Reinhart in Love by Thomas Berger

Author:Thomas Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reinhart in Love
ISBN: 9781937854737
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1962-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

The third of Reinhart’s summer courses, meeting from 10:10 to 11:00 each weekday morning in an unexceptionable room of a characterless building of yellow brick named Coote Hall, was Comparative Literature, which he took to make up the sophomore requirement in English, having run out on such a course three years earlier to go to the war. He had now to make it good or the University would disqualify him for a degree. You needed a degree to be somebody, as everybody said, even the degreeless. Another relevant fact was that he had gone to a different college before the war, a so-called country club where the campus was the feature; and the Municipal University, taking a dim view of this rival claim on the mother lode, would accept in transfer only three-quarters of each credit from the other.

For a B.A. you must have about 120 points; with 1½ years of college, he had something like 13¾. But prewar he had been a callow, lazy, naïve, negligent, dreamy, hopeless, silly, sluggish, fatuous slob. For example, he had had a block against reading the assignments. Ridiculous but true—he would open any book except one on the recommended list. Furthermore, he had been helpless against this destructive quirk; his defiance was not in the least conscious; try as he would to read Chap. 9, “Political and Social Reorganization,” in The Federal Union; A History of the United States to 1865, by Prof. John D. Hicks, his eyes would clamp shut at the second sentence. On the other hand he could read three corny novels in one night. At that time he had an aversion to any piece of writing that professed to tell the truth.

But that was all behind him now. Reinhart the fireball: after but a couple of weeks of summer session he had established his pre-eminence in Beginning French, General Psychology III, and Comp Lit. Most of the returned veterans were diligent students, but Reinhart far surpassed the norm, doing not only the assignment but Additional Readings to the right and left of it, the type of thing that textbook authors list at the end of each chapter with an obvious lack of conviction. For example, in the class to which he hurried the morning after reading Splendor’s short story, they would in eight summer weeks read all the great works of Western literature from Homer to date. Not the entire work in any case, but rather excerpts from each: first book of the Iliad; last scene of Oedipus Rex (where he gets the Complex, as the professor said); fifty lines from the Aeneid; two cantos of Dante; and so on up through the outputs of Rabelais, Cervantes, Balzac, Tolstoy, and the rest, not to mention brief re-encounters with most of the old English poets dimly recalled from high school (“I saw a host of golden daffodils,” “wee timorous cowrin’ beastie,” and so on).

Pretty comprehensive: the first week they had wound up on the Greeks; today, the end of the second, they would bury the Romans.

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