My family left Capri sipping cordials. Aboard the skipper, alongside us, was a young couple from the Southeastern U.S. The husband chatted up my father. He was in his late thirties, working as a financial broker-dealer in North Georgia, and feeling the ceiling. His own zip and zeal, he felt, were underfoaming, and the rural bosses were slow to update their trade. He saw my dad as a senior purse, and wanted his advice, his take on “the business.”
Though technically a part of the church of commerce for most of his professional life, my father is the last person who wants to talk about it. He doesn’t wake up and smell the stock market. He doesn’t bleed decks or fete careers in accountancy. His character spites his occupation, and his personality, I find, is closer to that of a pub wit than any math scrupler or tailored blowhard. Put simply, my father is a commission-based conversationalist, an incentivized talker, whose subjects are manifold. One happens to be a technology that moves money, an “investment platform” that he sells to wealth advisors across his territory. He putts; he puffs; he treats to dinner. And he’ll often describe his job as five-percent product, ninety-five percent relationships. Flat out, he will tell you, the smartest person he ever hired was an Art History Major from Bard. Her name and story, her indirect success, approached parable in my house.
But North Georgia was not looking to study color. A book suggestion would only confuse him. (A shame, since my dad is also a major reader, who devours contemporary fiction, classics, basically everything from Dave Hickey to Dave Harvey, with relish.) Instead, this man urged a specific kind of masculine banter, seized by the saliva of coincidence. He was, to corrupt a line of Yeats, networking in ecstasy. And so my dad obliged him with polite answers, appropriate answers, again misread.
I sat quietly on the boat cushion beside them until, eventually, I came up. “This your son?” the man asked. Yes. College-age, set to return to campus in the fall. The man nodded and smiled. He was pleased. Then, he turned to ask me the same question, with the same incurious catch, that I’d been asked many times. It’s not really a question.
What are you studying, business?
I took a breath, and prepared to ruin all good cheer with my answer.
English, I said.
The word hit him like a suspicious puree. To (presumably) try to digest it, the man gazed out to sea. The sun dashed and groveled upon the surface. Its brilliance bespattered the eye, with blue seething gently underneath. For a few moments, the man was all cauldron. Puzzled, he reverted back. He had failed to break down the dollop: “English,” he said. “What’s the end-game on that?”
The stumped response was far from unusual; it was the setting that canonized it. Even the bluffs of Amalfi were not enough to pry prejudice from the fundamentalist. And yet if there ever was a landscape to shake a man from dogma, that was it. Leisure, love, ancient cliff face. One might hope for a hairline fracture. But it seemed no amount of sublime visibility was going to suggest sympathy – or even neutrality – for the English major.
All of college unfurled this way, in a series of serious doubts. Doubt is actually a mild word for it. My parents and I both, separately and together, weathered an almost apoplectic response whenever the nature of my studies was discovered. The miff was always the same, but its manifests were seemingly infinite. Discouragement, disparagement, disbelief; mockery, insult, condescension. Outright laughter. All aimed at English, and at my apparently dim-witted dive into ruin. My parents, hardy defenders though they were, had to endure whole evenings of affront from the mothers and fathers of cowed kids, brow-beaten into regional business school. I still grit my teeth over the brazen caveman who, during a dinner party, sniggered, to their faces: “You’d pay all that money for an English major?”
Money. English major. The two are darkly intertwined. Often pejoratively. Often with a jeer. The amplitude afforded to assholes astounds me. Tact, etiquette, manners, all out the window. If you’re shaming a page-turner, you can more or less spit in a stranger’s face.
Each censor jolts into their jammer – “English. What are you going to do with that?” A friend of mine could reliably protect his temple by saying, “law school,” but I never could acquit myself so well. All I could respond when faced with this question of doing was blush, fidget, and admit that I did not know exactly what I would do with literature. The prosecutor would rest his case, a reeking Sherlock. He felt he had made his point and won.
English majors lack foresight, the minatory assume. He or she must be an empty-headed, unpragmatical, pot-smoking flower-picker to so willingly abdicate the practical. A naive dreamer, society’s favorite target. When the man in Italy or the mom on the court or the half-zip in liquor hears English, they hear a crime against earning, and so they rush the dozer with a paycheck mentality.
But the problem was always with the question, not the absence of an answer. It’s true: there is nothing to do with literature. Literature is not insurance on an income statement, nor is it a mechanical claw to rake profits. How do you job Chaucer, or turn Wordsworth into poker chips? You don’t. As Henry James tells us, literature is the absolute last road to fortune. To demand economic action for English is like demanding someone hang shingle with the human condition.
The prober never wonders, though, if there might be other things worth cultivating, currencies of another nature, a richer sort of wealth. English can be converted to coin (you can go to law school), but that’s not what it is for. And people don’t like this. They consider this idea frivolous, foolhardy, a vestige of aristocracy. They assume English majors fail to think ahead, and are unwilling to meet reality.
Consider this: they aren’t myopic. They haven’t failed to figure the future. And if they are unwilling to meet reality, which reality is that? The English major is never seen as he or she might be: a non-baubler, who intends modesty as a method of inward treasure. Of course to say this, to become this, a high budgeter in the barreling paganism of stuff, is a kind of slight. But what’s to be done? The bookish become accustomed to much sweeter pay.
Modesty is one of the virtues dispensed by literature. Joyce, Faulkner, Austen; Stevens, Delillo, Durrell – in the company of their art, in the gratis feast of their imagery, the flat screen cracks. Because a degree in books, more than anything, can develop fixity. It can nurture a steady metaphysical sightline, content to let the yachts coast by. It can, if you let it, if you attend to it, thin, trim, and rinse out all nonessential urges.
That’s my spin, restraint. Prudence. A concentrated will. All the hysteria about the player’s comeuppance assumes an ethic the player does not practice. True, purse-poor; also true, bad measure of meaning. Four (or more) years of rhyme and rapture is a powerful contrast for the dull hoard of experience. Nonstop encounters with the speech that burns, the image that shatters, sets up a compelling alternative to wad building. There’s no finer wage than beauty and wisdom. They often cost the price of your attention. And, as Gabriel Tardi tells us, “We weary of everything, except understanding.”
The most famous text of slim living is Walden, Thoreau’s hymn to self-reliance. But the book’s spare vision rhymes with all of literature. Thoreau wanted to “drive life into a corner,” and “front only the essential facts.” Literature, through endless strikes of understanding, does the same. It cuts away the dead objectives, and isolates the few necessities. It checks appetite, and creates a stance of small hanker.
In Walden is a chapter called “Higher Laws” wherein Thoreau describes the perfect nourishment. He describes caterpillars transforming into butterflies, shifting from a diet of salad to a diet of dew. Once this transition occurs, “though furnished with organs of feeding,” Thoreau quotes, “[the butterflies] make no use of them.” In other words, though the gears remain, the new creature does not exercise them. This represents the condition, the consequence, of a literary education. As we read, we grow beyond mere grubbers. We are altered, we are edified. We are reborn to soup the dew.
