting across from the niece of a well-known author. Physical proximity to genetic proximity to fame.
After sunset we were left with only the light from a standing lamp. In the dimness, the den felt cozily antique. And I felt fine. I’d moved from anxiety to acceptance and now something resembling enjoyment in the strangeness of the situation. One day it would make a good story: The evening I drank tea with Frederick Langley’s niece. On December 25.
“I should tell you something,” I said, blushing. “I didn’t realize, when I rang your doorbell, that it was Christmas.”
Helen laughed. She looked away from me and out the window. It was too dark to discern the street or the neighboring houses. Still, I aped her. If someone had walked by he might have noticed two women staring straight in his direction, into the night, one face past life’s midpoint, the other past youth, in a cluttered room protected from the winter cold. We would have made for a nice painting, a portrait of what I supposed, in my ignorance, was the last time we would ever see each other.
Other People’s Perspiration (#u1af90ef8-0ac6-5ec7-a1ad-fe614c2f76a9)
There were no Pop-Tarts left in my kitchen cabinet, presenting me with a choice: Skip breakfast or get dressed and walk to the store. Theoretically, there were other options available to me. I could, for instance, have resorted to the organic steel-cut oatmeal that I’d purchased in a fit of attempted self-improvement. But I’d gone too far by selecting the non-instant variety, and the thought of struggling at the stovetop was grossly unappealing — particularly since my reward for that labor would be … oats. Organic oats.
On the one hand, it was cold out. On the other hand, I was hungry. I stood in my kitchen, paralyzed by the prospect of making a decision. Again I rifled through the cabinet, hoping for a different result. Winston Churchill said a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d surprise an old box of Pop-Tarts hiding behind worthier items.
My meeting with my doctoral adviser was at four p.m., in four hours. Factoring in time to shower, dress, and walk to the English department, I had three hours and fifteen minutes to prepare. It was time to move on from the Pop-Tarts problem. It was time to act decisively. Was it possible, though, to work well on an empty stomach? Innumerable listicles suggested otherwise. The kitchen smelled like chemical lemon zest, the cleaning company’s signature scent. The stone tile felt chilly on my bare feet. I could skip breakfast or get dressed and walk to the store. Either way, I would eventually have to get dressed. Moreover, I would eventually have to shower. Or would I? Perhaps showering wasn’t strictly necessary. On second thought, it was not. Getting dressed, however, obviously was.
I matched a pair of jeans from my hamper with thick socks from a pile of clothes and old running shoes from the depths of my closet. And then I wrapped myself in a winter cocoon. And then I paused at the door, feeling cold air seep from the hallway into my apartment. And then I slipped off my running shoes and removed my hat. And then I put both articles back on and launched myself past the threshold.
One spends much of one’s life saying, or thinking, And then. And then I’ll graduate. And then I’ll get a job. And then I’ll get married. And then I’ll have a kid. And then the kid will go to school. And then I’ll get divorced. And then the kid will get married, and then divorced.
Or just: And then I’ll review my notes. And then I’ll see my adviser. And then I’ll go home. And then I’ll order dinner. And then I’ll watch television. And then I’ll fall asleep.
Seeing as I was no longer a teenager, I limited myself to unfrosted Pop-Tarts at breakfast. These came in five different flavors: strawberry, brown-sugar cinnamon, wild berry, apple, and blueberry. The middle three were revolting. The first and last were equally good. By 12:45 I had one strawberry and one blueberry spooning in my toaster. By 12:50 I was sitting on the rolling chair at the desk in my bedroom, ready to work on my dissertation, resisting the siren song of my down comforter. The desk was a mahogany behemoth out of place in our digital age, with its stacked drawers, shelves, and nooks meant to hold the debris of an intensely physical time. The down comforter was fluffy and soft. I rolled over to the bed. I rolled back to the desk.
The former owner of the desk, deceased, had, in his lifetime, been a usurer in charge of a veritable army of usurers, or so my mother had told me — I’d hardly known him, my grandfather. He was a highly successful, disreputable businessman who, from what I gathered, had clawed his way out of poverty by sinking other people into it. This was abhorrent. However: He’d left me the desk and a heap of money, so I was inclined to forgive his tactics and think kindly of him. Without his largesse, I would have led a far less pleasant life. I might have had to earn petty cash by grading moronic undergraduate papers, leaving me little time for research, including the research currently spread out on my grandfather’s desk.
The nutritional facts on the back of the Pop-Tarts box informed me that a strawberry pastry contained two hundred calories, fifty of which came from fat. The first ingredient was enriched flour, the ninth was dried strawberries, followed by dried pears, dried apples, and leavening. A blueberry pastry was identical in every way except that it contained dried blueberries rather than dried strawberries.
