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Life"
Part One:
The Early Start Good Fortune Gave Me in
My Intellectual Life; Its Brief Duration;
and
Its Sudden End
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Editor's Note:
Few segments of the Larsen Papers are more tantalizing than Fragment III, being, as it is, the most intensely—and ambitiously—biographical section of anything else among the discoveries, with the possible exception of the even more badly damaged Fragment V. X. I. Wei has shown [1] convincingly that the two fragments are part of a deliberately planned single piece, one intended in fact to have been a book-length epistemological study of the relationship between the private self and artistic perception, and, subsequently, of the relationship between self and symbol, aesthetic microcosm and aesthetic macrocosm (that is, artwork and world). Yanmei Ting has made much the same argument, though declaring further-or differently-that the major "hidden work" known to us only through these fragments was in fact not an exercise in criticism at all, but an enormous, most likely multi-volume, novel. [2]
Some of the more exclusively biographical critics of the Papers have made hypotheses about the extreme extent of damage to the pages in these particular fragments, it being generally agreed that we probably have as little as a twentieth, or five percent, of the whole. The most persistent in this branch of scholarship has been Lok-Ho Woo. Persuasively, Woo has made the case that, remaining to the end an "unconverted" inside an increasingly uncomprehending academic world (and general population), Larsen grew inevitably despondent. In a number of extremely readable and moving passages, Woo makes the probability seem quite real that Larsen, in a desperate act of disillusionment and disgust, destroyed the novel himself, missing only the fragments left to us now [3]. Powerful controversy remains, of course, as to the premise that the author himself may have put his own work to the flame. If he did so, however, few other actions in that grim era preceding the Collapse could have deprived later generations of so much pleasure, of such value, so completely.
The Early Start Good Fortune Gave Me in
My Intellectual Life; Its Brief Duration;
and
Its Sudden End
I
1
..........Calamity. But I must point out that it was in no way an individual matter. It was in no way something that happened only to me.
..........It was the whole world that began to change. The world that I lived in, that I thought I knew so well-suddenly it changed completely.
..........Think of humans' lives being like the lives of fish in the sea, with the difference that the human ocean is made of air, not water. When the change came, it was as though the air had been depleted suddenly of oxygen. And so enormous kills took place. Dead "fish" by the millions were washed up onto the shores.
..........By the millions. By the very millions.
..........Believe me.
..........A poisonous catastrophe, worldwide, perhaps even universal. I still don't know the full scope of things, even now, at this late date.[4]
..........Whatever did take place, I know this: I was in the midst of it, I observed it, I still am observing it. And yet I have managed so far, in one way or another, to live through it. All this with the dubious result that here I am now, surviving however best I can in the barren, diminished, depleted world left to me.[5] I do this, mainly, by keeping out of sight as much as I possibly can and by doing my work quietly, insofar as that remains a possibility for me.[6]
..........And there's the rub, or one of the rubs. Never have I been able to "teach" quietly. Nor have I been willing to, nor have I ever seen why I should. All around me, when I stroll through the halls, I look into rooms, on both sides of the corridors, filled with people asleep. This, apparently, is the way "teaching" is now done, or the way the experts do it. As if within the haven of sleep, no harm can be done. For me, the very idea is anathema. Never—not since my first semester, my first day, my first class at Actaeon—have I been able to abide it, the dozers in the back, the sleepers along the sides, their heads fallen against the walls, open mouthed, as if they had been made aghast and then knocked cold by the marvels of the things I'd shown them. So it has always been and so it still is, with me. I am driven into a rage against waste, sullenness, loss, emptiness and folly by the sight even of a single person asleep in one of my own rooms. Imagine fifty of them.
..........Classrooms. Somnolaria, they should call them.
..........And so it has come about, the use of noise. It isn't my credo, but it's the simple necessity of keeping it interesting, keeping them awake, keeping it productive, keeping madness and grief and humiliation and despair at bay throughout every hour no matter how much energy it may require of me or how great a toll it may take on me.
..........A note of explanation may be in order.
..........From the start, I knew I want [7]
graduated from high school, in 1959, I wa
from college, I was convinced my life would be ded
had been a sound one—in high school with teachers like St
with instructors like Scott Elledge, Reed Whittemore, Owen Jenkins
Harriet Sheridan, and others. As a result, I subscribed to the view that reading
could, must, and do strengthen one another. Consequently, I devoted the next
years, on and off, to graduate study instead of doing something else-joining
say (though they never would have taken me any
a fly-fisherman or forest ranger.
..........I got ready, in other w
begun publishing piec
..............................ern Fiction Studies
The South Dak
..............................was honest but no money in it, a
....................Needed support as I
..............................getting ready for all along.
..........And that was how I came to New York City and Actaeon, age thirty
married, my dear wife pregnant for the first time, t
........................................1971, eage
........................................n the certainty (and belief) that here was a pl
..................................................ould lead a literary life that was honest and
productive and....................intellectual integrity and was genuine.
..........Or so I thought. And so they let me g
for a certain brief time.
..........And then, the calamity. And, with it
........................................ibble realization that what I had undertaken for
one entire side of my life's work was not teaching at all, but it was "teaching." And that
(two children by this time) there was no going bac
emperor meanwhile more and more naked, t
Actaeon going more and more the
self-deluded in a nation itself
idly more and more insane
so that I, I, I unsuccessf
could have wished
again and again failing to learn
key thing how not to try, not make the effor
how not to increase my effort in inverse proportion to the
obvious and observable ignorance, lack of preparation or of interest in a
or result—in other words, could have become more adeptly self-deluding, learned how to
shut my eyes, how to widen.
..........
But, even then, would anything, really, have turned out differently? Would I
..................................................feated, lost?
..........If I could only have found my way successfully int
..................................................—but then at least what?
............................................................ight have left me alone, the
........................................................r. Correct and Dr. Long, Dr. Nose
.......................................................leopatra and the vile Dr. All, whom I
..................................................o on to mention the administrative cohort, all
........................................Glad, Happyhand, Shark, Dank, and Rattle, and of
..............................n-Duck himself.
.........................have seemed a matter only of an alteration in behavior, a
....................emper, mood, pattern, practice. If it were other than
.................anage to come so naturally to all those who did
...............ollowness they were living in the very midst of?
.............g, neither at the beginning nor at the end, not in
..........ctice, or mood. Instead, it was a matter of
.........less than living a lie.[8] And this was do
........he simplifying of what's there, until at
....... vens' "The Snow Man," one of the mo
.......and only at that time, as it is in the
.....istener, who, "nothing himself, b
...hing that is not ther
...the nothing that [9]
..then it is po
only then
but not
who c
crim
les
ot
v
......................................................................become, the one necessary thing above all
.............................................such as mine is that it be revelatory without being perceived as
..................................truth without being understood by the others as expressing truth, to
..............................silence, utter only without sound,[10] to put forth words that if heard at all
...............nly by their echoes," since in this way alone, through a kind of ancient code that
...........been all but lost, can one hope to elude them, the simplifiers, with their childish
........maniacally fierce puritanical wrath and narrowed minds, yet at the same time seek out
and find those other remaining few left alive in a dying intellectual world who can still
listen, still hear, still respond, still feel, still read.
..........It must be [11]
...............Above all, I was trained to believe that in the artistic or intellectual life success invariably lay in solid and continued preparation, no matter the degree of natural talent that may or may not precede it. As a result, I set out to prove myself capable of great diligence by putting enormous effort into my own intellectual preparation and literary training. Or, to be exact, I did so once I was old enough to make conscious decisions of this sort.
...............Before that, everything in my intellectual—and aesthetic—life was of course the result of such nurturing as I received from my parents, family, background, and surroundings—in other words, the blessings of fate.
...............The first time I feared failure, or remember fearing it, was in fourth grade. I know the season was spring, and the year must have been 1950 and my age eight. My teacher then was Miss Stryk, pronounced "Strike," a beautiful young woman with abundant, raven-black hair who became our teacher again two years later.
