Dear Committee Members: A Novel (2 page)

P.P.S.: Thank you for your attention to my office window, which now closes, but due to an impressive crack in the frame—presumably caused by the earsplitting construction on the second floor—rainwater is trickling merrily down the
inside
of the glass and, as I type these words, entering the rusted slats of the heater. You might want to send someone to take a look.

September 17, 2009

Bentham Literary Residency Program P.O. Box 1572

Bentham, ME 04976

Dear Overworked Committee Members, Ms. Vivian Zelles has asked me—three days before your application deadline—to recommend her to your January residency program at Bentham, and herewith I oblige.

Ms. Zelles is an apt and diligent writer, a second-year graduate student in comparative literature currently enrolled, as a sort of academic stowaway, in my fiction workshop. Her project, to date, consists of a series of short, linked narratives on the subject of childhood and family and female relationships, romantic and otherwise. The work is young and presumably autobiographical; still, one can discern a spark of energy here and there in the occasional quirks of the tone. Ms. Zelles is not among the top tier of students I generally prefer to send your way (e.g., Darren Browles—see my LOR of September 3), but in the coming year or two her work may mature.

Feel free to contact me for further information via phone or e-mail. And forgive the brevity of this letter: I do believe that student writing speaks for itself, and though the academic year
has just started I fear I am already losing the never-ending battle to catch up with the recommendations requested of me. Suffice it to say that the LOR has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office.

Continuing to wish you well with the search for a new director, Jason T. Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

September 22, 2009

Payne University Law School Admissions c/o Janet Matthias (aka Janet Matthias-Fitger)

17 Pitlinger Hall

Dear Admissions Committee Members—and Janet: This letter recommends Melanie deRueda for admission to the law school on the well-heeled side of this campus. I’ve known Ms. deRueda for eleven minutes, ten of which were spent in a fruitless attempt to explain to her that I write letters of recommendation only for students who have signed up for and completed one of my classes. This young woman is certainly tenacious, if that’s what you’re looking for. A transfer student, she appears to be suffering under the delusion that a recommendation from any random faculty member within our august institution will be the key to her application’s success.

Janet: I know your committees aren’t reading these blasted LORs—under the influence of our final martini in August you told me as much. (I wish I had an ex-wife like you in every department; over in the Fellowship Office, the formerly benevolent Carole continues to maintain an icy distance. I should think her decision to quit our relationship would have filled her with a cheerful burst of self-esteem, but she apparently views the end of our three years together in a different light.)
Ms. deRueda claims to be sending her transcripts and LSAT scores at the end of the week. God help you—this is your shot across the bow—should you admit her.

Still affectionately your one-time husband, Jay

P.S.: I’ve heard a rumor that Eleanor—yes,
that
Eleanor, from the Seminar—is a finalist for the directorship at Bentham. You got back in touch with her despite her denouncements of me; do you have any intel?

P.P.S.: A correction: you got back in touch with Eleanor
because
she denounced me. I remember you quoting what she said when I published
Transfer of Affection:
that I was an egotist prone to repeating his most fatal mistakes. I’ll admit to the egotism—which is undeniable—but I’d like to think that, after fourteen years of marriage, you knew me better than Eleanor did. We were happy for some of those fourteen years, especially before
Transfer;
why shouldn’t I believe that you were right about me, too?

September 30, 2009

Field-Bantry College of Government and Public Affairs Office of Graduate Admissions

447 Peck Hall

Whaylon, PA 19522

Dear Committee Members, This letter recommends Ms. Stella Castle to your graduate institution in the field of public policy. And to begin this recommendation on the proper footing: no, I will not fill out the inane computerized form that is intended to precede or supplant this letter; ranking a student according to his or her placement among the “top 10 percent,” “top 2 percent,” or “top 0.000001 percent” is pointless and absurd. No faculty member will rank any student, no matter how severely lacking in ability or reason, below “top 10 percent.” This would be tantamount to describing the candidate in question as a witless beast. A human being and his or her caliber, intellect, character, and promise are not reducible to a check mark in a box. Faced with a reductionist formula such as yours, I despair for the future, consoling myself with the thought that I and others of my generation, with its archaic modes of discourse, won’t live to see the barren cyberworld the authors of your recommendation form are determined to create.

Ms. Castle was a student in my American Literature Survey a year ago. She is a serious-minded young woman whose analytical
skills and arguments demonstrate a subtle acumen. More than once, in class, I saw her politely demolish another student’s interpretation of a work of literature by asking a series of seemingly innocent but progressively incisive questions. Perhaps oddly, I remember thinking of Ms. Castle as a highly articulate snake: sliding gracefully into an argument, speaking in lucid, sibilant phrases (she endows the letter
S
with the faintest suggestion of a whistle), and then striking to inject the requisite venom.

Ms. Castle wrote a final, exquisite essay on Willa Cather’s
The Professor’s House
—probably a lost tome as far as you policy wonks are concerned—on which she received a well-deserved A.

I recommend her to you very highly. She is excellent. She will not fit into any of your miniature boxes. I will now insert this letter in an envelope, maintaining a paper copy for safekeeping in a drawer by my desk, after which I will take a short stroll to the picturesque blue mailbox on the corner, opening its creaking rectangular metal mouth and dropping the envelope within.