My dissertation, my heartbreaking work of staggering scholarship, was very nearly finished. Soon I would print out the two-hundred-plus pages for the last time. Soon I would bring those pages to the university copy shop and have them bound in leather. Soon I would enter the job market and bask in the praise of the usually taciturn interviewers, uncorked by my greatness. Next I would turn my dissertation into my first book. I would receive grants. I would accept visiting professorships in Paris and Rome. I would give well-attended talks at literary festivals. My scholarship would breach the academic-real-world divide and grace the pages of the New York Review of Books. A dark-haired man with a British accent would recognize my virtuosity and excuse my lack of charm.
Any student of narrative would agree that my life had been leading up to a brilliant dissertation and a secure position at a topnotch university. Of course that was my future; it was a matter of course. Even as a child, when my mother read to me at night, I knew where the stories were headed and could guess the characters’ motivations. That’s the protagonist’s long-lost sister, I’m sure of it. The man in the mustache will betray his betrothed for her diamond earrings. Why else would the author linger on their shiny contours? I had never seriously considered a career unmoored to reading and writing.
Narratively speaking, success could not but lie ahead for the valedictorian of a pressure-cooker high school who had finished summa cum laude at an elite college and had her pick of graduate programs. As had been expected, Bs an affront to her — my — honor. At twenty-two, I published my first article. (A spruced-up version of a term paper on the use of coincidence in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.) At twenty-four, I published a second. (Mistaken identity as allegory for literary misinterpretation in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.) At twenty-six, I passed my oral exams with high honors. There was just one step left for me to take, a step that would come as naturally as — as taking steps. As walking.
Titled “Where Does Art Come From?” my dissertation was an intellectual history of inspiration. To early civilizations, it was a gift — or curse — from the gods. The ancient Greeks held the Muses responsible for inspiration, which they distinguished from skill or technical ability; mere artisans toiled to refine their craft, whereas artists were mouthpieces for what divine entities wished to express. But if ventriloquism was semiautomatic, it was still exhausting and not exactly fun. Plato in Ion described poetic inspiration as a sort of possession, a maddening ordeal.
The Hebrew tribes also looked to the divine. Samuel gave Saul fair warning that Yahweh’s inspirational methods were heavyhanded: “The spirit of the Lord will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy … and you will be changed into a different person.” Christians replaced Yahweh with the Holy Ghost. Tertullian, for instance, explained that God, through the Holy Ghost, “flooded” the minds of the prophets. Granted, Jews and Christians were preoccupied with revelation, not epic poetry, but in those days there wasn’t such a clear distinction between theology and fiction.
As Western societies became more secular, the explicit God talk fell out of fashion. The Romantics compared the artistic process to a passive chemical reaction. They argued that poets were — unconsciously — sensitive to mysterious energies or winds, which they converted into creative enterprise. Yes, wind was a metaphor, but not for anything terribly concrete. “Poetry,” Shelley said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.” On the contrary, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”
Then along came Sigmund Freud, who said that what his forebears had thought was supernatural or, at any rate, external to the self was actually the subconscious at work. Writers wrote, painters painted because of early childhood trauma, deep psychological wounds, which they sublimated into poems, novels, paintings. Marxists, for their part, thought that was just as silly as Shelley’s fading-coal theory. They looked not to infancy but to the economy, theorizing that art was always, necessarily, an expression of social conditions. Artists were mirrors.
Although the concept of inspiration had changed dramatically over the centuries, I argued that one element remained steady: Everyone seemed to think that it was out of the artist’s control. The artist cannot train the Muses or the Holy Ghost. He cannot force his mind to channel inconstant winds. He cannot will his parents to traumatize him. He cannot tame macroeconomic trends.
I also argued that, although this lack of control in one sense minimized the role of the artist, it simultaneously made the artist seem special. Art was not just another trade. If a young woman decides she wants to be a doctor, she can go to medical school and learn about the human body. If a young man decides he wants to be a builder, he can find a job at a construction company and learn about concrete. But if that same young woman or young man decides, No, I’d rather be an artist, then it’s game over. You’re out of luck. Unless, that is, you happen to have been chosen by God/have the right disposition to channel winds/have had a difficult childhood. Either you’ve been touched, or you haven’t.
But — this was totally ridiculous, was it not? All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds became artists, and no brain scan had ever discovered some artist-specific pathway. Each and every theory of inspiration was bullshit designed to make artists feel as though they belonged to a special class, even though there was no evidence of that class beyond the tautology that all artists had something in common — which was that they were artists.
