After finishing Sean Carroll's The Big Picture well in advance of our Men's Book Club meeting, I used my spare time to read some fiction. One, Alexander McCall Smith's My Italian Bulldozer (2017), was just for fun, an excellent summer novel about a holiday escape to Italy, funny and frivolous. Alexander McCall Smith is one of those super prolific writers I've never read, so I thought, why not? Then I turned to John le Carre's first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), which introduces George Smiley and what would become le Carre's famous take on espionage, mystery, and betrayal. Since my first experience of le Carre's writing was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), I enjoyed getting a glimpse of this earlier iteration of Smiley and his creator. Next I decided to get a jump on our book club's August selection, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (2008); I'll probably have more to say about that one later.
In any case, before moving on to another book club assignment, I thought I'd continue reading a bit more fiction, so I glanced through the many titles on my Kindle Reader and found one by Wallace Stegner, another writer I'd always intended to read but had somehow passed over until now. I settled on Crossing to Safety (1987), a late semi-autobiographical novel that turned out to be his last, and so far as I can tell not exactly typical of his earlier works. I'll probably read a bit more just to see if that's true, but this one was a good choice, since it's another novel about academic life to add to my extensive list in that genre.
Academic fiction, stories about teachers and professors, has a certain appeal for those of us who've been fortunate enough to experience that decidedly privileged form of existence. And while it's diverting to read the zany accounts, such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim or any of David Lodge's or Malcolm Bradbury's send ups, Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety has an almost disturbing ring of truth, especially for American academics who may have attempted a career in a college or university English department in the mid to late 20th century. Stegner lays out all of the anxieties associated with tenure: publish or perish, the competition for positions and promotions, the parts played by luck and good connections and long-suffering wives, for remember this was well before women made any significant inroads in academia.
As I read Stegner's novel, even though it recounts careers that began in the late 1930s, still in the midst of the great depression and not long before the outbreak of World War II, I was struck by how similar his experiences were to mine and those of many of my contemporaries. After all, when you think about it, graduate students have nearly always started out experiencing economic hardships. And while we hear tales of good job markets, few have ever experienced them, particularly in the humanities. Mostly it's a grind followed by a lottery and, one hopes, a bit of luck, dependence on connections, and the contributions of family or long-suffering spouses. Anyone who wants to get a good idea what it's like without actually having to go through the whole thing can just read Stegner's novel.
Another aspect of academic life that often goes unremarked on is the importance of the bonds of friendship. Stegner shows how friends come to one another's aid and sometimes steer one another to jobs and publishing opportunities. Occasionally, it's the famous old boys network, but often it's just friends helping friends. Perhaps this doesn't ring true for everyone, but in my own experience, although with less drama, friendships played an important part in my academic life. Some date all the way from graduate school, others from my first academic appointment, and a significant few from a fellowship year spent in residence with a group of other fellows who went on to influence one another's professional lives in a variety of ways.
Stegner also does a good job of showing how personal and professional lives can overlap and interconnect. Colleagues often become one's closest associates, so that even when one's professional life takes a different direction, the friendships endure, at least for a time, perhaps no longer as close as they once were, but with a lingering fondness for earlier times and shared experiences. I suspect that may be one of the principal appeals of Crossing to Safety, particularly for those who have lived in that world and known those sorts of trials and small victories. And as I said, for those who have not lived it, this book is a pretty faithful guide.
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