war against academy:leslie fiedler

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The War against the AcademyAuthor(s): Leslie A. FiedlerSource: Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 5, No. 1, Scholars, Critics,Writers & the Campus (Winter - Spring, 1964), pp. 5-17Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207116 .Accessed: 31/10/2014 10:26

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THE WAR AGAINST THE ACADEMY*

LESLIE A. FIEDLER

It is the revolt gainst schooland in particular gainst theUniversity which most clearly distinguishes he writers of theSixties from those who immediately receded them. Given theopportunity, he generation f the Sixties prefers theoreticallyat least) to go on the road rather than into school; and even, fforced so far, would choose the madhouse over college, prisonover the campus. Yet at the very center of the generations m-mediately before, here stands a group of novelists bound to-gether, whatever heir social origins, by a common ocial fate:that s, by a commitment, rimary with someof them, econdarywith others, to the University. Among distinguished recentAmerican writers of fiction who have taught or are teaching nUniversities re Saul Bellow, saac Rosenfeld, ernard Malamud,Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, John Hawkes,John Barth, Wright Morris, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, RobertPenn Warren, Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley, Herbert Gold,LionelTrilling, Vladimir Nabokov, nd a host of others.

As a matter f fact, heir role as teachers n the Universitymay seem in the long run the truly unique characteristic f theGeneration f the Forties-Fifties, more critical even than theirurban origins, r the particular flavor ent them by the Jewishwriters whoconstitute o large a part of their number. Naturally,they have distilled ut of heir experience kind of fiction, ewat least in theme, sub-genre f the novel which treats the aca-demic community s a microcosm eflecting he great world, nadequate symbol of our total society. The College Novel is aform s

clearlydefined or us as the Historical Romance or the

Tale of Terror; and, indeed, t usually s a Tale of Terror withappropriate comic overtones. n this respect, t resembles theWar novel of the Twenties, nd especially he Hollywoodnovelof the Thirties: that other product of the American writer'sdream of finding job not wholly t odds with what he is drivento do, whether t pays or not. The encounter between such adream and the reality o which ts dreamer wakes is bound toeventuate n a catastrophe t once comic and horrible, pratfallfrom which the comedian does not rise again; and models forsuch pratfalls re provided n Fitzgerald's unfinished he LastTycoon, s well as in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.

*This essay, somewhat revised, appears in Mr. Fiedler's book, WaitingFor the End, published in 1964by Stein and Day.

War Against the Academy 5

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Fitzgerald's book provides, n addition, uggestions or in-troducing nto such new versions f GothicBurlesqueelements fthe class struggle. And, ndeed, he College or more properly,anti-College Novelof the Forties-Fifties s distinguished romearlier American books with academic settings by its quasi-Marxian or Popular Front view of the relationship etweenpro-fessors nd administrators. s early as Hawthorne's Fanshawe,there had been novels n which ollege-educated uthors returnedin imagination othe scenesof their youth; but unlike Fanshawe,and the scores of middlebrow ntertainments ith campus set-tings which followed, rom Fair Harvard to Stover at Yale, oreven such works of serious novelists s Fitzgerald's The Beauti-ful and Damned and Faulkner's Sanctuary, recent academic

novelsdealprimarily with professors ather han students. Whenstudents nter t all, they nter briefly o seduceor be seducedbytheir teachers, hus providing rotic relief from he struggle ffaculty and administrative fficers t the barricades. In thislight, George Stewart's Doctor's Oral seems a transitional ook- representing, s it were, the American uthor n the processof getting is Ph.D., and thus graduating rom he distillation fundergraduate eminiscence o the dispensing of post-graduategossip.