............... I had been kept home for a fair length of time, in quarantine along with my two sisters because we had all had whooping cough. It felt less a deprivation than something like a vacation, really, since the spring weather was perfect, none of us felt the least bit sick, and we were free to run about the farm however we pleased. For part of each day, in the afternoons, our mother made an effort to keep us current with our lessons, sitting us down at the dining room table to do whatever work our teachers had given her for us up to that point. In my own case, however, something must have gotten lost or overlooked, because I suddenly found myself behind in arithmetic. The very day I went back, Ms. Stryk set us all to performing a set of long-division problems that I was without the faintest idea of how to do.
...............This was the first time I remember feeling panic in school, and I'm not certain why the panic should have come just then-unless it really was the first time I hadn't understood something expected of me by a teacher. In any case, I was suddenly overwhelmed this time by a sharp, unalloyed fear, almost as if I were drowning. Our seating was alphabetical, so Richard Jensen was next to me (normally, Patty Klingbile would have been sitting between us, but she was absent that day). I fought back tears and in whispered desperation begged Richard to show me what to do.
...............I don't remember anything about the incident beyond that point (Richard always knew everything, so I imagine he showed me how to do the work-or got Ms. Stryk to show me), nor do I remember wondering just why I had become so badly frightened. It may have been simply the child's terror of being left behind, separated from the herd. But it was, I realize now, the first time I had ever realized that school was not just automatic, that school wasn't something that happened to you and would take care of itself without any particular effort from you. Care was involved, and you always had to be absolutely certain to hold up your own side of the project if there were to be any success. Twenty-two years after the fourth grade, when I started as an assistant professor at Actaeon, this understanding had long since been so ingrained a part of what I assumed education was that the Actaeon students sitting there and looking up at me with no anticipation or eagerness, but instead with puzzlement, boredom, or sullenness-well, they seemed like people from another galaxy, people who had never been exposed to even a hint of such an idea about education as my idea was, let alone to any true experience of it, people for whom the entire proposition had been turned precisely and absolutely upside down, for whom there was no conceivabl
...............f course, at age nine or ten, I thought about it in a differe
..............................ut the effect, still, was the sa
...............The truth is that for all my life I have been terrified of failing, or at least all my life after early childhood.
...............Which doesn't mean, however, that I've always done the most reasonable thing to avoid it, or that by failure I have always meant the same thing as others may mean by failure.
...............Doubtless, [13]
in the Sixth Grade
.........When I was in the sixth grade:
.........1)..........At the north door of the school, standing there waiting to come in after lunch recess, I fell on the ice and was briefly knocked out.
.........Outside the door, a sheet of ice had spread out in an apron, and, through thawing and re-freezing repeatedly, had taken on an undulant surface consisting, as it were, of hummocks, some the size of walnuts, others baseballs, others still as large as grapefruits. When I slipped (my feet simply disappeared from under me), I fell sideways so that my right temple, with my body's weight behind it, slammed against an ice-lump of baseball size. Instantly, blackness was everywhere around me. Then stars began floating across that velvet blackness-all of them five-pointed and of different colors. When the stars disappeared and my eyes began to function again, I saw that the last two or three sixth-graders-I'd been in the middle of a whole crowd of them before-were pushing their way in through the entry and disappearing inside. It was as though for a certain period I hadn't existed. That bit of time-for me-had been snipped out of the universe.
.........2).........Stephen Koch's father died. His father, a lawyer, had moved to Northfield from St. Paul in 1946 or 1947. He had an office on the west side of Division Street, on the street level. When he died, of heart disease, he was forty-four.
Later, in ninth grade, I became friends with Stephen and remained so for life. Before ninth grade, however, I knew him only distantly and had never spoken a word to him. He was in the "other" section of sixth grade and therefore in a classroom across the hall, a distance that might as well have removed him to the antipodes.
But of course I knew about his father's death, and I have a memory of Stephen on what I believe was his first day back at school after it. The memory consists of nothing more than my seeing Stephen come out of the building at the end of the day. But I thought to myself, "He is the one whose father died."
He was at the top of the hill when I saw him. I was at the bottom.
