Bright Precious Thing by Gail Caldwell

Bright Precious Thing by Gail Caldwell

Author:Gail Caldwell [Caldwell, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00


10

Austin, the late 1970s. I’ve gone back to graduate school to save my life. I drive a pickup truck, argue with my male professors, have a reputation as an uppity Marxist who will cause trouble in seminars. Being uppity is easy in a department run by several white males from Harvard and Yale, all of them smug with their self-perceptions of liberalism. I am appalled at the competitive, stifling nature of academe, and am also finding out that I am easily as competitive as everyone else.

I am living with a woman, having an affair with a male professor, sick of both romances and champing at the bit to get out of it all—out of Texas, out of love, out of scholarly pursuits. When the time comes to pick a subject for a master’s thesis, I unearth a number of women writers from the 1930s, a group called proletarian writers. I write a long, fiery, critically flimsy thesis on these women (Tess Slesinger, Meridel Le Sueur, and Tillie Olsen being the most memorable) and realize (a) how dull it is and (b) that I want to be a working critic, not a campus-bound one.

But first I have to get off the train of higher learning, and I show a draft of the paper to the four members of my committee—all of them men who are rooting for me but also demanding my allegiance. At the end of the day I have crossed campus twice, one office after another, excited and quaking over a range of opinions, and all I can think is how much I need a drink. I am whiplashed from other people’s feedback. And then something stops me cold as I stand on that grand, Texas-huge famous forty acres, near the Main Building, near the Tower that Charles Whitman scaled a decade earlier, near the entrance emblazoned with scripture from the book of John: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” When I was a girl of about ten, I saw the building, and the quote gave me goosebumps. Now I’m not just seeking truth, I’m chasing it, hoping for a pat on the head to go along with veritas. I’ve spent months writing about the forgotten voices of women writers, and now I’m desperate for a stamp of approval from four powerful men.

Then I think of something one of the men told me a year or two earlier, the first time we met: “You should get out of here before we ruin you.”

And so I do.



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