Yet despite the large number f talented writers who havetaught n collegesand have been willing to tell the tale, we donot yet have a collegenovel to compare with West's account ofthe artist n Hollywood r Hemingway's of the writer t war;perhaps because in the University ragedy tends to be reducedto the pathetic, nd the comic o stir a titter ather han a belly-laugh. Or perhaps it is the incestuous nature of the AcademicNovel, the apparently rresistible emptation mplicit n it thatmakes its practitioners bandon their administrator illains in

favor of writing bout those most ike them n the University.Randall Jarrell's ictures from n Institution ypifies he genre,being a book about a writer writing book about a college;andbeyond t we imagine a counter-counter-novel, bout a writerwriting bout a writer writing bout a writer n the Academy.*

Or perhaps the failure of the anti-Collegenovel has to be*Most recently Jack Ludwig has written n Confusions a college novel

intended to end all college novels. At least his protagonist, ontemplatingone of his own (surely the one in which he appears), attempts to makea pact with the Devil to help him achieve so improbable an end. "Devil,tell me," he says, "if I merge with you will you guarantee ... That thisbook will kill off, once and for all, the Jewish novel and the campusnovel?" To which the Devil answers, "What, what? Should I bargainaway my primary vehicles?"

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explained on the grounds that failure is its very subject; andthat its authors typically annot maintain enough distance be-tween heir protagonists nd themselves okeep the nadequaciesof the former from seeming their own. As accounts of thewriter's continuing oomedbattle with the establishment n itsmanifold orms, atter-day cademic novels tend to fall into self-pity or self-exculpation, ince they are inevitably histories ofdefeat, a defeat which the institution he writer berates mayconsider his, but which he asserts (without final conviction) sits. In any case, the feelings which motivate such books are,primarily, rustration nd impotent age - secondarily, he de-sire to strike back and be revenged by making a last minutesuccess out of failure, .e., a best-selling r critically cclaimed

novel. And indeed precisely such secondary successes wrestedfrom primary ailure have been achieved n bookswhich presentthe writer's ase against the army or even Hollywood.

Why not then n the anti-Collegenovel? Is it because suchnovels are often oo circumstantial, oo much romans a clef orpersonal ustifications, ipped unaltered from the diary, or di-rectly ranscribed rom he complaint o the American Associa-tion of University Professors? But ,oncemore, precisely

suchundisguised pologieshave survived he occasionsthey bewailed,and outlived hosethey ravestied r praised, Hemingway's TheSun Also Rises, for nstance, r Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer- so why not academicnovels, oo?Is it simply hat no one hasever succeeded n making typical university vents eem at onceas banal and surreal as they actually are? Most Collegenovelsare, in fact, not nearly grotesque nough for their subjects, andend up seemingnot the descents nto hell their uthors had surelyintended n one level or another, ut merely descriptions f ob-stacle courses devisedby minds more apt at tedium han terror.

They are, that is to say, hopelessly middlebrow, muted wherethey pretend o be moderate, melodramatic where they pretendto be tragic, commonplacewhere they pretend to be wise. Andthis s, surely, heir ssential flaw, the clueto why they nevitab-ly end by falling nto the very ttitudes heybegin by satirizing.Certainly most of them eem not so much transcendent xplora-tions of the failures f nstitutions f higher earning, s depress-ing symptoms f the way in which such nstitutions ubserve heflight rom xcellence nd the parody of culture represented ythe triumph f midculture n our lives.

Some literary forms appear to be born middlebrow, whileothers have to be radically debased to suit middlebrow nds; andthe Collegenovel, ike, say, the earnest expose of advertising nsuch sub-novels s The Big Ball of Wax, or attacks in satirical




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science fiction n organized religion, s an innately ulgar form.Certainly wo of its major themes which we have already no-ticed the teacher as liberal and innocent ictim of social re-pression, and the teacher as lecher and guilty seducer of theyoung belongrespectively o the stock ubject of sentimental,popular front politics, nd to garden variety pornography. utboth of these demand cliche rather than truth, ince their endis titillation ather han nsight; nd both re hard to avoid,sincethey re as old or older han the form tself.

Long before he kind of collegehad been invented o whichthe writer can come to be disillusioned, he archetypal tory ofAbelard and Eloise had been adapted to novel form by Jean-Jacques Rousseauin his Julie, r the New Eloise; and the notionof the teacher burning with ust behind his pretense o detachedwisdomhas continued o excite the popular magination n levelsprogressively more and more debased. The truth s, of course,that the relationship f teacher nd taught s a passionate one inessence, hough no official heory f educationhas taken this n-to account ince the collapseof the Greek ynthesis f pedagogy,gymnastics, nd pederasty xpounded n Plato's Symposium. utmiddlebrow riters have never forgotten t, taking dvantage ofrelaxing aboosto make more and more explicit he aura of sex

