The English Major Who Wasn’t, Not Really

On one of my first days as a student at Auburn University, I visited the office of a journalism professor, as I’d decided on journalism for my career. He said, “Well, you’re not going to learn to be a journalist in school. You should just go find a job at a paper and write.”

I left his office a bit confused. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why. If I’d had my wits about me, I’d have asked what, then, was the point of the noted J-schools at Columbia, Northwestern, Syracuse, and Missouri? And, to extend the inquiry, what was he doing there? Or did he just not like the looks of me?

Instead I left the 8th floor, home of the Journalism Department (two men) and climbed the stairs to the English Department on the 9th floor and signed up there. Yes: I would be an English major.

After all, I had taken a test at my high school and tested out of having to take Freshman Composition. So I could write, as adjudged by college professors. My first quarter I signed up for Advanced Composition. The teacher, Ms. Layman, wrote on my paper on “Araby”, Joyce’s iconic short story, something to the effect of, “I suspect that this was hastily conceived and ill-contrived.” (The stinging words stay with me 49 years later.) Or ill-executed. That too.

Probably because it was, and because I had no idea how to conduct myself in the world (thanks, parents), I ran to my advisor, Bert, and complained. He smiled indulgently; “If it helps, your interpretation is one that a lot of people have adopted.” I’ve no idea now what that was, but it was kind of him not to send me directly back to Ms. Layman to work it all out. Bert had made a crucial mistake, indulging me: I thought I had a leg to stand on.

Auburn has excellent departments of engineering, architecture, agriculture, football, and veterinary medicine, but good English majors were thin on the ground. The male students were bearded and quirky and flannelled and imagined that their quirkiness established credibility. The women were wild, pot-smoking, boy-fucking sullen kids who realized too late that they should have gone to an out-of-state private school. I kept being named best male student in the department, mainly because there weren’t many others. But I took it to heart: I’m the best.

Fast forward a couple of years, and my arrogance was unabated.

After an exam in a course in English Romantic poetry, I found that I’d received an A on the exam and was a little surprised. I didn’t think I’d said all that much. So I went to the professor and asked to see my exam; why not see what he had commented on? He handed it over, and I paged through it—page after page, innocent of any remark at all. I looked up at him and he shrugged: “You knew as much as anyone else.” In a Comparative Lit class, another professor wrote at the bottom of my paper, “You could yet be a Lion of the Church, Jarecke.” Pretty amusing but not helpful. The English department professors were kind, intelligent people, and I don’t want to deride them. But maybe the standards were a little…lower? given the quality around me?

Here’s one of my most shameful episodes. For some reason lost in the mists of the Chattahoochee, I wrote a paper for one of the 18th century experts on, I think, 18th century drama. He red-inked the living hell out of it, quite rightfully, as directions for revision. I set it on a side table and once in a while glanced at it. In the end, he asked if I had revised it and turned it in, as he couldn’t remember. I looked him right in the eye and said I had, though I hadn’t touched it. I probably couldn’t imagine how to fix it, and I was probably bewildered by all that red ink. I was beginning to suspect that I had some shortcomings.

But I had another excuse at hand: I was a writer, not a scholar. Yeah, that was it! I graduated and went off to get my MFA at UNC-Greensboro. Two years later, I came back as an instructor, a faculty member, at the age of 22, a seeming prodigy. Plus I was a certified Writer.

There was a novel, a bestseller, years ago, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. I loved it! Parts of it stay with me; the village idiot calling out, “Mussolini dead! All Iddaly weeps!” only to be corrected about the weeping. And this great advice: never grow old where you have once been great.

Well I’ve never been great at anything, but, at Auburn, I was slightly like Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit, Run, hanging around a town where he had been a great high school basketball star. Rabbit himself said, once you’ve been really good at something, it kind of takes the kick out of being mediocre at everything else.

But ah, I was able to fool myself, because I really was an excellent teacher. I know it, and you know it, because you’ve read enough of this blog to know that I’m self-deprecating. It was the one thing I could do. But I was an MFA, not a Ph.D., and my position wasn’t tenure track, so I left after six years.

I had two girlfriends at opposite ends of my time there who should have made it obvious to me that my life was not to be spent in English departments. One is now at the University of California-Berkeley, a revered full professor, and the other is the same at Ohio State. When I had the first over for dinner one night, she was so tired that she simply lay down on my kitchen floor.

One morning, I was driving the girlfriend from near the end of my time at Auburn, who was getting a masters, back home. I had learned from my dad the dubious strategy of taking the car out of gear and coasting on a down slope to a stop sign—this saved gasoline, Dad said. I started to do that, and my girlfriend said, “Do you mind not doing that this morning? I have a lot of work to do.”

However, they both have tenure, and I don’t. They were obsessive about the right things, at least by their lights.

In those years at Auburn, when I should have been obsessive about writing, I spent way too much time on basketball, beer, softball, and girls. I had a tennis partner who, when studying for his oral and written exams for his Ph.D., was in a horrible mood. That told me the truth: even if I’d had the aptitude for the work, which is a serious question, would I have been willing to change my life to get a Ph.D. in English?

No. So then what? Stay tuned.

Haley Center at Auburn. One of my offices was about seven windows from the left on the top floor.