“It’s a little thin,” said Professor Carl Davidoff. My adviser was short and pudgy and somehow pulled off the trick of looking swarthy despite having light skin, a result of his thick, dark, almost black curly hair and equally thick, dark eyebrows. For a full professor, he was young, in his late thirties. He cleaned his glasses to avoid taking in my expression. “The historical overview is fine but your conclusion, your actual thesis, feels a little thin,” he repeated.
“Care to elaborate?”
“My assessment is more or less the same as it was three months ago, and six months ago, and twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem to be sinking in —”
“This has changed a lot in the last twelve months —”
“Let me finish, Anna,” he interrupted. He was in the habit of using my name when he wanted to convey that he meant business, like a kindergarten teacher scolding an unruly five-year-old. “It’s a good observation: There’s a seemingly universal tendency to place inspiration beyond the artist’s control. You believe this tendency, this assumption, is wrong, even stupid. Fine. But if you really think that all theories of inspiration are stupid — all of them — then you need to suggest an alternative. I’ve said this before. You keep ignoring me and fine-tuning what you have instead.”
“It’s just work.”
“What is?”
“That’s my alternative theory. There’s no such thing as inspiration. Writing is work like anything else. It’s just creative work instead of physical work or what have you. Bankers bank. Plumbers plumb. Sculptors sculpt. Writers write. I once heard Naomi Wolf quote her father: ‘The writer who goes out with the bucket daily seems to provoke the rain.’ He had the guts to make art sound mundane.”
“Citing other people’s arguments won’t impress me. You always do that when you’re not sure what to say. If you believe the Wolf line, do the work of proving it. You need a case study. I’ve said this before: Enough with the lit review. Choose an author to examine closely. His biography. His output. Think about what it is that caused him to write. Connect what happened off the page to what happened on it. Don’t smirk. This is basic. Fisher-Price My First Academic Paper.”
“Wow.”
“Sorry. I’d recommend Milton if there weren’t already dozens of books on his process. He spent years after university obsessively reading the classics without writing much at all, living off his father’s investments. He traveled through Europe, still not writing, dabbled in politics, then, finally, drafted a drama that would become his epic. He said it came easily! You must know the line — the celestial patroness who nightly dictates to the slumbering poet his ‘unpremeditated verse.’ ”
“How nice, to wake up and find a few more pages of Paradise Lost at your feet.”
Better than a nocturnal emission, I did not add.
Professor Davidoff’s office, laid out like a psychoanalyst’s with a leather armchair for him and a leather couch for his visitors, was overheated and stuffy. I wondered why he didn’t open the window since he was visibly uncomfortable; a few beads of sweat had trickled down his forehead and I had to resist the urge to dab him with a tissue. Some future civilization would master temperature control. It was thirty degrees outside and what felt like eighty degrees inside, hastening climate change.
“I should ask — is there something going on?” he said.
“No.”
“Some reason you’re finding it so hard to finish?”
“My parents think I’m lazy.”
“Oh?”
“They say I need to stop procrastinating.”
Professor Davidoff scratched the dry skin around his nose, a compulsive habit.
Again the conversation flagged and I thought back to the time, many years earlier, when I’d attended a Quaker meeting in backwoods Vermont. It began with twenty minutes of enforced silence, at the end of which congregants were encouraged to speak their minds if “the Spirit moved” them. It didn’t move anyone. Three-quarters of an hour in I felt so oppressed that I considered jumping up, maybe reciting poetry. But I only knew Ogden Nash by heart, which didn’t seem appropriate.
Anxious parent, I guess you have just never been around;
I guess you just don’t know who are the happiest people
Anywhere to be found;
So you are worried, are you, because your child is turning
Out to be phlegmatic?
The professor lurched inelegantly out of his chair, walked cautiously, like a much older man, over to his desk, and shuffled his papers. His suit jacket had deep creases along the shoulder blades, suggesting he didn’t have someone at home to look him over. He did, though: a viperous woman who always served me last at end-of-year dinner parties, certainly because her husband had predicted, at the first of these parties, that I would one day sit alongside him as a colleague. She was jealous of what our relationship was, or had been; a relationship between a man who was fiercely proud of having graduated from Williams, Cambridge, and Princeton — he’d framed his diplomas and mounted them to the wall above his desk — a man who looked up to no one, straight ahead to almost no one, and a young woman with the potential to match him. If she’d heard his Fisher-Price quip, she might have treated me rather differently.
“No … no … no,” the professor muttered, to himself as much as to me. “Here it … no. Now, where did I put that? Hang on. Yes, this is it.”
He unfolded a week-old university newsletter and pointed to an item on the second page that read Francis Goodman, the New York Times bestselling author and life-hacking expert, will deliver a lecture on efficiency and work-flow techniques at the School of Management on January 15.