which the mass mind connects not only with teachers but withco-eds s well, even when quite unencouraged.Lowbrowfantasy has always conceived f college s a place

where atheism and communism re taught, while middlebrowliberalism has thought f it rather s one where those two chal-lenges to orthodoxy re persecuted; but both have agreed thatwithin ts walls good girls are likely to be deflowered y theirmentors s well as their fellow-students. nd the writers f col-lege novels have done much to sustain their view. Herbert Kub-ly's recent The Whistling one is a case in point, not only de-scribing a pair of professorial ove-affairs nd an academiccuckolding, ut culminating n a campusorgy dripping with moresperm han has flowed n any American book since MobyDick;but Kubly ntersperses is sex with pious exhortations o politi-cal tolerance nd righteous ermons bout freedom n the class-room. More sophisticated, nd consequentlymore frankly orno-graphic, houghnot without atirical ntent s the account of theadventures f a particularly usciouscollegegirl (saved from her

lubricious eacheronly by the ntervention f a boy over of thatteacher) in "Maxwell Kenton" s Lollipop,one of he atest booksto have passed from first publication by the Olympia Press,which aunched The Ginger Man and Lolita, to the list of a re-spectable American publishing firm.

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If, however, he relationship f teacher to student n theUniversity s unconfessedly assionate, his relationship o theadministration s avowedlypolitical; and since the time of Sena-tor McCarthy t least, he has been seen n the ight of the middle-brow liberal's determination o defend he legitimacy f the in-tellectuals' flirtation with Communism. or serious writers hemass of obtuse platitudes associated with that defense haveseemed s formidable n obstacle o art and truth s those whichhave grown up around campus love life; and they have soughtto redeem he former, s they have the latter, by ambiguity ndparody and inversion. Their models in this regard have beenNathanael West's A Cool Million, which attempted o rescueHoratio Alger for literature y standing him on his head, and

Saul Bellow's The Victim, which succeeded n refurbishing heliberal-sentimental ovelabout anti-Semitism y dissolving ntoambiguity he relationship which oins anti-Semite nd Jew.

So more ambitious and subtle novelists have tried to freethe academic novel from the limitations f erotic reverie andritualistic iberalism, y making, n the onehand, sexualvictimrather than aggressor of the professor; and on the other, byturning im from he guilelessbutt of reaction nto a disingenu-ous exploiter f the cliches of the politically nlightened. uiteearly on, Faulkner had portrayed emple Drake, the Universityof Mississippi student n Sanctuary, s more seduced than se-ducing, ut no teachers were numbered mong her prey; and notuntil Robie Macauley's The Disguises of Love was there a de-tailed, self-conscious tudy of the seduction f a professor y aco-ed, n that ironic mode which we are likely o associate thesedays with Nabokov'sLolita. So extraordinary, owever, id thispursuit then appear to one critic, conditioned y conventionalnotions of who pursues whom n the classroom, hat he accused

Macauley of having fallen back on what that critic called the"Albertine Strategy," which is to say, of having, ike Proust,presented a really homosexual relationship n the guise of aheterosexual ne.

In an analogous way, Mary McCarthy's Grov,es f Academeparodies the political tereotypes f the academic world by por-traying grossly nefficient rofessor, monster f self-pity ndself-adulation, ho hangs on to his job by pretending o havebeen a Communist, hus becoming he beneficiary f the stock

attitudes propagated by a hundred middlebrow ovels,and tenthousand middlebrow racts proving that a commitment o theradical movement at the proper moment, f course) was thenoblest f human errors. Grovesof Academe s a witty nd satis-fying ook; but it is essentially parasitic one, ts satisfactions,




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like those of parody always, depending on a knowledge f andcontempt or the kind of literature which t inverts nd mocks.Finally, that s to say, it does not transcend ts occasion, houghin its failure t provides many more incidental pleasures thanmost books of the genre to which t belongs. n no case, at anyrate, has a fictional work of ndependent ower and enduring p-peal been created against the drag toward middlebrow analitythat besets even the most wary writer of academic fiction.

