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Down in the Dirt magazine (v081)
(the April 2010 Issue)




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The Mentor

John Bruce

    Harold Sigurdson’s seminar on esthetics and criticism was one of the courses Ed McLaughlin took in his first semester at graduate school. He’d been on campus only a few days when Sigurdson, who later became his graduate advisor, pulled Ed into his office to get some idea of what they had.
He must have been looking at Ed’s college transcript in the folder. Ed had done his undergraduate work at a prestige school and had majored in English, but you’d never tell it from his graduate record exam score.
    “You did a lot of work with Hartsfield, didn’t you?”
asked Sigurdson.
    For a moment Ed wasn’t even sure who he meant. “Geoffrey Hartsfield?” he asked.
    Sigurdson nodded grimly.
He shuddered, too. “I got into a real fight with him at a conference once,” he said. Ed couldn’t remember how many courses he’d taken from Hartsfield, in fact; it wasn’t all that many.
He wasn’t teaching much more than the sophomore survey and the eighteenth century course.

    So then Sigurdson kept on grilling him.
“Who did you have for the Shakespeare courses?” he asked.
    “Ellis Throckmorton,” he answered, with even a slight tone of pride.
He may as well have said Elmo P. Flickworthy.
Sigurdson registered no recognition of the name.
He kept on.
    “Who did you have for American Lit?”
    “Henry Terrace.” Another null reaction.
    “Romantics?”
    “Stansford Bulworth”
    
Sigurdson shook his head. “I haven’t heard of any of these.”
    Ed almost blurted “Stansford Bulworth?
He wrote Generative Dialectic: Charles Lamb and the Deep Structure of Ritual”, which had recently been voted faculty book of the year (though competition that year was light), but he restrained himself.
It seemed a bad start, but Sigurdson seemed to have a twinkle in his eye.
    But he left the first session in Sigurdson’s class with a feeling that he’d actually learned something, an unfamiliar impression that he kept exploring in his mind the way the tongue keeps exploring a loose tooth.
The impression was the more incongruous in that he’d just spent four years at an elite college, without ever having felt anything comparable in any of his classes there.
The graduate school where Sigurdson taught, for that matter, was anything but top-ten.

    “I think you mean to use the word ‘notion’, as opposed to the word ‘idea’,” Sigurdson said to one student in the class.
He wasn’t rebuking him; he wasn’t even castigating him.
He was just working with him to polish his thinking a little.
Where Ed had come from, the profs coddled and flattered their students, possibly on the basis that if they weren’t already rich, they soon would be, and if they had fond memories of feel-good class discussions, they’d be more
inclined
to remit donations to the alma mater.
Sigurdson was simply assuming that everyone in the room was an adult.
It was a new feeling for Ed.
    Leaving aside for the moment what had brought Harold Sigurdson to California, I need to point out that he was new there – not quite as new as Ed was, but still new.
He’d taught at a couple of liberal-arts safety schools in Massachusetts, not Ivies, but fairly prestigious nonetheless.
The transition was apparently as hard for him as it was for Ed.
In the first class session, Harold was explaining that he’d rather hold the class meetings at his home and was giving directions for how to get there.
He lived in Beverly Hills, though it was south of Wilshire, which meant it was just an ordinary house..
    “Do you know where Roxbury is?” he asked Ed, referring to a street near his home.
    “Sure,” he answered. “It’s near Boston.”
Harold, it seemed, felt right then the same pang that Ed was feeling.
They hit it off from that moment forward.
    Sigurdson was in early middle age.
He didn’t say much about himself in class, but Ed gradually picked up the story in scuttlebutt. His wife had passed away a year or so earlier, after a long battle with cancer.
Beyond that, his children had been on a trip to the zoo with a group from several other families, when an elephant suddenly went rogue, reached over the enclosure, picked up a child with its trunk, and threw it to the ground, killing it.
Harold’s own children, while unharmed, were thoroughly traumatized.
Since then, he’d been hitting Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, with its glimpse of gruesome night, pretty hard in the readings for the criticism seminar.
This further went to Ed’s sense that Sigurdson wasn’t coddling anyone.

    But around that time, people started to talk to Ed about taking over the program manager’s job for the monthly English Department tea. This unremunerated job involved reserving the room in the Burkett Center, making sure sufficient folding chairs had been laid in, ordering the sherry from the faculty lounge, requisitioning the napkins, crockery, and other refreshments from the student union, serving as master of ceremonies, and not least, securing speakers.
    One might assume that being selected for such a duty was a sign of favor among the faculty, perhaps also a prefiguring of academic success, since it demanded of the incumbent a certain basic competence and reliability, an ability to work with people at all levels in the university, and a flair for cajolery, flattery, even political maneuver, when needed to persuade faculty members to speak. On the other hand, the last four well-seasoned graduate students who’d been selected for that job had seen their careers truncated. There was no way to do it without offending someone important on the faculty, whether by scheduling a rival, passing over a protégé, making a gaffe in introductions, or even selecting the wrong brand of sherry.
    Rob French was the current, soon-to-be-former, incumbent; he was giving the whole graduate school thing up and heading off to teach writing at a business college.
It was in his interest in recruiting a successor to minimize the problems and frustrations he’d had, and he said nothing about them to Ed.
And Ed was new enough at the game that he didn’t divine those issues on his own.
    “Harold Sigurdson thinks you’re a good candidate for the job,” said Rob.
    “Really?” Ed said.
He figured he and Sigurdson were friendly, but he’d always kept in mind their first meeting.
“Are you sure?”
    “I don’t think you understand,” said Rob.
“Every time someone mentions your name, he booms out ‘Good man!’.”