Trusting the U.S. Postal Service to deliver this missive to you in a timely fashion, I am J. Fitger

Professor and Upholder of the Ancient Flame Payne University

October 5, 2009

Eleanor Acton, Director Bentham Literary Residency Program P.O. Box 1572

Bentham, ME 04976

Dear Eleanor,

Congratulations on the
dictatorship
(haha!) directorship! Well done! Who would have guessed, twenty-some years ago when we were living on pizza crust and challenging the poets to recitation games
*
in the student lounge, that you’d be in charge of Bentham and I’d be sending you my best and my brightest? In any case, kudos. Toiling for decades through the murk of the corporate world and then the nonprofits must not have been easy, but I’m sure you’ve garnered some valuable expertise.

I’m appealing to you directly to recommend in emphatic terms an advisee and student, Darren Browles. I’m aware that your committees are beavering through mountains of applications
for the January residencies, and while winter seems distant at this time of year (as I type this letter, shirtless undergrads are frolicking on the quad), I assume that decisions will be made under pressure, and soon. Hence this additional recommendation on behalf of Mr. Browles, who shuffled into my office this morning, dejected, to tell me he will be taking a leave of absence this spring for financial reasons. He should have had a teaching assistantship, but our graduate program has been put on the chopping block, all funds to be diverted to the technical fields.

Eleanor: If Bentham could offer Browles a residency not only for the January term but through spring, I’m confident he can finish his manuscript,
Accountant in a Bordello
, and then his degree. As a prose stylist, Browles is a high-wire performer—but if he loses momentum … We’ve both been there, Eleanor: I have a desk half full of projects that, lacking time and attention, have succumbed to these small, pitiful deaths; and I’m sure your slender volume of stories (Janet bought two copies the week it came out) would have been followed by a novel, had your schedule allowed. The bottom line: I’m making a personal appeal, for the sake of our years together in the Seminar, that you arrange to float Browles financially at Bentham through winter and spring.

Anticipating a positive reply, Jay

P.S.: I’m aware that you and Janet reestablished a correspondence during the period of our marriage’s dissolution and I hope any vitriol she might have expressed won’t compromise my professional relationship with you. (In case you’re waiting for me to acknowledge that I behaved like an ass, I hereby admit it; but Janet has forgiven me: we see each other twice a year on what was our wedding anniversary, in August, and on the date when we signed our divorce agreement, February 3.) There’s no changing the past; we can only stumble haphazardly forward. I appreciate any particular attention you can devote to Darren Browles.

*
They usually beat us, of course, but we were reading several novels a week, while their coursework fit comfortably on a single folded sheet of loose-leaf in a pants pocket. Ah, the strenuous life of the poet: he snips a few adjectives from the daily paper, tapes them in a spiral to his office door, and calls the workweek done.

October 8, 2009

Philip Hinckler, Dean

College of Arts and Sciences

1 MacNeil Hall

Dear Dean Hinckler,

I write in support of my colleague, Assistant Professor Lance West, regarding his nomination for the university’s Campiello Undergraduate Advising and Service Award. West is a solid junior scholar; more apropos of the current occasion, he has served for three of his four short years at Payne in administration, directing the undergraduate writing center and the much contested/maligned composition program. (No reasonable person outside a university would believe the teaching of composition to be controversial, but of course it is.) Professor West has an open-door policy and a rapport—one is almost tempted to call it a flair—with the incoming freshmen. He has worked hard, he has done what was asked of him, and—in the wake of the deliberate gutting of the liberal arts, English in particular, in favor of the technological sciences—he has held together the tattered scraps of the literature and writing programs, which the faceless gremlins in your office have condemned to indigence and ruin.

Furthermore, West is not yet jaded or cynical; a former Eagle Scout, he maintains a “team spirit” approach to the institution.
Before construction forced us to seal ourselves into our offices like agoraphobic strangers in a cut-rate motel, I could frequently hear, across the hall and three doors down, in West’s office, the contented chatter of freshmen being persuaded that clarity of expression might be achievable as well as worthwhile.

Only by rewarding West and others of his happy ilk, and perhaps by killing off senior faculty, myself included, will it be possible for that elusive and almost mythical beast—collegiality—to prevail. (You may have thought that plunging us into receivership and imposing an outsider as our chair would serve to unite us, but Boti is sadly out of his element; he wanders the halls, bewildered, with a soiled bandanna affixed to his face
*
like a madman descending into a dream.) Other LORs cascading onto your desk like autumn leaves may suggest that the Campiello Award, associated with a modest financial settlement and a plaque on which the administration does its best to spell the awardee’s name correctly, should be given to a colleague more senior than West. This is shortsighted thinking. West is not yet entrenched, and because of the caliber of his scholarship and his regular presence at the requisite conferences, he is rapidly making a name for himself. If we don’t engage in an aggressive effort to retain him, other (more prestigious)
institutions will poach. West is unprepossessing—but he is also a striver. Put a ladder in front of him and he will eagerly climb it. So much intellectual will and ambition! I confess: at this point of my career, that sort of enthusiasm fatigues me. The role that is left to me is to stand in the patronizing shadow of my younger and more aspiring colleagues and
push
. Up the chimney with you, and don’t get soot on your knickers along the way!

Those of you in the superior ranks of the Land of Red Tape would do well to watch your backs: if West hasn’t yet fled the institution, he’ll have one of your jobs in a few short years.

With the customary respect and a nod of deference, Jason Fitger, Professor/Hazardous Materials Specialist Willard Hall

*
We are inhaling more dust over here in Willard Hall than an average coal miner—please send a backup supply of medical masks ASAP.

October 16, 2009

Avengers Paintball, Inc.

1778 Industrial Blvd.

Lakeville, MN 55044

Esteemed Avengers,

This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources.

Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store.

Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger