GENERAL

V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM PERILOUS PROFESSORS

F ACULTY T OWERS : T HE A CADEMIC N OVEL ANDITS D ISCONTENTS

★By Elaine Showalter (Oxford University Press 166pp £12.99)

E LAINE S HOWALTER ’ S SUBJECT isn’t any old campus fiction – novels about universities in general or student life at large: that mass of fiction beginning, it might be, when Thomas Hughes’s hero left Rugby and ‘went up’ to Oxford in Tom Brown at Oxford, the genre coming of age in Evelyn Waugh’s deliciously malicious Decline and Fall. Professor Showalter’s concern is, rather, that much smaller corner of this unforeign field which academics have dubbed the Professorroman– novels about university teachers, the doings of lecturers and professors in their departments and faculties, in particular those written from the Fifties to the present day. Our very lively and likeable Dante to this educational Purgatory and Inferno – mapped decade by decade as the novels appeared – says this is her favourite reading. Since she’s been a professor of English (at Princeton most notably) it comes as no surprise that she seems to like reading most about English departments and their staffs. Indeed, what’s especially grabbing about her report is its perpetual air of insider trading. She knows intimately what the novelists are enthusing about (occasionally) and grousing about (mainly). She knows the professorial authors who go in for the Professorromanin such numbers, knows the departments whose powerplays, careerisms and other misdoings they’re shopping, knows the villains hidden and hiding behind the fictional masks and the pseudonyms. Her career has been their career; their distresses and pushinesses, their ideological manoeuvrings (to do not least with the rise of Theory) have been hers. This is Elaine Showalter the celebrated feminist critic and historian speaking. She’s even a character in some of the novels she has us alight in. No wonder this is her favourite stuff. She glances at alleged fictional precursors: Middlemarch, with dried-up Casaubon cast in the role of selfishly ambitious, wife-hurting scholar; Barchester Towers as a model of sort-of learned men’s institutional infighting; Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night as a case of donnish bitching with murder in its heart. But the true instigators, or loud missionary voices, of the mode for Elaine Showalter are C P Snow in The Masters and Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim. And no one, I guess, would quarrel much with that. The Masters is clearly a Fifties version (by a devoted

Trollopean, no less) of the common Thirties academic plot in which (as in Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging) murder takes place in an Oxford or Cambridge college, except that in this story of the election of a new Master for an old-fashioned Cambridge college it’s ambitions for high office and place that get murdered. Snow founded a vision of the modern quadrangle as a home for careerist grasping and bitching, a killing field for academic selfhood and rightful scholarly ambition. For its part, Lucky Jim– that lovely undoing romp through the intellectual shallows of an English provincial university, an academic dump licensing powerful ogres (the grisly madrigal-singing head of department Professor Welch), cultural pseudery, intellectual bad faith and inadequacy – simply kills off the very idea of the modern university with a set of hollow laughs. We laugh, of course, at Jim Dixon’s pratfalling struggles against the Welch regime, his pointless research on ‘this strangely neglected topic’, his wonderfully hopeless and drunken ‘Merrie England’ lecture, but as Showalter rightly insists this comedy is very black indeed. And for her, Amis’s importance consists precisely in setting going a line of fictions in which satire and satirists engage with a history of steady institutional decline and failure. It’s a pessimistic business, this late-twentieth-century phase of university education which Showalter presents her chosen novels and novelists as marching in step with, decade by decade right up until now. It’s a scene in which the melancholy of teachers and taught mounts steadily. Faith in the good of the university seeps away. A kind of wholesale treason of the clerks sets in. The old men thwart and resist the young, especially the women. The young, and the women (to Showalter’s feminist dismay), tend to collaborate in the institutional nastiness. You have to get ruthless in turn or you don’t get tenure. The tenured oppress the tenure-needy. The most terrible careerists run the show, get the power, the dollars, the sex. Modern academic politics are revealed as rather special encouragers of nastiness. The ivory tower is now a Stasi fiefdom. Forget any idea you might have had of an academic pastoral, let alone a utopia. Myopically, these profs get ever more solipsistically ruthless and power-crazed as the influence of English studies shrinks within the university and the world. It’s the perennial tragedy of big fishes – not to say Stanley Fishes – in ever-diminishing ponds. No wonder the professorial writers of the Professorromanturn out so many crime stories: death after death in the English department or at the academic conference – by the likes of Amanda Cross (Carolyn Heilbrun), or Joanne Dobson. (Elaine Showalter particularly likes a sharp feminist-academic sleuth.) Of course, theory, theorists and anti-theorists – depending which side of the Theory Wars of the Seventies and Eighties an author stands on – are especially lampooned, and charged with causing lots of the recent trouble. Just in case you were unaware of who the

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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