Straight Man

But before he gets very far into the story he’s lost his thesis, and his crisis-of-the-soul story starts getting illustrated with details that undermine his intention. He reminds me that his salary was enormous, unheard of at the time, that it paved the way for the salaries of today’s academic superstars, an entirely inferior breed. What would he be worth, in his prime, on today’s market? No English department in the country could afford him. Eventually, he does return to his story, but by the time he gets to his triumphal Dickenslecture, his scathing attack on
Bleak House
, it’s become nothing more than a story of personal triumph over adversity, of mind over body, intellect over larynx, scholarship over art. A story of vindication, of William Henry Devereaux, Sr., and his salary. I’m only half-listening to all of it, so I’m not entirely prepared when his narrative takes an unexpected turn. “You may find this strange,” he says, “but I’ve recently started rereading Dickens.”
    Clearly he imagines he’s paying the author a compliment by returning in his final years to a writer whose mawkishness he’s derided over a long career. “Much of the work is appalling, of course. Simply appalling,” my father concedes, genuflecting before his previous wisdom on the subject. “Most of it, probably. But there is something
there
, isn’t there. Some power … something”—he searches for the right word here—“transcendent, really.”
    It would be pointless for me to offer an observation, I know. This conversation he’s ostensibly having with me he’s really having with himself, and the truth is I can never remember having a conversation with him that wasn’t this way.
    “I feel almost,” he says, “as though I had
sinned
against that man.”
    This statement, it must be said, brings me to the brink of powerful emotion. It must be a hybrid of some sort, since sorrow and hilarity seem equally justifiable in this circumstance. “Dad,” I finally say, when I locate my voice. “
This
is what you feel guilty about? You feel guilty about the way you treated
Dickens
?”
    He nods without hesitation. “Yes,” he says, then again, “yes.”
    I think it’s me he’s looking at as he says this until I realize his focus is somewhere behind me, on the abandoned carousel, perhaps, or maybe he’s with Pip and Joe Gargery at the forge. At which point something happens to his face. It seems almost to come apart, and then tears are streaming down his cheeks, exactly as Mr. Purty described. “I wish …,” he begins, but he’s unable to continue. He’s too overcome with grief.

CHAPTER
34
    My fiction writers seem to have remembered the morose silence that ended our last workshop, and then to have concluded that we should pick up where we left off, despite Leo’s surprising absence. Not only does Leo never miss class, he usually arrives early and paces in the hallway, hoping to have a few words with me beforehand, a strategy I defeat by arriving exactly one minute after the bell and pointing at the clock face at the end of the hall. And after he’s had a story work-shopped, he always arrives at the next class loaded for bear. I’d have thought that would be especially true today, since a story of Solange’s is up for discussion.
    Perhaps Leo’s taken Hemingway’s advice. Earlier in the term he explained to me why Hemingway would have disapproved of our workshop. Hem advised young writers to live. He derided the whole idea of writing groups and talking about writing. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of the contemporary workshop concept. When Leo explained all this to me, I seriously considered agreeing with him, sincethat would have implied that he’d be better off to drop the class and move into a log cabin in the mountains with an old typewriter and a couple reams of paper. Instead I reminded Leo that when the young Hemingway was living in Paris, he wrote in the morning and spent his afternoons talking writing with Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson in what may have been the world’s first and best workshop. My reward for setting Leo straight was, of course, another semester’s worth of his slasher stories.
    It may be that today’s workshop is less impeded by Leo’s absence than by my presence. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., appears to have taken over today’s workshop at several levels. Not only am I seated at the head of the table, but I’m also beneath it. Whereas yesterday I