The memory is vivid and I imagine it will be permanent. Almost everyone thought of Stephen then as having a superior air, something that, to me, made him interesting and mysterious. It was true that he did have an air. It came from the way he walked, moved, and held himself, and from the fact also that he wore glasses. He had a reputation, already, for being intellectual and bookish. Almost always, he held his chin slightly raised up, adding to the impression that he was thinking of higher things, or that he felt burdened by the necessity of making his way through throngs of lesser beings.
Three years later, our friendship began, and he became the second most influential person in my life, intellectually, before or since.
I was nothing at all like him. I lived out of town, he lived in town.
He came from a large city, I had never been close to one. He knew
with his life, while the very question hadn't even occurred to
visited by disease and death, I had been touched by n
to have to live without a father.
.........The school was built into a hill that sloped down from south to north,
so that this entrance was a full level lower than the east and west entran
him, at the close of the first school day after his fathe
the west entrance and walked to a car that was
myself was standing near the Secon
up along the gradient as I
car came down the h
I stood, turned an
past me.
.........descent, a significance drawn from nature itself, unarguable, and there
..................putably universal, archetypal, of a kind equally true and real for anyon
.........................inking, human existence, but not even these do they agree upon, b
...........................itrary in the simplifiers' rejection, seeing no need for a rationa
....................................in the case of the Green Knight, the example I spoke of earlie
......................................only in attitude, not reason, the attitude being that since they
...........................................were accepted, they therefore will be rejected, but if
....................................................a simplifier asked what rationale underlies the
...................................................................and the very empirical basis of the
..............................................................................jected as erroneous, wrong,
.......................................................................................er critics like Stanley Fish
...................................................................................................vile and hegemonic
.............................................................................................................in to a beast
.......................................................................................................................nger.
time Tom Rankin and I were stepped over by his father.
................................like me, born in 1941—and by then, his father,
in what was his second marriage, was far, far from being a young man, o
................oments typical of her more apothegmatic side, was fo
that Tom's unusual intelligence was from his b
................"child of aged loins."
.........What Mr. Rankin's age actually was, I don't know, b
past seventy, even older, by 1946. After other faculty posit
became professor of English at Carleton, and for some
chairman through the 1930s. After his retirement fr
still went to his college office each morning in o
then at midday walked back home ag
sidewalks shaded by the high elm
pleasant shade under branch
archways high overhe
autumn.
.........At one such moment, Tom and I were playing on the walk in front of his house. I remember that the sun was out, the day was pleasant, dappled light and shadows were falling from the trees above us—and we, in the manner of five-year-olds, were blocking the sidewalk by lying on our sides, each leaning on an elbow in order to gain some degree of elevation while also leaving a hand free for whatever play we were involved in.
.........What that might have been, I don't remember-miniature cars or trucks, or forcing ants to go on detours into their holes, or simply pushing around blocks or sticks or some such thing.
.........But I remember the rest of it perfectly: that Mr. Rankin appeared; that, without altering his pace, without turning either left or right, without saying a word or making so much as a gesture or nod, he lifted his feet and stepped over us, his pace unbroken, and kept going, then turned in at the front walkway, went up the two concrete steps, continued to the front door—and went in.
.........Again—as with Stephen Koch, the hill, and the automobile—the symbolism extends in every direction, and in this case again the most pronounced directions are up and down. In the stream of generative power that rose upward from us (or from his son Tom, at least) where we lay on the sidewalk was the promise of futurity for Mr. Rankin: futurity for him, that is, the reward, pleasure, and promise provided by his own offspring. At the same time, downward to us from Mr. Rankin flowed all that he was and represented: the authority, security, strength, and stability that had been gathered by him and stored within him through his intellectual harvesting of the preceding century, all of which now, by the very fact of its having existed, was being offered to us, from him, while we in return and at the same time offered ourselves to him as the potential means by which those things could be carried forward another step into time, into the future.
I came later to think of this as the moment when the 19th Century stepped over me, and I have thought of it in exactly that way ever since.
.........Mr. Rankin—in his rumpled suit and tie, with the old-fashioned air he had about him, with his white hair sticking out and his scuffed leather briefcase—Mr. Rankin stepped over us as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world.