Nevertheless, we keep trying. ndeed, the number of aca-demicnovelsturned ut in the Forties and Fifties exceedsmanytimes over the number of Hollywoodnovels produced n theThirties; in part, because the professor, nd even the adminis-trator, s driven o turn writer n emulation f the writer urnedprofessor (think of Carlos Baker, one-time Chairman of thePrinceton English Department nd then anti-academic ovelist;or of Stringfellow arr, first President f St. John's t Annapolisand then author of Purely Academic) in part because so manywriters have sought the numerous ollegeposts opening whole-sale in a time of academic expansion. Is it an accident thatHollywood hrinks s the academy grows, or is it an essentialpart of the comedy f our cultural ife? Driven from one kindof cover, he writer eeks another, he ironic prayer of Melvillealways on his lips, "Oh time Oh cash Oh patience "

In any case, we must be careful to understand he precisenature of the oke which the community lays on the professor-author t the moment e believeshe is playing joke on it; andto understand his,we must disabuse ourselves f all convention-al notions of the "academic" writer nd the kind of "academy"he inhabits, particularly hose sponsored by Europeans. TheAmerican writer who teaches n a University nd lives in a col-

lege town, necessarilynhabits neither cultural center nor

an"ivory tower." Rather than being protected rom he bourgeois,world,

e is plunged nto it, immersed n its small politics andpetty spites, its institutionalized ypocrisy, ts self-righteoustimidity, nd its endless bureaucratic neptitude. f it is a refugefrom he pressures of real life he is after, he can find t betterin the artificial paradises of North Beach or Greenwich illage;the world he inhabits may be artificial, oo,but it is likely o bea small artificial hell, n which not only he demonswho tormenthim (i.e., Deans and administrators) ut even his fellowdamnedare likely obe members f the ocal Rotary Club.

It must be remembered hat the presence of the intellectualin an American university ommunity s bound to be an anoma-lous one, even when he is a full-fledged Ph.D., but more es-

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peciallywhen he is a writer-in-residence ithout he customaryacademic degrees. His appointment s likely o represent quitelike the Hollywoodproducers' quest for big-name writers) thetribute middlebrow ice pays to highbrow virtue, tribute n-evitably withdrawn when cultural hame-feelings ield to hostili-ty and suspicion.And, after ll, this s fair enough, orthe writermost often regards his non-writing olleagues with a certainamount f genial contempt, ased on his sneaking onviction hatall their differences re to his advantage. The difficulty f hisposition s compounded n cases where he is not merely n intel-lectual among anti-intellectuals, ut also, say, a Jew amongGentiles, n Easterner among Westerners, radical among con-servatives, European refugee mong the native-born, r simplyan urban type among defensive provincials.Two recent ttempts o deal with the tragi-comedy nvolvedin such situations though n each a tribute has also been paid tothe standard middlebrow roblems f sex and politics) are Bern-ard Malamud's A New Life and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire:the former Malamud'svaledictory o one collegehe was about toleave for another, he latter Nabokov'sfarewell o teaching. Butthere s no way out for the teacher-writer n the end. Even whenhe has exchanged a less sympathetic et of colleagues for

a more amiable one, or has fled all academic colleaguesforever,he hears still his own hectoring voice, demanding: Why wereyou there to begin with? What on earth did you think you wereafter? And this voice is not really appeased by the answer: Iwent to malke book, oturn hevery experience n question ntoart - likeMary McCarthy n The Groves f Academe or RandallJarrell n Pictures from n Institution, r John Barth n The Endof the Road, to show how funny t all is, to make clear the okeon everyone, ncludingmyself. o which the first voiceanswers,Not

funny noughIndeed, here have been some who have found he whole ad-venture, heentry f the free ntellectual nto the University ndhis future here, not funny t all; but most of these have fearedself-pity nd have camouflaged heir pathos with quips and fun-ny sayings (like Malamud and Barth and Nabokov), though afew have tried to reveal the naked horror behind the superficialhumor. The suicide of F. O. Matthiessen, ate Professor t Har-vard and author f that astonishingly on-academic ritical work,The American Renaissance, has twice over tempted novelists otry heir hands (more successfully n May Sarton's Faithful Arethe Wounds) at academic tragedies, n which his self-destructionand the betrayals hat presumably rompted t are madeparablesof the ntellectual's efeat n the University.




