Читать книгу The Hemingway Caper - Eric Wright - Страница 8

Hambleton College is where I hold down my other part-time job, that of sessional lecturer in the English Department. The word “sessional” signifies that my contract lasts only to the end of the session, or term, and to keep me reminded of that they pay me by the hour, unlike the tenured gang who are paid by the year. Of course, I have to teach the leftovers, whatever the tenured faculty don’t want, which can be dismaying. Last term I was given a week’s notice to prepare “Modes of Satire 1: Theoretical,” a course for which forty students had signed up and the asshole who dreamed up the course had disappeared on sabbatical to Dublin to do research for a book tentatively called, “Complaint in Catholic England—A Medieval Safety Valve.”

But with a bit of ingenuity, an awareness that the man in Dublin and his course objectives could be ignored, and the security of knowing that I was the only one teaching the course, setting the exam, and marking it, I scraped together an outline. I started with a bit of Donne, wallowed in Swift, and ended up with as much Evelyn Waugh as I thought I could get away with, with a dollop of Vonnegut as dessert. When planning to teach such a course, you keep your eye out for anything that might be useful the next time the merry-go-round throws off “Satire” and you are in the way.

I am digressing, I know, so I’ll conclude this rant by admitting that the present situation actually suits me very well. I have been a sessional at Hambleton for long enough to have become the most senior temporary instructor in the department. I have my pick of the bits left out for the dog after the tenured faculty have taken what they want, and I can generally find something appetizing enough in the leavings, filling up if necessary on an extra section of the first year Arts (General) course, one I have always liked teaching.

Because I do like my job—I like teaching English literature; that is, I like talking about prose, poems, and plays, especially to students. I don’t have any method, and I don’t have any theories. I just tell students about the interesting things I’ve noticed in the works on the course, and then think of exam questions that will let them do the same.

What I am not is a scholar. I was not able to summon up the interest or, to be honest, the learning, to finish my one attempt at a doctoral thesis, so I am never going to get a full-time job. Our universities, aping the Americans, who themselves set up their universities in the nineteenth century in imitation of the Germans (except for the duelling and calling each other “Doctor/Doctor”), regard a Ph.D as an essential qualification. I understand it’s happening in Britain now, too.

On the other hand, unless my tenured colleagues are prepared to do much more teaching than they presently do instead of concentrating on “research” (which, to be fair, they are forced to do by the system), I have a temporary job for life, or until I finish my novel.

Two years ago, I shared an office with a man named Richard Costril, another sessional and an angry man if ever there was one, who, when accused of discriminating against an Abyssinian student, turned the tables on his accusers so adroitly (with my help) that they gave him a tenured appointment with six years’ seniority, beginning with a sabbatical, to shut him up. Now Richard’s fire has gone out, and he sits among the ashes trying to think of something to turn into a little article to put in his annual report to his chairman. I don’t want that to happen to me.

My current office mate is from Scunthorpe, in northern England. When we first shook hands he said, “When I go home they say the coont’s back in Scoonthorpe.” After he had explained the joke, or rather, re-articulated it in a dialect I could understand, I realized that he was just characterizing himself, not as witty, but as earthy.

He had been hired for a year right off the boat by a fundamentalist church-affiliated college in Manitoba, then let go for comparing the world’s belief systems, and for pointing out that historically there had been a lot less blood spilled on God’s behalf in Tibet than there had been in Rome or Canterbury. He applied to the graduate school in Toronto, eventually ran out of money, and found work at Hambleton while he continued his thesis. His specialty, his field, is the literature of imaginary travels in the eighteenth century. As far as I understand it, he is trying to trace the common routes the imagination of the day took in the writing of fauxtravel literature, back to where the imagination found its sources. I think that’s what he’s doing: We don’t talk about it much.

When he’s in the real world you might mistake him for a character on Coronation Street,although when I hinted at that early in our relationship he got very offended. Apparently he’s from the other side of England, and for him the characters on Coronation Streetare all a bit soft. He, and the world he comes from, is hard; he is a hard man from the world of Rugby League football, whatever that is. I’ve never seen it, even on television. Ernie (we began by calling him Ernest, but he quickly asked if we were taking the piss—his phrase) said that true enough he had been christened Ernest but from the time he was five he had thumped anyone who dared to call him that. His name was “Ernie”. Actually, he said, when the subject first arose, he preferred “Ginger”. It’s an obvious nickname because he’s a light pink colour with bright blue eyes, freckled, and covered with thick ginger fuzz, not only on his head but on all the other bits that show where his clothes end.

The name took some getting used to, especially if you wanted to catch his attention from any distance. He asked me early on why everyone seemed to pause before they said his name, like, “You going for coffee, er, Ginger?” While I was trying to think, I told him that Ginger as a colouring was probably not as common in Ontario as it was in Yorkshire, and, actually, as a name, it was more usually attached to girls, exotic cats, and boutiques.

“That’s why they say it poncey-like?” he said. “I thought they were taking the piss.”

Ginger sees piss-takers everywhere.

I think he’s playing a role, being a character, not quite a stage Yorkshireman, though he can do that, too, but, as I say, he’s a hard man surprised to find himself in the softest of worlds.

In his job interview, which I was allowed to attend (but not to vote at), there was barely a trace of dialect, and the suit was blue, the shirt white, the tie striped. As soon as he got the job he changed into a knobbly mud-coloured cardigan which he claims his Gran knit him when he said he was coming to Canada, a khaki shirt, moleskin trousers held up by a wide leather strap, and the kind of boots good for striking sparks off cobblestones. He has worn the same outfit ever since, although I assume he must have several similar shirts.

Occasionally, when he wants to create a comic effect, he talks in stage dialect—”is tha coomin’ down t’road lud”—although normally his slightly flattened vowels are the only trace of his pre-university background. He’s Alan Bennett in boots, but the man from Scunthorpe is still there. He has a couple of pals from home here in Toronto, and occasionally, if he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s talking about, he drops his voice on the phone and slips into real dialect, and then he’s unintelligible.

I felt sorry for him when he first moved in with me. He seemed to be someone who could use a lot of help socially, an odd duck in spite of his impersonation of an academic at his interview, certainly someone whom women would find weird. So I took him home for dinner, to Carole’s dismay, because she doesn’t like cooking. But I wanted to do my bit for the new boy, and I even had the idea we might have a party, that Carole might invite some girl friends to meet him. Carole said she didn’t have any girl friends, which I should have known if I had thought about it. After I took Ginger home, she told me I was wasting my time, anyway, though she refused to say why. “You’ll see,” was all I could get out of her.