.........From below, he was enormous. He loomed above, dimmed the light of the sun for an instant-and then was gone, had passed over us, was on his way to lunch, and everything fell back to being nothing nor more less than what it had been before. Except that of course it wasn't the same and never would be, because Mr. Rankin had stepped over us and now he was gone, and I was never to forget that moment, ever.
.........My life: three decades of it had existed before Actaeon, and now three and a half have existed in Actaeon.
.........The year Mr. Rankin stepped over me and Tom was 1946. The year now is 2004. If Mr. Rankin was seventy-five years old in 1946, then I still have a decade to go before I reach the age he was when he came home for lunch and Tom and I were on the sidewalk, in his way, playing with trucks, or ants, or twigs.
.........Parallels. Mr. Rankin had his office, at Carleton, and I have mine, at Actaeon. Mr. Rankin's, doubtless, would have been in Williams Hall, that ancient, classic, modest, two-and-a-half story red brick hall that was constructed in the 19th Century, that for almost a hundred years looked out toward the southwest from its rounded knoll, and that was torn down in 1960, nothing but bare ground left behind.
.........That was during my second year at the college, when they tore it down. How I grieved for that dignified, worn, dusty, comfortable, perfect old building.
.........Its own symbolism: reaching out in every direction simultaneously, simultaneously having things returned to it from every direction; looking out in every direction, simultaneously being seen from every direction. Then the enormous complexity added even to that, because there was the added symbolism extending also through time itself in every degree of past and future.
.........But no one else understood, or saw, or cared, or seemed to think about it at all, so it was torn down and came to an end and ceased to be and was never to return or exist or be seen again, ever..........
.........My own office at Actaeon, mine now for over three decades, and the place, as it happens, where I am writing these words— [14]. an unusual thing, since mostly I work at home, in my apartment, at my desk, in the pleasant quietness there, and only seldom here, although that's not so just now—so that, with a certain timely appropriateness, I remark on the symbolism of my office. Which means doing the opposite of what would have been done in the case of Mr. Rankin's. In mine, I must identify the symbolism of the place by identifying its absence of symbolism: the absence, that is, of any symbolism reaching outward, an absence well symbolized by the lack of windows of any kind in my office, as also by the lack of air—of any kind, that is, that's fresh, or from outdoors, or moving, as opposed to the kind my office is indeed supplied with, at temperatures conveniently either too hot or too cold: air already used up, stale, dead.
.........No, the symbolism of my room, unlike those rooms that lived on for a century in Williams Hall, finds its strength and greatest expression not horizontally or obliquely, but vertically. For in height and depth, in the directions of up and down, the symbolism of it is strong and deep. Consider: Below my office is the earth; above, three levels of latrines, stacked up like boxes of crackers.
.........Indeed, the extraordinary richness of symbolism of this kind is to be found everywhere, rooted as it is in the very life-forces of the vertical, the forces of downwardness and upwardness, of one, of the other, or of both simultaneously. The seed is pushed down, is it not, into the earth, and the sprout pushes up, does it not, into the light. Consider Mr. Rankin stepping over us on the sidewalk: his testicles hung down, yearning toward the earth, and we—the sprouts brought into being from plunged seed like his—we also then grew, aspired, rose upward.
.........Thus it has been also with my office at Actaeon, a coincidence of identically the same archetypes and symbols. In my office, there have been ambition and aspiration, growth of spirit and a surging toward light, all upward, in the form of my writing and thinking. Then, simultaneously, coterminously, indispensably, there has been the coming downward of the fertilizing element, giving strength and power to the seed and destined thus to aid the birth of further and additional new thought, inspiration, and composition.
.........Few other offices at Actaeon (if any) have enjoyed the fortune of such perfect placement as mine, [15] and the truth is that, as a result of that room's perfect location, my intellectual fertilization was so powerful over time that the effect grew evident not only in my own literary projects but in my pedagogic skills and ambitions as well. Not only was I able to manage increasingly complex materials, matters, and approaches in the classroom, but I was able also, albeit with ever-greater expenditures of energy and loss of fluids, to become louder and louder in my pedagogic methods and therefore more and more effective as an instructor. Success of this kind, however, as the reader knows, did not meet invariably with the approval of all of my colleagues—for the real reason, I have always believed, that they were, in truth, jealous of it, although such a truth, of course, would never dare speak its name. Either way, such questions remained moot for so long as I was able to keep my uses of quickness and loudness a secret known only to me—and, of course, to my students themselves.