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Unfortunately, n America no fictionist with the gifts andsensitivity f the talian Cesare Pavese has been moved s Pavesewas movedby the death of Matthiessen; nd for Pavese no pos-sible novel seemed an adequate response to his feelings aboutthat death. What followed or him was his own suicide cueddoubtlessly y many other things beside the example of theAmerican critic he loved, though his suicide note was likeMatthiessen's the quotation from Shakespeare, that had beenunderlined or them both by Herman Melville: We must endureour going hence even as our cominghither. The iripeness s all.

For a younger generation f Americans and their spokes-men, however, hosewho represent he final horror f academiclife re not the defeated ntellectuals hofled he

campusor died

defeated n it, but those who have adapted to the demands f theuniversity nd have stayed on in the classroom most usuallyto teach iterature, nd, presumably, o write novels on the side.The viewpoint f that generation s not, n any case, that of theprofessor, ickedor victorious, ut that of a bright nd scepticalstudent ooking t the professor, articularly t the kind of pro-fessor who, over two decades now, has helped create the newacademicnovel.Sometimes, s in William Goldman'sThe Templeof Gold, he eyethat ooksand the voice that speaks belong to anactual childof the university, professor's on, whosevalues, un-like his father's, re derived from popular culture rather thanthe classics, from he screen version of Gunga Din rather thanthe plays of Euripides.

More usually, hey re the voice and eye of a sensitive resh-man, unattached o the academy except by wavering choice, asrendered y some recent college graduate or someone movedbysympathy nd love to emulate uch a role, ike Salinger, for in-stance, playing t being Franny n the story alledby her name.But here is Franny's version of the "section man," the kind ofyoung teacher, proud, as she does not even trouble to note, ofhis difference rom the old-fashioned cholars who taught himand of his intimate knowledge of recent or currently rizedbooks; and likely, s she has no way of knowing, o end by writ-ing a conventional nti-academic ovel.

... where come from, section man's a person thattakes over a class when the professor sn't there or is

busy having nervous reakdown r is at the dentist rsomething. He's usually a graduate student or some-thing. Anyway, f it's a course in Russian Literature,say, he comes n, in his little button-down-collar hirtand striped tie, and starts knocking Turgenev for about

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a half hour. Then, when he's finished, when he's com-pletely uinedTurgenev oryou,he starts alking boutStendhal or somebodyhe wrote his M.A. on. Where Igo, the English Department as about ten little ectionmen running around ruining things for people, andthey're all so brilliant they can hardly open theirmouths . . . .

Only Lionel Trilling has attempted o treat a similar situa-tion from he teacher's, which s to say, the adult point of view;though there is an anticipation of such an approach - muchconfused by overtones of anti-Semitism in the section ofThomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River which deals with hisrelationship t N.Y.U. with an undergraduate homhe calls AbeJones. Trilling, more sure of what he is after, has made of theattempt is onlywholly uccessful ieceof fiction, heshort tory"Of this Time, of that Place," which has won an extraordinarykind of fame for so brief work. ndeed, recently nauguratedTV series based on campus ife has as its hero a young nstruc-tor calledJoseph Howe,after the protagonist f Trilling's tory;though he actual shows since the pilot program, which was anadaptation of that story, have had nothing o do with Trilling'svision or the actual plight of the universities. Worthy f muchbetter reatment, rilling's story nvites by virtue of its subjectmatter middlebrow degradation and dilution, despite the factthat it first appeared in the almost archetypically ighbrowpages of Partisan Review.

And how much more easily s the fiction f Salinger assimi-lated to the same level; for his earlier stories appeared in GoodHousekeeping,Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post, whileat the height of his career he has been content o write for thekind of reader to whom the New Yorker represents ultimatesophistication. et even if the young for whom Salinger meansmost come out of the social circles to which the readers of theNew Yorker spire when they do not belong, his does not makethem unrepresentative, or the stories which appeal to them un-typical. His audience consists, t is true, of the cleanest, politest,best-dressed, est-fed, nd best read among he disaffected outh- and his protagonists reflect (or explain) that fact. Notjunkies or faggots r even upper bohemians, is chief haracterstravel a road which eads from home to school, nd from chooleither back home again or to the nuthouse or both. They havefamilies and teachers and psychiatrists ather than lovers orfriends; and their crises are likely to be defined n terms ofwhether r not to go back for the secondsemester o Vassar orPrinceton, Dana Hall or St. Mark's. Their angst is improbably




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motivated y such questions s: "Doesmy date for the HarvardWeekend really understand what poetry s?" or "Is it possiblethat my English nstructor ates literature fter ll?"

