Straight Man

single criterion, or even a cluster of two or three criteria, that would sacrifice the right people.
    Which no doubt suggests something about the task itself. That I’ve allowed myself to engage in the exercise, even as an exercise, must mean something, though I’m too tired and sick to feel guilty. So here’s the question. If it’s not guilt, why does the name Judas Peckerwood keep appearing on list after mental list?

Part Two

JUDAS PECKERWOOD
    What I had not foreseen

Was the gradual day

Weakening the will

Leaking the brightness away
    —Stephen Spender

Since this newspaper printed the story of Lucky Hank’s first dog some weeks ago, its author has received three or four times the usual amount of mail (the exact numbers I leave to the reader’s imagination), most of it wanting to know more about my father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., whom I left with blistered hands, standing knee deep in a just-dug grave, wearing ruined chinos and loafers, about to bury a dog I’d managed to kill about two minutes after my father brought him home. My mother, who is well-known to readers of this newspaper (her columns generate far more mail than mine), objected to the story as I told it, claiming that the portrait of my father was unflattering, unfair, and unkind, but the response of other readers suggests the opposite. Their hearts went out instinctively to the father in the story. Several readers shared with me stories of their own valiant attempts to please their own stubborn, ungrateful children. They felt bad for my father and wondered if there was any news of him. They wondered if I had any more stories I could tell about William Henry Devereaux, Sr., stories thatwould be more about him and less about me. And so, I pick up my father’s story where I left off
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    Not long after the dog was buried, my father was made two attractive offers. The first was a full professorship from Columbia University, which he accepted. As I mentioned before, by this time my father was already a very famous scholar, and he was apparently weary of all the distinguished visiting professor gigs that were the texture of my childhood and early adolescence. He may have felt it was time to settle down, as my mother had for some time been suggesting. The second attractive offer came from a young woman graduate student from his D. H. Lawrence seminar, and it was with her that he settled down in New York
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    The Columbia deal was sweet. The university offered him a luxurious apartment within easy walking distance of the campus and partially subsidized it for him. His salary, for the late sixties, was unheard of, and in return for it, he was required to do relatively little in the classroom. He was the nominal editor of a prestigious scholarly magazine, as well as director of a special collection in the library, but he was also assigned a research assistant, who attended to many of his duties, including the grading of papers in the one undergraduate class he taught each year. Papers from the tiny graduate seminar he graded himself. That is, he placed a letter grade on them and for all anyone knew may even have read them. He had written five distinguished books of literary criticism, one of which, dealing with politics and the novel, had become wildly popular in the way that an occasional scholarly book on a fashionable subject will catch on. Everyone buys it, displays it, discusses it, without finding the time to actually read it. His real job at Columbia was to continue writing such books, to thank the university profusely for its encouragement, and to ensure that all subsequent editions of books he had written elsewhere would make mention of the fact that he now held a prestigious named chair at Columbia
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    Still, even though teaching was not a significant part of his responsibilities in his new position, the university must have been surprised, given its modest expectations, to learn upon his arrival that my father was unable to perform. I know my father was surprised. What befell him was unprecedented. He arrived at his first class in September, read the names of his students off his roster, opened his mouth to begin a lecture he had delivered half a dozen times before, only to discover that his mind wascompletely blank, that he was unable to speak so much as a pertinent syllable. He was not confused about what he wanted to say, nor had he forgotten how he’d meant to begin, or the lecture’s key details. His mind was simply voided, as if