PART 12 ORAL FIXATION

 PART 10:   ORAL FIXATION

The anatomy of fear: horror is fear at a distance, terror is fear up close, and dread is fear without an object. Whoever said that got the last one wrong; graduate students at Columbia spent years in a state of dread with a very specific object: doctoral orals. And how could we not? By the time we’d gotten to the point of sitting for them, we’d invested years in our higher education – earned an M.A., passed our coursework – and were now confronted by a leap into the abyss. It wasn’t just that the exam itself was modeled on the Spanish Inquisition, but also that the consequences of not passing were instant dismissal from the graduate program. No second chances.

Here’s how it worked: four or five members of the English department, all senior professors whose fields of study theoretically coincided with yours, would sit on one side of a table, you’d sit on the other side, facing them, and the grilling would begin. The object, theoretically, was to determine whether the candidate had acquired a broad and comprehensive understanding of his field, had read the relevant primary documents, had familiarized himself with the secondary sources that under lay them. In practice, of course, that included reading everything the members of the committee had published. My committee consisted of Professor J. and four others: a specialist in early seventeenth-century poetry (no problem for me there); an authority on Courtly Love in the Middle Ages (I’d taken his course, so there wouldn’t be any surprises); someone I didn’t know, who usually taught the 18th century but also doubled in English drama after 1660, which pretty much meant Restoration comedy, and I’d read those because they were fun. Finally, there was George, a lunch buddy from the Faculty Cafeteria with whom I played basketball once a week. All in all, it seemed as though I’d drawn a reasonable bunch of guys.

Nevertheless, I spent two years studying for that exam – everybody did. I was teaching a full load, and had a girlfriend, so I wasn’t poring over texts all day and all night like a medieval monk, but I was reading, in the library or at home, every weekend and on the two weekdays I didn’t have class, through every vacation, on every subway ride, and before bed. The legends and fables about the orals were scarifying: someone was said to have fainted while the grilling continued, the examiners continuing to fire questions at the inert form slumped in his chair. Several people were known to have begun crying, but no handkerchiefs had been proffered to the weepers. I knew one guy who showed up on the appointed day and couldn’t bring himself to enter the room; he turned around and went home, and dropped out of school shortly after. One of the people in my doctoral seminar hadn’t passed his orals, and his recourse was to enter Teachers College, which was and is an excellent school of education, but against which our minds had been poisoned by the Graduate Faculties’ air of grandeur and reflexive scorn, personified by Jacques Barzun, who, when the place was mentioned, was said to have answered, “Ah, yes, Teachers College -- where they cast imitation pearls before genuine swine.”

Teachers’ colleges, both Columbia and all the others, were not designed for people who intended to teach on the secondary or primary school levels. College professors were expected to know, intuitively, how to do it. Since it was college and university administrations who propagated this theory, they hired people with doctorates in academic fields, not people with Masters degrees in Teaching. Students at Teachers College learned how to teach; we learned what to teach. Educational theory and classroom techniques didn’t apply, and in truth the prospect of teaching a secondary-school schedule – five or six periods a day, five days a week, with principals nosing around and lesson plans to file, was appalling. Tenured ollege professors typically teach two courses, each of which meets biweekly – a total of about five hours a week in the classroom, and, at wealthy schools, they have graduate assistants to do onerous chores like grading papers.  As a lowly adjunct instructor at Hunter, I was teaching four courses, sometimes four sections of the same course, and grading up to a hundred papers a week.

That same Professor Barzun had famously proclaimed that graduate students should live like hermits, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, not pleasure or recreation. The conditions of graduate school inclined one in that direction, but my girlfriend and I saw a lot of movies, I watched the Yankees and the Giants and the Knicks both on television and live, II played basketball and tennis for recreation, and I had not taken a vow of chastity, though poverty was a given. But such was the intensity of my absorption in everything that had been written in England between 1500 and 1660 (that’s how my Special Field was described) that, a few months before the exam, I gave up playing tennis, stopped watching baseball on TV, and didn’t hang out much with my male friends at the West End Bar. As the exam got closer, my compulsion to read and memorize grew stronger. On the Memorial Day weekend of the year the exam was scheduled for October, Adrianne’s brother had tickets to a double-header at Yankee Stadium, and, knowing I was a dedicated fan, he invited us, but I left after the sixth inning of the first game to go home and re-read Donne’s Holy Sonnets. The Yankees were in a tight pennant race, but all I could think about was whether, in Sonnet 13, the speaker’s claim to God that he would never be chaste “except you ravish me” is literal or figurative.

My sub-specialty was a concentration in the English theater during the later reign of Elizabeth I and the entire reign of James I – in other words, the time of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and successors.  But plays other than Shakespeare’s were hard to find. Most of them were out of print, and available only in used, tattered copies of the 19^th-century Mermaid editions. They were in the library, of course, but everyone wanted to own them so we could mark them up. The only place you could find them was the Strand Bookstore on lower Broadway, which I haunted, along with my coevals at Columbia, NYU and CUNY. There weren’t enough copies to go around, and when a new one showed up, we were like shoppers at Loehmann’s on Black Friday, wrestling over on-sale pantyhose.