I do not mean by reduction o mock the concerns f Salin-ger's characters; they cannot in any case be reduced, and Ishould only mock myself making fun of them. For better orworse, significant umber f young Americans ive in a worldwhere politics s meaningless,words n the newspaper repeatedby the solemn old; and sex unreal, threat or a promise, com-pulsion or a curse, but never a pleasure. And in that world, heclassroom and the football game provide adequate arenas foranguish and joy, both to the dull majority who go to them andthe more ensitiveminority hostay away. To that world, t anyrate, Salinger has been more faithful han it perhaps deserves,more faithful han one would have expected of a writer who -far from emaining n it with whatever mbivalence, ike Trill-ing, for example was busted out of t for goodearly n his col-lege career. For this reason, Salinger, unaffiliated s he is, mustbe understood s an academicnovelist, hough ne fixed foreverin the student's stance, which is to say, at the point he hadreached when he flunked ut; and in this regard, he resemblessuch other notable flunkees, eturning orever n the maginationto the

sophomore ear they never uite attained, s Faulkner andFitzgerald.If Faulkner's TempleDrake stands as the classic co-ed of the

Twenties, he Franny of Salinger's Glass stories bids to becomeher equivalent for the Fifties, her only rival the young ady insearch of an orgasm, who shuttles back and forth mong T. S.Eliot, her psychoanalysts, nd two lovers in Norman Mailer'sshort story, The Time of her Time." Mailer's story preservesmuch of the brutal mpact of Faulkner's; and if there s a declinein terror nd intensity n Salinger's, this is not only because ofthe markets for which he writes, but also because he is morefaithful o the general experience of the middleclass young nour cushy times. Not the orgasm, s Mailer would theoreticallyinsist, but madness, s Salinger nstinctively nows,what politercircles call a "nervous breakdown," s the fatal Cleopatra of theyoung; for they re fighting ow new enemies n new wars, notthe Anthony omstockswith whoseghost Mailer still ousts, butprecisely hemost nlightened f their lders. And this, of course,those elders find harder to understand n direct proportion o

their enlightenment. ndeed, the females among them, earnestreaders of the New Yorker one and all, revealed the depth oftheir incomprehension hen "Franny" first appeared in thatmagazine, by interpreting er collapse n the face of impendinginsanity s a symptom f pregnancy.

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The revolt heyremember, nd are braced to understand ndforgive n the young (as their parents did not understand ndforgive t in them) is the sexual revolt, he attack on vestigialpuritanism nd obsolescent hivalry which had set Temple inmotion, nd had led her to take up the weaplons f booze andpromiscuity nd getting way from home to college.But Fran-ny's is a revolt against literature nd the New Criticism, ndher weapons are the "Jesus Prayer" and the quick retreat fromschool to home. Certainly his is fair enough, for in the thirtyyears that separate the two archetypal o-eds, he Culture Reli-gion of Western urope has replacedChristianity s the orthodoxfaith of those most eager to send their children o college, atleast if they re urban, middleclassAmericans; and the pastorsto whom our hungry heep look up in vain are not ministers fthe old-time eligionbut Ph.D.'s in literature nd those sectionmen who serve as their acolytes. n a society presided over bythis new clergy, o play with Vedanta or Buddhism or evenChristian orthodoxy, xcept as reflected n certain standardpoetic texts like Eliot's Four Qucartets, .,e., o seek a salvationbeyond hereach of art, s considered eresy r insanity, r someparticularly blasphemous compound of both; for which therecommended ure is psychiatry.

