So it was to be Prof Dex and Prof from then on. I never addressed him as Dex even when he and I became as casual with each other as my relationship with my old roommate and with Taft Edison had become. I would say, Hey, man, and hey, Prof, but never hey, Dex, and he never did call me Scooter. He called me Don. Because from our Composition 102 self-portrait paper he had found out that when my roommate and I were not make-believe Belle Epoque, Montmartre bohemian offspring the likes of François Villon, we were the local versions of Oxford and/or Cambridge dons, which was not only appropriately academic but also had the titular ring of jazz, kings, dukes, counts, earls, and barons as well as tongue-in-cheek overtones of Don Juan and Don Quixote.
As for our on-campus apartment assignment, all he had to do was name the address and give Eunice the keys. Neither she nor I had ever been inside that particular faculty residence, which was near the student nurses’ dormitory area and not far from the campus infirmary, but I was pleased because I liked the cross-campus walk from there past the clock tower, the bandstand on the campus promenade lawn, and through the post office to the main academic area.
We had made no special requests other than for an on-campus apartment for two, but both Eunice and I had hoped that we would not have to be assigned to one of the duplex or triplex units on the deans’ and administrators’ row along the municipal thoroughfare between the main academic quadrangle and the block where the drugstore, Red Gilmore’s Haberdashery, and Deke Whatley’s Barbershop were.
Our on-campus quarters assignment turned out to be the only official orientation item on the agenda for the evening, because any detailed clarification of specific academic assignments and standard operation procedures in the orientation material would be addressed during the preclass period departmental meeting that first Monday morning and in one-on-one appointments with the department head.
So I asked what I asked about faculty and staff changes since my graduation, because the only officials I had seen since our arrival that afternoon were the ones on duty at the guesthouse. And that was when I found out which of the people I remembered were away in graduate school completing their time in residence required of Ph.D. candidates. Then as we were taking our last sip of sherry we were called into the dining room and as we settled into our first course I said that I had nothing else to add to what I had said on the phone from New York about the Bossman’s Royal Highness proposition. So the main thing we talked about was the work of fiction that Taft Edison was already preoccupied with when I introduced myself to him in New York and told him that I remembered him from my freshman year on campus. Two of the sequences he had read to me sometime later had recently been published in current highly rated magazines, both of which placed more emphasis on literary quality than on social issues and political positions as such.
I’ve seen a few things he did for the sociopolitical corn-bread paper sheets a year or so ago, Prof Dex said, but these new pieces are impressively different, and I must also say that they represent not only a logical but also an astonishing development of the Taft Edison who was a student in the course in the English novel which, by the way, he was concurrently supplementing on his own initiative with works of Zola, Hugo, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky.
As Jerome Jefferson and I were well aware, I said, and he also knew that he was reading a lot of twentieth-century poetry. You know, Pound, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore. Incidentally, I can also remember the copies of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, and Mayor of Casterbridge on your bookshelves in the office of the English Department and also how old Jerome Jefferson, better known as Geronimo, used to sneer whenever he heard somebody saying, Beyond the maddening crowd. It’s madding crowd, my good fellow. Hardy got it from Thomas Gray’s poem, not from some goddamn sports column hack. Madding, my good man. You’re on a college campus. Faites attention.
Then when I said, So you like what old Taft is by way of getting into these days, he said, If he can bring even most of it off as these two excerpts suggest, he just might be capable of doing. We just might have a quantum leap to reckon with.
And I said, Well, I’m ready to tell you that he just might do just that. I can personally vouch for the fact that there is more to come that is even more outrageous. Voltaire, Cervantes, Rabelais, none of that stuff was lost on our boy. I must say, though, that it surprised me because as much as I had come to know about the library books he had checked out, old Jerome Jefferson was the one I had associated with the outrageous adventures and misadventures and absurdities of Candide, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Don Quixote.
My main concern is that the universality of the picaresque misadventures of Candide and Don Quixote may be mistaken for a fictionalized sociological documentation of yet another black boy being done in by his own incompetence or downright stupidity. Whereas nobody assumes that Candide stands for all Westphalians or Don Quixote represents the nuttiness of, say, Spanish idealism.
He’s very much aware of all that I said. So he hopes to make some of it outrageous enough to offset at least some of the ever-ready condescending compassion of survey-addicted do-gooders. He has already concocted a hilarious takeoff on Don Quixote that I think he’s really going to bring off. The draft he read me reminded me
