Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle Review
I will probably never attend another annual convention of the Modern Language Association. That realization struck me forcefully as I was stepping onto the escalator to descend into the lobby of the Boston Sheraton early last month. The skirted tables at the top of the stairway were still loaded with fliers, but there was hardly anyone around, so it seemed as though the profession had been abandoned and I was its sole survivor.
The mesmerizing reading of a poem in a Dublin classroom when I was a teenager and the casual advice of an American friend in England that I should study literature rather than philosophy had led me here, and now the lights were about to go out on my career as a college professor. In another few years, I would be officially retired.
Seconds later I reached the lobby below, where hordes of conferencegoers bustled about making plans for dinner. In an overcrowded, noisy seafood restaurant, my colleagues and I commented on how much the sartorial look of the conference had improved over previous years, while the chance of getting a tenure-track position had diminished. I worried silently that my college-age son, a committed reader, might one day be among those same job seekers.
I attended my first MLA meeting in the mid-1980s, well into my 30s. I was still under the tutelage of my dissertation director, who had ensured that I was a presenter on his panel. I had one job interview, and now I can’t even recall what institution it was with. My visiting position was renewed at the last moment, though, extending my academic career for another year. At my next MLA meeting, in Chicago, I gave another paper, had five interviews, and landed a job.
On one of my campus visits, I was so underprepared that both they and I knew the game was up on the first morning, but we had to endure another day in one another’s company. On the second visit, at the campus where I was eventually hired—my Bill Blass thrift-store suit pinching under the arms—I misunderstood a question from a senior faculty member and gave a snarky reply. In the years since then, I’ve seen several interviewees eliminated for much more minor lapses. But on that occasion, my untenured guide, who was worried about his own dearth of publications, assured me that I would be offered the job, as I was the fourth candidate and the faculty was worn out with the process. A decade later, he would be a finalist for the National Book Award.
Another MLA meeting in Chicago a few years later, another paper, and I am with my fiancée, no longer suffering the anxiety of job hunting. Indeed, the room is so packed when I present that I see my star rising, only to discover afterward that all the enthusiasm is for the actual academic star sitting beside me, even though I had not yet heard of her.
A year later, in San Francisco, my wife is pregnant, and I have no paper but am on my college’s interview committee. I’ve passed to the other side. I’m up for tenure, have published a book, and am confident there won’t be a problem with the departmental vote.
Most of the MLA meetings I attend after that are combinations of paper presentations and interview-committee work, tours of the book exhibits, parties with fellow English professors—complete with free drinks and awkward conversations that I can’t wait to abandon—and late-night talks with colleagues who want to get promoted to full professor but see obstacles ahead, or with those about to retire with tales about the past. Those exchanges occur less frequently in the department itself than in hotel lobbies and suites, where we vent our hopes and frustrations.
Secure in the profession, I skip the MLA meetings for several years. I also have a second book that has unexpectedly gone into paperback reprint; my own promotion to full professor should undoubtedly follow. But the book isn’t enough. An outside evaluator of my file has, I am told indirectly, gone apoplectic over the details of my book’s argument. This is an unexpected setback.
The MLA meeting rolls around again, I am on the hiring committee, and I am smarting with disappointment. Those being interviewed are spouting current theory in an area not my own. My unease only increases as I mull over my failed promotion while listening to them discourse about discourse. Our last interviewee is an older man who rambles on and on, finally informing us that he grew up in the surrounding streets. I am keenly aware that he is irritating one of my colleagues, that he would not fit in anyway, and yet his tale of academic dislocations resonates with me in my disturbed condition. My paper here, no matter how well received, will not resurrect my stalled career.
Several more years pass, and I am in Philadelphia. This time, with a third book, things have worked out, and I am complacently conscious of being the senior person on the search committee, though the others had tenure before my arrival. A few of the interviewees even express excited familiarity with my publications. This is only the second time I have no paper to give, and because our hotel is a couple of blocks from the main venue, I don’t attend any panels or even the book exhibits. Late one night, I see an ambitious former colleague across the street but decide not to greet her as she passes by without noticing me. I haven’t got it in me to chat in the chill air about the ups and downs of our academic lives.
And so to Boston. Now that my children are grown up and have gone away to college, I feel renewed in my scholarly interests, all the more so because I have freer range in their pursuit. I give no paper and have to borrow someone else’s badge to visit the book exhibits. Talking to a press representative with whom I’ve corresponded about a new project, I’m told straightforwardly that without major alteration, it would not sell in the current market. I see no one I know, and all my mentors are either dead or retired. Even much younger colleagues have passed away. I am the ghost in the machine.
But as I walk along, someone catches my eye, and I hers. Her name escapes me, but she is forgivingly friendly—a student of a few years ago who now has a tenure-track job and has just given her first MLA paper. She steps onto the career track as I step off. I am tempted to say something frivolous to her about my mortality but resist the self-indulgence. Besides, I will be back in the interviewing suite tomorrow morning, pacing around and looking out at the thin layer of snow on the roof beneath our window, scrolling through files to bring back to mind new approaches and fresh subversions.
And I still have Robert Herrick’s “To Daffodils” that I first read with such innocent delight in a classroom on North Richmond Street in Dublin over 50 years ago. “We have short time to stay,” it said. I need its wisdom now more than ever.