    Ed had other confirmation of Sigurdson’s attitude toward him.
As that year’s spring semester wound down and he began looking at his courses for fall, he decided to take an advanced seminar from David Hume Browne, a recently-hired prestige professor who’d been brought in with a newly-created endowed chair.
He and Sigurdson had come in at the same time, and the rumor was that hiring Sigurdson had been a condition of bringing Browne in.

    Anyone who wanted to sign up had to make an appointment to talk with Browne first, which Ed did.
The meeting went much the same as his first talk with Sigurdson: Browne wasn’t impressed with Ed’s undergraduate work and suggested he might want to wait a year or two to get more experience in graduate school before trying again.
But then it came out that Ed had taken Sigurdson’s esthetics and criticism course the prior fall.

    “Just a minute,” said Browne, “I’ll be right back,” and he left the office.
Soon enough, he returned.
“Well,” he said, “it seems that Prof. Sigurdson was quite. . . impressed with you.
I suppose we can let you sign up for the course after all.”
    Megan told him she was starting to look at teaching opportunities in California for the following school year so they wouldn’t be so far apart.
She mentioned a position at a continuation school in San Diego, the same work she’d been doing.
Ed wasn’t too unhappy about that; San Diego was a hundred miles away, and they wouldn’t be in each other’s hair.
Then there was a potential teaching job in Lompoc: same thing, not so close as to be a problem.
    But then in March, she called him.
She’d applied for, and received, a graduate assistant job at the same university, the same English department, where Ed was teaching.
This was a surprise: she hadn’t mentioned anything like it.
Her tone on the call was severe: “Is there any reason – any reason,” she repeated carefully, “why I shouldn’t accept that job?”
    Ed sorted through the possible reasons: what she clearly implied with her severe tone was whether he’d started something serious with some other woman.
He’d looked around, but nothing worthwhile had shown up.
So the answer to her specific implied question was no.
He didn’t have the presence of mind even to start assembling a rejoinder based on whether the whole question of her joining him at work was a good idea or not.
    And as she promised, Megan moved out to California that summer.
She didn’t have a car, so Ed, who’d bought one, though he was still living with his parents, drove her around to find an apartment. Actually, she never bought a car for the several years the relationship with Ed continued, which created a serious problem in California.
She relied on public transit, on Ed, or whomever else she could find to give her rides where she wanted to go.
    That fall, Ed discovered that, without mentioning anything to him about it, Harold Sigurdson had quietly made sure that his son, who was starting college then, wound up in Ed’s first-year comp section.

    When Megan started graduate school in the fall, she took Sigurdson’s esthetics and criticism seminar on Ed’s recommendation.
A week or so later, she said Sigurdson had called her into his office.
“He told me I’m in the wrong place,” she said. “He told me, ‘You’re much too good for this school. We need to get you into UCLA as soon as we can.’”
    This came as a shock to Ed.
As far as he could tell, Sigurdson thought of him about as highly as he thought of anyone, yet he’d never mentioned anything along the line of getting him into UCLA.
In fact, considering the move they’d made to put him in charge of the monthly English Department tea, they seemed to want him right where he was.
On top of that, given the soul searching he’d done on the nature of an elite-school English major, he wasn’t sure how Megan’s background differed all that much from his own.
    She sensed his puzzlement, as well as his jealousy.
“Maybe this is my big chance in life,” she said. “Do you think I should do it?”
    “I thought what we’d talked about was you coming out so we could be together,” he said.
That didn’t, as the reader may well imagine, have much of an effect, and she began to dig her heels in.

    In fairness, I should add here a bit of information that Ed didn’t have at the time. It often happens that, when offspring enter their parents’ professions, it gives them a Darwinian fitness for survival. Certain habits of personality, which is to say certain fundamentals of professional gamesmanship, are somehow transferred across generations, when for those not born into the family profession, some time, and indeed some careers, must inevitably be sacrificed in trial and error.
    Megan’s father, as we’ve seen, was himself an English professor, tenured though unpublished and unassuming, at a third-tier institution. His dissertation had traced the hitherto unrecognized influence of Edmund Gosse on Charles R.B. Southwick, a Canadian poet, and although his own work hadn’t reached publication, he’d been engaged for many years in a thoroughgoing if feckless reappraisal of Gosse himself.
    As some people give lavish gifts to their children on occasions like confirmation or graduation, her father gave Megan what, in his estimation, was the most valuable gift he could give on the occasion of her enrolling in graduate school: a draft of an essay on Gosse.
    You could interpret this as simple complacency and self-absorption on his part, but it in fact represented a greater understanding than we might expect of his daughter’s real capabilities and actual needs. And perhaps instinctively responding to this intention, Megan took the draft and polished it, helped by numerous professors, throughout her graduate school career, and it formed the core of the only article she ever published. That, in turn, was eventually sufficient to earn her a full-time job, and later tenure, at a community college – but this is beyond the scope of our story.
    Thus the issue of moving to UCLA soon enough went on the back burner, and a month or so after her first report of a meeting with Harold Sigurdson, Megan reported to Ed on another.
“‘Megan,’ he said to me, ‘your prose style is soggy and desultory.
You need to come to my office so we can work on it.’”
One would think that a graduate student destined for a top-10 school would have a prose style other than soggy and desultory – or at least, that’s what Ed had at the back of his mind.
But in fact, nothing afterward was ever said about UCLA.
    Then, a few weeks after that, she reported yet another exchange, this one indicating that a certain informality had built up between them: “‘Megan,’ he said to me, leaning out of his office door, ‘come play with me.’”
She gave no further details on what this may have entailed, and this was the last such exchange that she reported.
It did appear, though, that he was satisfied to have her exactly where she was.



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