that if you teach a Canadian author in the Canadian Literature course, you're condescending to Canadians-by not teaching them in another literature course. And if you 'use them up' in another literature course, then she'll ask you what you think is 'wrong' with Canadian Literature; she'll say you're being condescending to Canadians. It's all because I'm a former American, and she doesn't like Americans; this is so obvious-that and the fact that I am a bachelor, I live alone, and I have not fallen all over myself to ask her (as they say) 'out.' She's one of those pushy women who will readily humiliate you if you do ask her 'out'; and if you don't ask her, she'll attempt to humiliate you more. I am reminded of some years ago, and of a New York woman who so reminded me of Mitzy Lish. She brought her daughter to Bishop Strachan for an interview; the mother wanted to interview someone from the English Department-to ascertain, she told the headmistress, if we were guilty of a 'parochial'' approach to literature. This woman was a seething pot of sexual contradictions. First of all, she wanted her daughter in a Canadian school-in 'an old-fashioned sort of school,' she kept saying-because she wanted her daughter to be 'saved' from the perils of growing up in New York. All the New England schools, she said, were full of New Yorkers; it was tragic that a young girl should have no opportunity to entertain the values and the virtues of a saner, safer time. On the other hand, she was one of those New Yorkers who thought she would 'die' if she spent a minute outside New York-who was sure that the rest of the world was a provincial whipping post whereat people like herself, of sophisticated tastes and highly urban energies, would be lashed to the stake of old-fashioned values and virtues until she expired of boredom.
'Confidentially,' she whispered to me, 'what does a grown-up person do here?' I suppose she meant, in all of Toronto-in all of Canada . . . this wilderness, so to speak. Yet she keenly desired to banish her daughter, lest the daughter be exposed to the eye-opening wisdom that had rendered the mother a prisoner of New York! She was quite concerned at how many Canadian authors were on our reading lists; because she'd not read them, she suspected them of the gravest parochialism. I never met the daughter; she might have been nice-a little fearful of how homesick she would be, I'm sure, but possibly nice. The mother never enrolled her, although the girl's application was accepted. Perhaps the mother had come to Canada on a whim-I cannot claim to have come here for entirely sound reasons myself! Maybe the mother never enrolled her daughter because she (the mother) could not endure the deprivations she (the mother) would suffer while she visited her daughter in this wilderness. I have my own idea regarding why the child was never enrolled. The mother made a pass at me! It had been quite a while since anyone had done that; I was beginning to think that this danger was behind me, but suddenly the mother said: 'What does one do here-for a good time? Perhaps you'd like to show me?'
The school had made some rather unusual, if not altogether extraordinary, arrangements for the daughter to spend a night in one of the dormitory rooms-she would get to know a few of the girls, a few of the other Americans . . . that sort of thing. The mother inquired if I might be available for a 'night on the town'!
'I'm divorced,' she added hastily-and unnecessarily; I should hope she was divorced! But even so! Well, I don't pretend to possess any skill whatsoever at wriggling myself free from such bold invitations; I haven't had much practice. I suppose I behaved as an absolute humbler; I no doubt gave the woman yet another stunning example of the 'parochialism' she was doomed to encounter outside New York. Anyway, our encounter ended bitterly. The woman had been, in her view, courageous enough to present herself to me; that I hadn't the courage to accept her generous gift clearly marked me as the fiendish essence of cowardice. Having honored me with her seductive charms, she then felt justified in heaping upon me her considerable contempt. She told Kather-ine Keeling that our English reading lists were 'even more parochial' than she had feared. Believe me: it was not the reading lists that she found 'parochial'-it was me I was not savvy enough to recognize a good tryst when I saw one. And now-in my very own English Department-I must endure a woman of an apparently similar temperament, a woman whose prickly disposition is also upheaved in a sea of sexual contradictions . . . Eleanor Pribst! She even quarreled with my choice of teaching Tempest-Tost; she suggested that perhaps it was because I failed to recognize that Fifth Business was 'better.' Naturally, I have taught both novels, and many other works by Robertson Davies, with great-no, with the greatest-pleasure. I stated that I'd had good luck teaching Tempest-Tost in the past. 'Students feel so much like amateurs themselves,' I said. 'I think they find all the intrigues of the local drama league both extremely funny and extremely familiar.' But Ms. Pribst wanted to know if I knew Kingston; surely I at least knew that the fictional town of Salterton is easily identified as Kingston. I had heard that this was true, I said, although-personally-I had not been in Kingston.
'Not beenl' she cried. 'I suppose that this is what comes of having Americans teaching Can Lit!' she said.
'I detest the term 'Can Lit,' ' I told Ms. Pribst. 'We do not call American Literature 'Am Lit,' I see no reason to shrivel this country's most interesting literature to a derogatory abbreviation. Furthermore,' I said, 'I consider Mister Davies an author of such universal importance that I choose not to teach what is 'Canadian' about his books, but what is wonderful about them.'
After that, it was simple warfare. She challenged my substitution-in Grade -of Orwell's Burmese Days for Orwell's Animal Farm. In terms of 'lasting importance,' it was Nineteen Eighty-four or Animal Farm; Burmese Days, she said, was 'a poor substitute.'
'Orwell is Orwell,' I said, 'and Burmese Days is a good novel.'
But Ms. Pribst-a graduate of Queens (hence, her vast knowledge of Kingston)-is writing her doctorate at the University of Toronto on something
