this about me.
J. Castleman, M.A., brought from his pocket a small silver nutcracker, and then picked up a walnut. As quietly as possible he began cracking nuts and eating them. Almost reflexively, he offered them to the class, but we all shook our heads and murmured “No thanks.” He simply ate for a few moments, then closed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair.
“The thing is,” Castleman finally said, “I always knew that when I had a baby it would have to have a literary name. I want my children to know how important books are. And I want all of you to know that, too,” he said. “Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don’t have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?” We didn’t know, but we nodded somberly. “So I named my baby Fanny,” he went on. “And when you girls start to become baby machines in a few years, I expect all of you to name your little girls Fanny, too.”
There was uncomfortable laughter; none of us had any idea of what to make of him, though we knew we liked him. He stopped talking for a moment, taking time to crack a few more walnuts, and then, in a softer voice, he spoke a little about the writers he particularly loved: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce.
“Joyce is it for me,” he said. “I bow down before the genius-shrine of Ulysses, of course, though I have to admit my heart really belongs to Dubliners. It doesn’t get any better than ‘The Dead.’ ”
Then Castleman said he was going to read to us from the final passages of “The Dead.” He produced a sea-green paperback copy of Dubliners, and as he read aloud we stopped twiddling our pencils and rotating the rings on our fingers and yawning silently inthat sluggish, late-afternoon way. Parts of the novella, particularly near the end, were stunning, and the room became absorbed and silent. His voice, as he read, was reverential. When he was done, he spoke for a few minutes about the meaning of the death of poor, doomed Michael Furey, who had stood lovesick in the frozen night in James Joyce’s story, and died.
“I would kill to write a story half as good. Literally kill,” the professor said. “Well, okay, figuratively kill.” He shook his head. “Because when I really face the facts, girls, I remember that I’ll never even come close to doing what that man did.” He paused, looking away self-consciously, then he said, “Now comes the moment in which I have to confess that I’m trying to be a writer myself. I’ve written a few stories here and there. But for now,” he went on quickly, “we’re not supposed to be talking about me; we’re supposed to be talking about literature !” He pronounced the word archly, with humor, then looked around the room. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe one of you will write something truly great one day. The verdict isn’t in yet.”
I understood that he was implying that for him the verdict was in, and it wasn’t good. He continued to speak for a while longer, and the most diligent girls in the class took notes. I peered sidelong at Susan Whittle, the redheaded, blush-prone girl in mohair beside me. On a page of her binder, in perfectly formed letters, she had written:
Fiction = ART MIXED WITH EMOTION! i.e., the novels of Virginia Wolfe (sp?), James Joyce, etc., etc. Experience should be undiluted. Similes!! Note: MUST pick up streamers & keg TODAY for soph. mixer.
Outside the tall windows of Seelye Hall, the light was being wiped from the sky; I saw a few girls walking along the paths, but I didn’t register them particularly; they were people walking, nothing more. I looked back at Professor Castleman. He was a new father with a wife and a baby lying in the warmth of thenursery of the local hospital. He was a sensitive, intelligent man with a suggestion of a limp; he’d most likely gotten it in Korea, I guessed, or
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