Franny, t any rate, who will not write the proper criticalpapers or go out for the next collegeplay, seems, not only to herelders and her more ubmissive eers, but even to herself here-tic guilty s charged nd therefore elf-condemned o a "nervousbreakdown." Certainly, he enters the scene in which Salingerasks us to be interested s an academic "drop-out": one of thatgroup of quiet protestors, who adapted passive resistance toAmerican onditions ong before t was taken up by CORE, andhave managed to shake our society or at least to impress t to

a point where he President himself as begun to set up commit-tees to study he problem. The suggestion hat collegehas failedthe kind of young man or woman for whom we have all alongdreamed t, at any rate, stirs in us feelings of guilt and con-fusion. The spectre hat haunts a world secure economically utculturally ncertain o the point of panic is precisely his threat;and Franny, n her own way, embodies t.

Despite her final submission o that unspeakablefalse guru,her brother Buddy, with his pop-culture dogmathat "Christ isthe Fat Lady," she remains sister n rebellion, fellow ravellerat least to Ferdinand R. Tertan of Trilling's "Of this Time, ofthat Place," the student lways right n his literary udgments,of whomhis poet-instructor s nonetheless orced o decide, Oh,the boy was mad. And suddenly he word, used in hyperbole, n-




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tended lmost for the expression f exasperated dmiration, e-came iteral .. ." Yet that nstructor must finally refer, houghhe must nevitably etray Tertan's madness to the sanity of his"well-adjusted" nd "well-rounded" lassmate, ound for successin the same world n which he nstructor eeks to be recognized,though he latter will publish poetry while the former ells in-surance or real estate.

Interestingly nough, Tertan was modelled n part at leaston a leading member f the Generation f the Beats, who hadturned up in Trilling's own classes,and who has survived o tellmuch of his own story, hough he has never treated his collegeyears n any detail. Such self-conscious evotees f un-reason, owhom he phrase "to flip," .e., to go out of one's head, representsa supreme chievement, o not ordinarily write about classroomexperience, or they re likely o be well out of it, and immuneto nostalgia, before they have begun to define themselves. t istheir eachers, herefore, ovedfor having, with whatever oubts,protected he right of others o "flip," but despisedfor not hav-ing dared cross that frontier hemselves, or having preferredacademicsecurity o insanity, who must write he record s bestthey can. Such teachers may, moreover, n baffled ffection ndunconscious esire for revenge, nvite heir madder tudents ack

to the campus to lecture or read from their works, but it doesnot really help, for the occasionsthey plan are likely o end infrustration nd scandal. In any case, even after we have seenhim n an academic uditorium, e cannot magineJack Kerouac,for nstance, n any relationship o the collegecommunity xceptone of mockery nd evasion; and the brief valedictory f AllenGinsberg's Howl remains in the mind ("who passed throughthe universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansasand Blake-light ragedy mong the scholars of war,/ who were

expelledfrom heacademiesfor crazy publishing bsceneodesonthe windowsof the skull . ."), no matter how often he has re-turned since to read it to undergraduates n scheduled classmeetings.

We have comefull circle to the Twenties and the attitudesof Ernest Hemingway: hecentrifugal oung once more runningaway from chool ostrange ands, f not strange wars, n searchof salvation, nstead of the centripetal ounggoing to schooltosit at the feet of the writer-in-residence. nd the former s, alas,the more typical American way. Though enormous numbers ofnovelists nd poets are still sustained by the collegesand stillmake themselves isible there o the less-enlightened oungwhoseek them till, we begin to feel that we have reached he end ofan era; begin to see that t was perhaps only single generation

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which tried, gainst the grain of our tradition, o bring about amarriage of literature t its freest nd most advanced with theUniversity.

Yet it was not an utterly gnoble dream, this hope of com-promising yet another of the polarities that have disruptedAmerican life, and the Generation of the Forties and Fiftiescould not have foreseen how soon it would be disavowed. Cer-tainly hat generation ontinues ofeel as naive and ignorant hecontempt or the Professor o rampant n the Twenties (and soattractive once more in the Sixties) ; just as that generationtends still to despise the Cult of Raw Experience, which usuallyaccompanies such contempt, nd which has for so long helpedkeep American iterature allow and immature. t was not justin search of security which n any event heydid not find) thatthe children f the Depressionturned o the colleges, ut also inpursuit of the long-delayed dulthood of American culture, ndof a kind of independence ever possible n bohemias.


war against academy:leslie fiedler

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