That was it. The professor squinted at me.
“You might find it useful,” he said.
“You’re joking.”
“Not at all.”
“The dissertation’s close. I think it’s close. It’s close, isn’t it?”
“I’ll be frank, Anna.”
On weeknights, GPSCY, the offensive-sounding Graduate and Professional Student Center on York, sold two-for-one margaritas. After my meeting with Professor Davidoff I ventured there, as I’d learned from movies that in moments of distress, adults invariably resorted to alcohol. The bartender looked me over brazenly to see if I was worthy of his unwanted attention and apparently decided that I was not.
Another failed romance. Aborted. Uprooted. For months that side of my life had been totally dormant; my last flirtation had ended disastrously. Benjamin was a student at the medical school who said he wanted to help people but would probably end up a plastic surgeon. For our fifth date he’d invited me to the movies and, to seem worldly, had picked out a French film called Baisemoi, which he thought meant “kiss me.” It meant “fuck me” and had been banned in several countries because it featured numerous graphic rape scenes. Our fragile relationship couldn’t handle the awkwardness.
Double-fisting margaritas, I drifted through the bar, eventually spotting someone I knew in one of the red-pleather booths: Evan. He was my contemporary in the English department and a notorious grind, the kind of guy who never turned in anything late, never left the library before it closed, never went on vacation without his laptop. He’d once considered me a rival.
I liked to think, though, that my mild distaste for his company came not from competitive anxiety but from a tribal aversion to his ethnic whiteness. He was a high WASP with perfectly coiffed blond hair, prominent cheekbones, a square jaw, broad shoulders, and a seemingly endless supply of Nantucket Reds. That night he wore a Barbour jacket, which added to the impression that he might start shooting foxes at any moment.
Out with Evan was another classmate, Evelyn, who also played the role of Evan’s fiancée. She had smooth black hair (inherited from her father, a Chinese ophthalmologist) and symmetrical features (inherited from her mother, an Alabama hand model). Her most notable trait was dullness: she never said anything particularly smart, funny, or controversial. Mostly she echoed and amplified Evan. Under his influence, she’d even embraced a Northeastern prep-school aesthetic, filling her closet with pastel slacks and cashmere sweaters.
When she saw me she waved like a beauty queen on a float, beckoning me to approach. She said they’d descended on GPSCY to celebrate Evan, whose job search was going well. The University of Chicago wanted to fly him out for an interview.
“Congratulations!” I managed.
“Thank you. Are you here by yourself?” Evan asked, noticing that both my hands were full.
“Tequila’s good company.”
Evan peered vacantly into the middle distance while Evelyn bragged on his behalf: More than five hundred people had applied for the tenure-track position at Chicago, many of them already assistant professors at other universities. Only five of them had been offered interviews, and Evan had cause to believe that he was the front-runner. On the phone, the head of the hiring committee had said that he was “very, really, very impressed” with Evan’s “precocious and lively” dissertation on moments of enlightenment in mid-twentieth-century American literature. When he heard that Evan was in a committed relationship with another graduate student — meaning Evelyn — he said Chicago might be able to find her an adjunct position. It didn’t even cross Evelyn’s mind to feel ashamed of a hanger-on posting. For Evelyn, engagement meant parasitic self-abnegation. She would henceforth derive her value entirely from her partner’s success.
“Nothing’s certain yet,” said Evan, “but I have a good feeling.”
“So do I,” said his amplifier. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed, for both of us.”
Like a film critic for a small-town rag, Evelyn resorted routinely to set phrases. She’d — famously — once described Romeo and Juliet as “a refreshingly good love story.” In response, Professor Davidoff had called her an “evolutionary cul-de-sac” — the best insult that I had ever heard.
Evan and Evelyn were happy in Evan’s success. Oh so happy.
“I wonder — just thinking out loud here — if Chicago is a safe place to live?”
“What? What are you talking about?” asked Evan.
“Lots of gangs there, so say the newspapers. High murder rate. Muggings. Drive-by shootings. You’ll need to watch yourself if this works out.”
Evelyn glared at me. She was as toothlessly protective as one of those tiny dogs that travel in purses.
“Chicago’s dangerous, sure. That’s why the university has one of the largest private security forces in the country, right up there with the Nation of Islam,” Evan said, determined to put down my rebellion swiftly. “I think they can shield me from spraying bullets while I teach. Anyway, who cares what the city’s like so long as the university in that city has a good reputation? That’s what matters for my career.”
Appropriately, the conversation turned to “our work,” and I tried hard to enter a meditative state in which the mind separates from the body, no longer registering external stimuli. I must have succeeded because the next thing I knew, Evan was saying: “Everything all right?”
“Sorry, what?”
