A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell

Author:Gail Caldwell [Caldwell, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

IT WAS SUMMER SESSION, and I enrolled in the only class I thought I could tolerate, an interdisciplinary literature course on the postwar beat experience that met every day. My instructor was a tall, soft-spoken man around thirty who liked to quote Bob Dylan, and his reading list zigzagged among Twain, Kerouac, and Frederick Exley. I liked Anderson immediately for his quiet irony and his assumption that what he had to teach us lay mostly in the novels. The chief requirement for the course, he told us, was written feedback; if it was his job to crack the code, ours was to read and to think, then turn in the notes that proved it. His class was cross-listed in both English and American Studies, the latter still a small, maverick field where you could find experts on jazz, baseball, and the sociocultural impact of disease. This sounded like the sort of place where a beached bohemian might find herself, or at least hole up for a while. I smiled over the reading list and resolved to make it through the next six weeks.

The hardest and best passages in my life have tended to arrive in this circumspect fashion, like a tornado knocking on the side door before it levels the land. Most of the things I had accomplished that held—that mattered and lasted—had been feats of near-deluded determination: walking through the early effects of polio, climbing that little papier-mâché mountain at the library, hoisting my heart past the flat resignation of the Panhandle plains. I had tricked and coaxed myself through each long crossing, the insistent superego shepherding the fear within. Now I’d wandered back into these halls with the nonchalant vow that I could bail whenever I chose. Within three months, I had mapped out the rest of an undergraduate degree, taken the graduate school entrance exams, and applied for the doctoral program in American Studies.

What I knew about the field was relatively slight. I knew Tom Wolfe had been trained in the discipline at Yale before descending upon the newsroom of the New York Herald-Tribuneto churn out his ragtime-piano prose. The UT program, I had also heard, was notorious for sounding hip but being grueling, with two fierce professors guarding its gates like stone lions. There were stories of departmental shenanigans: One middle-aged teacher of literature was known to tap-dance on his seminar table to wake lethargic students. A lead question on a recent Ph.D. orals exam had come from the same man: “Why is Jawsa better book than Moby-Dick? Defend."

Like so much about American Studies, the question sounded heretical but was brazenly simple: It presented an untruth with insolent ease, expecting its unfortunate recipient to bring an arsenal of English literature and popular culture to expose its fallacy. This dialectic was why I ultimately came to love the field. Where so much of the humanities had become reactive by the 1970s, torching or hacking away at the wheel in order not to reinvent it, American Studies had little precedent to constrict its aims.

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