I met Ida Brown in the faculty lounge, and we went out to eat at Ferry House. We’d seen each other when I was there three years before, but whereas I was now in decline, she had only improved. She had a distinguished look with her corduroy blazer, her crimson lipstick, her slender body, and her mordant, malicious tone. (“Welcome to the cemetery where writers come to die.”)
Ida was a star in the academic world; her thesis on Dickens had transfixed all studies into the author of Oliver Twist for twenty years. Her salary was a state secret, but it was said that they raised it every six months and that her sole condition was that she must earn one hundred dollars more than the highest-paid male (that’s not what she called them) in her profession. She lived alone, had never married, didn’t want children, was always surrounded by students, and you could see the light on in her office at any hour of night and imagine the soft whirring of the computer where she developed her explosive theses on politics and culture. You could imagine her little laugh of delight as she thought of the scandal her theories would spark among colleagues. They said that she was a snob, that she changed her theories every five years, that each of her books was different from the last because it reflected the fashion of the day, but everyone envied her intelligence and force.
As soon as we sat down to eat, she apprised me of the situation in the Department of Modern Culture and Film Studies, which she’d helped to create. She had included film studies, she said, because students may not read novels, may not go to the opera, may not like rock music or conceptual art, but they will always watch movies.
She was frontal, direct, and she knew how to fight as well as think. (“Those two verbs go hand in hand.”) She was bent on an all-out war against the Derridean cells that ruled over literature departments in the Northeast and, above all, against the central committee on deconstruction at Yale. She didn’t critique them from the same position as defenders of the canon like Harold Bloom or George Steiner (“kitsch aesthetes from magazines for the enlightened middle class”), but instead attacked them from the left, from the great tradition of Marxist historians. (“But it’s a pleonasm to say Marxist historian, it’s like saying American cinema.”)
She worked both for the elite and against it and despised the people who made up her professional circle; her audience wasn’t wide, only specialists read her, but she had an impact on the minority that copies extreme theories, transforms them, popularizes them, and turns them—years later—into mass-media information.
She’d read my books, knew about my projects. She wanted me to teach a seminar on Hudson. “I need your perspective,” she said, with a weary smile, as though that perspective did not matter so much. She was working on the relationship between Conrad and Hudson, she told me, forestalling me by stating that this was her territory and it would be ill-advised for me to go down that road. (She didn’t believe in private property, they said, except when it concerned her field of study.)
Edward Gardner, the publisher who discovered Conrad, had published Hudson’s books as well. That was how the two writers met and became friends; they were the finest prose writers in English at the end of the nineteenth century, and both had been born in exotic and distant lands. Ida was interested in the traditions of people who set themselves against capitalism from an archaic, pre-industrial position. The Russian populists, the Beat Generation, the hippies, and now environmental activists had taken up the myths of natural living and the rural commune. Hudson, according to Ida, had added his interest in animals to that rather adolescent utopia. “The cemeteries that serve luxurious suburban neighborhoods are full of graves for cats and dogs,” she said, “while the homeless are freezing to death in the streets.” For her, the only thing that had survived from the literary struggle against the effects of industrial capitalism were Tolkien’s stories for children. But, well, anyway, what was I thinking of doing in my classes? I explained my plans for the seminar, and the conversation continued along that line without any major surprises. She was so beautiful and so intelligent that she seemed slightly artificial, as though she was making an effort to diminish her charm or even considered it to be a weakness.
We finished the meal and then walked down Witherspoon toward Nassau Street. The sun was starting to melt the snow, and we moved carefully along the icy sidewalks. I would have a few free days to get adjusted, and I had only to let her know if there was anything I needed. The receptionists could take care of the administrative details; the students were enthusiastic about my course. She hoped I was comfortable in my fourth-floor office. When we said goodbye on the corner facing campus, she rested her hand on my arm and said with a smile:
“In the fall I’m always hot.”
I stopped short, confused. And she looked at me with a strange expression, waited a moment for me to say something, and then walked resolutely away. Maybe she hadn’t said what I’d thought I heard, maybe she said In a fall I’m always a hawk. Hot-hawks, maybe. Fall meant the fall semester, but it was only the beginning of the