.........But secrets are never easy to keep, and they're even harder, logically enough, when the issue has to do with noise or with loudness-or when the location of such noise happens to be the Actaeon College of Institutional Analysis and Social Control, UNY, where they might at any time be overheard by inquisitive and corridor-creeping colleagues the likes of Dr. Nose, Dr. Snoop, Dr. Correct, Dr. Cleopatra, and Dr. Muscle.
.........As clearly as if it were yesterday, I remember the day when this close-knit group of colleagues first overheard me-or the day they made a point-if you understand-of overhearing me. All five later claimed they were simply passing my room by chance on their return from lunch; though, in point of truth, I had previously, and more than once, had glimpses of them peering through the windows of my classroom doors, this at hours of the day nowhere even near lunchtime. Be that as it may, on the occasion in question, the Drs. Nose, Snoop, Correct, Cleopatra, and Muscle not only heard (and presumably saw) me being loud but reported what they had heard to Actaeon's director of security, Mr. Badge Worn, and afterward to President Penguin-Duck himself, with results that became very meaningful to me indeed. The loudness incident, after all, helped feed and develop President Penguin-Duck's subsequent impression of me as unreliable and a ne'er-do-well, making it all the more probable that he would choose rather to betray than protect me after my failed attempt to expunge Sasha Brearly from my Aeneid class. [16]
.........Still, however calamitous the outcome may already have proven for me both personally and professionally, [17] it remains important, I feel, that the record show as clearly as possible that the loudness heard and reported by the Drs. Nose, Snoop, Correct, Cleopatra, and Muscle be understood as having arisen for intellectual reasons and on an intellectual occasion that itself served perfectly legitimate pedagogical and educational ends.
.........Therefore, let me put down here that the occasion was a discussion of James Joyce [18] —specifically of his short story "Eveline" and, more specifically still, of these opening passages, which for accuracy and clarity, I will quote here:
.........Throughout the tale-not unexpectedly, considering Joyce's monumental literary and intellectual gifts and achievements-ingenious uses are made of verbal echo, connotation, association, and symbol, all deployed (almost unnoticeably, beneath the commonplace veil of the story's everyday surface) to suggest and reinforce Joyce's theme, that of death taking over where life once was.
.........Here, then, the first round of questions I posed to my students so they could begin to see some part of the story's full complexity and beauty: [19]
.........01) What are the uses of windows?
.........02) How does this window fail in two of the essential uses of windows?
.........03) What is darkness?
.........04) What are the connotations of darkness?
.........
.........05) What can darkness be symbolically?
.........
.........06) What is air? What is air for?
.........07) What are the connotations of air?
.........08) What can air be symbolically?
.........09) What is dust? What is dust for?
.........10) What are connotations of dust?
.........11) What can dust be symbolically?
.........12) What has to be absent in order for there to be dust?
.........13) What is water? What is water for?
.........14) What are the connotations of water?
.........15) What can water be symbolically?
.........16) What are the connotations of the word "invade"?
.........17) What, in this case, might be "invading"?
.........18) What is the position of Eveline's head in the second sentence?
.........17) What could be significant about the position of Eveline's head there in that sentence?
.........In that way, then, went the first round of questions, the class, by and large, having a pleasant time, I, by and large, also having a pleasant time—pleasant enough that, as we continued with our work, the forbidden element of loudness began gradually manifesting itself, soon to reach the level at which it was to be noted with disapproval and alarm by the good Drs. Nose, Snoop, Correct, Cleopatra, and Muscle.
YOU CAN READ THE CONCLUSION OF "FRAGMENT III—MY INTELLECTUAL LIFE, PART ONE" BY CLICKING HERE
—EL
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