The Professor and Other Writings Read Online Free Page A

Michigan Avenue. But then we had a big blow-up fight that evening and she rushed out of her apartment building in a rage. I had to ask the Polish doorman which way she’d gone and ran after her, gesticulating like a Keystone Cop, up Lake Shore Drive.
    When I got back to California, friends asked about the trip. I gave brief, potted, cousin-rich recountings; sometimes I even described the stereopticon. But I felt like a bit of a sociopath, especially when one of my colleagues looked at me with revulsion as I related the itinerary. At the same time I became irrationally indignant when listeners seemed insufficiently captivated by my odyssey of death. In March I gave a lecture at an esteemed university where I hoped to get a job. (The people there knew that Blakey and I wanted to be together; I had been asked to apply.) The talk had to do with thewar and writers of the 1920s: Wyndham Lewis, Woolf, the Sitwells. I showed slides of Claud Lovat Fraser’s sad little trench drawings and expressed, all too dotingly, my love for them. I even mentioned (obliquely) Uncle Newton. It was not a success. The department Medusa—a steely Queer Theorist in bovver boots—decided I was “wedded to the aesthetic” and needed “nuking” at once. And so I was. Hopes dashed, I fell into a pompous, protracted, maudlin depression, like Mr. Toad when he finds the stoats and ferrets have taken over Toad Hall. Friends kept saying “But they are the ones who look bad!” But I couldn’t get over the ghastly cruelty of it all. I felt like a bullet-ridden blob. The cemetery trip had done something to me—induced a kind of temporary insanity?—but I couldn’t get a grip on how or why. I was cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, and bound in to saucy doubts and fears.
    My resolution’s plac’d, and I have nothing
    Of woman in me; now from head to foot
    I am marble-constant, now the fleeting moon
    No planet is of mine.
    â€” ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA , V. II . 237–40
    A clue to the nature of my feelings came only this past autumn, haltingly, in the wake of the attacks on the East Coast. Even in balmy California there was no escaping what had happened. Televisions—especially the silly little army of them suspended above the treadmills at the gym I belong to—became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball; just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.
    The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked, and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke down and called my father for the first time in months. He was surprised to hear from me. I mumbled thatI was “calling to see how he was,” that I was upset by the attacks. Long, baffled pause. He allowed that he was fine. Silence, followed by clotted hmmms. He seemed to apprehend that I wanted something. I started raging inwardly. After a long silence, as if goaded by tiny jumper cables, he morosely acknowledged that when he and his brother were evacuated to the North of England in 1940, he thought it was “the end of the world.” Two weeks later, though, he was feeling “somewhat better.” Glum Larkinesque half-chuckle. Now, this was all unprecedented self-revelation, but didn’t help much. I asked after his wife and the trombone-playing nephew. He sank back into his customary Arctic mode. I hung up, swearing as always never to call again.
    I’d got off the World War I thing after the job fiasco—couldn’t bear to look at my lecture notes, had tried to put everything out of my mind. But now it came inching back. I was desperate for something to read in those disordered weeks, something to match up with the lost way I was feeling. I galloped through Ann Wroe’s book on Pontius Pilate, but it was too weird and dissociated. I ordered Kenneth