                                                A Mermaid, published in the 1890s. Unexpurgated!

They were in the library, of course, but everyone wanted to own them. The only place you could find them was the Strand Bookstore on lower Broadway, which I haunted, along with my coevals at Columbia, NYU and CUNY. There weren’t enough copies to go around, and when a new one showed up, we were like shoppers at Loehmann’s on Black Friday, wrestling over on-sale pantyhose. I had a carrel in Butler Library where I pored over academic journals and other obscure materials; it was a tiny, bleak room with a filthy, immoveable window on the top floor of the library stacks, which became unbearably hot in the summer. So I’d shift my base of operations to the air-conditioned lounge of the Law School Library; I spent one whole July I there reading Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – one of the longest and most inaccessible poem in the language, which gradually yielded to me its secrets and then the reasons for its fame. As I got deeper into my subject, immersing myself in English literature became luxurious, like lowering myself into a hot tub. I reread Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays in chronological order, one a day, and for the first time began to perceive the shape of the whole canon. I memorized Petrarchan and Metaphysical poems, and can still recite them with the slightest encouragement. I love solving puzzles, and parsing Paradise Lost, all 10,000 lines of it, gave me the kind of satisfaction I got when I finished a Times double-crostic, with the added bonus of Milton’s sly, almost inaudible comic voice whispering a commentary on the problematic marriage of Adam and Eve into my ear, as Satan had whispered into Eve’s. Did you know that angels have sex, and it’s better than human sex because they have no bodies to get in the way? That they eat but don’t poop? I came to appreciate the radicalism of the poem’s conception: as one of my professors pointed out, how extraordinary is it that the climax of the story of man’s relationship to God should be a woman eating a piece of fruit?

A couple of months before the date on which the exam was scheduled, Professor Maurice Valency, whose course in Dante, Petrarch, Castiglione and Machiavelli I had taken, sent his regrets: he would be unable to participate in the exam, and Professor William Nelson would be taking his place. Valency assured me that this would present no problem for me; after all, Professor Nelson’s field was the same as his, the literature of Renaissance Europe. I almost threw up when I got this news. I hadn’t studied with Nelson, but I knew that his field was not the same as Valency’s. Valency was all about Italy and France and poetry; Nelson was all about Germany and Holland and religion. They were two different worlds: the Southern Catholic part of the Continent, and the Northern Protestant part. Aside from knowing that Martin Luther had kicked off the Reformation by nailing his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, I knew next to nothing about the history or writings of the North. So I went to Nelson, confessed my ignorance, and threw myself upon his mercy. To plumb the depths of that ignorance, he lobbed me a softball question: did I think that Erasmus was “a man of the Renaissance?” I had no answer. Nelson was kind and understanding, and he assured me that he would limit his questions on the exam to the Southern latitudes.

I thanked him profusely and went immediately to the library to borrow Desiderius Erasmus’s masterwork, In Praise of Folly. I also went to the Metropolitan Museum to view the paintings of Holbein, Durer, Bosch and Memling, whose iconography, I remembered from college, had been important to the development of art in England after it had renounced Catholicism. Was it paranoia that drove me to hedge my bets in this way, after Nelson had promised me I needn’t? Judge for yourself: during the exam, after quizzing me on Petrarch and Chretien de Troyes, he said to me, “Now, you might regard this as an unfair question, and I’ll understand if you don’t want to answer it, but tell me: do you consider Erasmus a man of the Renaissance?” “I certainly do,” I replied, and rattled off the five-minute spiel that I’d rehearsed. Nelson smiled and nodded, and I knew, at that moment, that I would pass the exam.

My euphoria after the exam had ended, and Prof. J. had told me that my performance had been “in the range of the good” (he actually talked that way), was boundless – on a par with receiving my 4-F notice. It was only lunchtime but I wasn’t hungry; I went to a bar, ordered a celebratory cocktail, took one sip and walked out. My newfound freedom was overwhelming, oppressive even – like that of someone released from prison after serving twenty years. Or Milton’s Adam and Eve’s, when they’re expelled from the Garden: “The world was all before them.” It was all before me, too; what part of it did I wish to claim at that moment? I bought a ticket to a movie I had wanted to see at the Thalia, a revival house on 95th Street – I think it was Viridiana – but I couldn’t concentrate on it, so I left. What I needed was a place to walk off my energy, like the High Line, but that was decades away. I ended up in Central Park, at the pond above the Zoo, watching little boys launch their model boats. Gradually, I grew calm, and my manic exuberance was replaced by a sense that my life had entered “the range of the good.”