Syllabi, Butterflies, and the Professor Who Performs Himself

The faculty lounge smelled of burnt coffee and carpet adhesive. Someone had taped a flyer for a visiting poet to the corkboard by the door — it was already curling at the edges, two weeks old, the reading long past. Through the window, a November quad: students crossing diagonally, scarves taut against the wind, all of them looking at their phones. The radiator under the sill clanked every forty seconds with the regularity of a metronome.

Nabokov was examining the corkboard with the attention of an entomologist cataloguing a disappointing specimen. He had picked up a red pushpin and was holding it between two fingers, turning it slowly, as though its shape might contain information not immediately available.

“The American faculty lounge,” he said, “is the saddest room in Western civilization. Sadder than a provincial courtroom. Sadder than the departure hall of a minor airport. It aspires to nothing and achieves less.”

Cusk was already seated at the oval table, coat still on, a paper cup of tea cooling in front of her. She hadn’t responded to his observation. She was watching the students through the window with an expression I couldn’t read — not boredom, not interest, something more like inventory.

I’d arrived early and arranged three chairs at the table’s far end, away from the door. I had notes. I had the combination spec printed out. I had, I realized as I sat down, no idea how to begin a conversation between two writers whose aesthetics were not so much opposed as mutually unintelligible.

“I thought we might start with the campus,” I said. “The institution as a setting. What it does to a story when you put a character inside a university.”

Nabokov set the pushpin back in the corkboard, impaling the curling flyer precisely through the visiting poet’s left eye. He sat. “The university is a wonderful setting because it is a place where people are paid to be intelligent, and this payment corrupts the intelligence absolutely. The mind that must perform itself on schedule — Tuesday and Thursday, ten to eleven-fifteen — becomes a circus act. The professor becomes his own trained seal.”

“That’s a kind of contempt,” Cusk said. Not accusingly. She said it the way you’d note the temperature.

“It is a kind of love,” Nabokov corrected. “I taught for decades. I loved the classroom. But I loved it the way one loves a stage. There is no pretending the performance is not a performance. The question is whether the performer knows he is performing, or whether he has confused the performance with the life.”

I wrote that down. The performer who confuses the performance with the life. It felt like the center of something, though I couldn’t yet see the edges.

“For me the university is interesting for a different reason,” Cusk said. She turned the paper cup a quarter revolution on the table. “It’s a place where people narrate themselves constantly. The academic CV, the research statement, the tenure file. Everyone is always composing the authoritative account of their own significance. And the gap between that narrative and the actual texture of their days — the committee meetings, the fluorescent lighting, the disagreement about the printer — that gap is where fiction lives.”

“Yes,” I said, “and Lucky Jim is entirely about that gap. Amis puts a man inside the institution who cannot perform the narration. Jim Dixon can’t compose the story of his own significance because he doesn’t believe in it, and the comedy comes from everyone around him who does.”

“Amis is funny about institutions,” Nabokov said, “but he is shallow about people. Dixon is a type, not a person. He is the Comic Outsider. He makes faces behind the pompous man’s back. This is entertaining but it is not —” He paused, selecting. “It is not inhabited.”

“I disagree that shallowness is the problem,” Cusk said. “The problem is that the comedy protects the reader from having to feel anything. Dixon is miserable, but his misery is always funny, so we never have to sit with it. It’s misery as entertainment.”

“But that’s the tradition,” I said. “The campus novel as comedy. Lucky Jim, Changing Places, even Pnin —”

“Pnin is not a comedy,” Nabokov said, with a sharpness that made me stop writing. “Pnin is a man. He is ridiculous and he is dignified. The narrator makes fun of him, and the narrator is wrong to make fun of him, and the reader knows the narrator is wrong, and this knowledge is not funny. It is painful. This is what I achieved in that book that Amis did not achieve in his.”

A silence. The radiator clanked. I realized I had stumbled into something real — not a polite disagreement but an actual wound, or the place where a wound had been.

“I want to ask about Stoner,” I said, because I needed to move us toward the other current. “John Williams wrote a campus novel that isn’t funny at all. It’s almost unbearably sincere. Stoner spends his entire life in the university, and the university is both the place that saves him and the place that diminishes him, and Williams never winks at the reader. Never steps outside the emotional register to make a joke.”

“Williams wrote a book about a man who never becomes what he intended to become,” Cusk said, and for the first time she seemed to be leaning in rather than observing from a calculated distance. “That’s different from a book about a man who is funny because he doesn’t fit in. Stoner fits in perfectly. He belongs to the university. He loves it. And it ruins him anyway. That’s more frightening than any comic mismatch.”

“It is the quiet devastation,” Nabokov said. “I understand it. But I would never write it that way. Williams strips everything — the prose is plain, the structure is patient, the surfaces are unadorned. For me this is a refusal. A refusal to give the reader the pleasure of language itself. Why must suffering be plain?”

“Because ornament distances,” Cusk said.

“Ornament includes,” Nabokov said. “A beautiful sentence about suffering does not diminish the suffering. It honors it. To dress a wound in plain cloth when silk is available — this is not honesty. This is a different kind of vanity. The vanity of austerity.”

I felt the floor tilt slightly, the way it does when two people who are both right start arguing. The vanity of austerity. I knew Cusk would not let that stand, and I didn’t want her to.

“Every style is a vanity,” she said, and the evenness of her voice was itself a kind of argument. “Ornament says: look at me looking at this. Austerity says: look at this. Both are performances. But the ornate performance calls attention to the performer, and the austere performance calls attention to the subject. For a story about a professor whose life doesn’t amount to what was hoped — a man who is, in some fundamental sense, not enough — the prose that calls attention to itself becomes a lie. It says: something magnificent is happening. When the whole point is that something very small is happening.”

Nabokov drummed his fingers on the table. Two taps, pause, three taps. “You are assuming magnificence and smallness are separable. They are not. A man’s entire life failing to become what he hoped — if you cannot find the magnificence in that, you have not looked closely enough. The butterfly’s wing is small. The patterns on it are the most intricate designs in nature.”

“So you’d write the campus novel as — what? A lepidopterist’s report?” I said, and immediately regretted the flippancy.

But Nabokov smiled. “Yes. Exactly that. I would examine this professor the way I examined my specimens. With precision, with magnification, with — I will use the word — with love. And the love would be in the looking, not in the judgment. Dixon is judged. Stoner is mourned. I want neither judgment nor mourning. I want the reader to see the wing.”

“And what do you want?” I asked Cusk, because the silence after Nabokov’s image felt like it needed an answering pressure.

“I want the reader to notice the light in the room,” she said. “Not the wing. The light that falls on the table where the wing is pinned. The temperature. Who else is present. What they’re not saying. The wing is the ostensible subject. The light is the actual one.”

I sat with that. Two different theories of attention. Nabokov’s attention moves toward the object and magnifies it until its beauty becomes unavoidable. Cusk’s attention moves around the object and reveals the conditions that surround it — the room, the weather, the other people, the silence. One is microscopic. The other is atmospheric.

“Can both exist in the same story?” I asked, knowing the answer was probably no but needing to hear them say it.

“Not comfortably,” Cusk said.

“I would say not at all,” Nabokov said. “But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is a character — your professor — who sees the wing. Who sees it magnificently. Who can describe it in language that makes your heart ache. And the story itself sees the room. The story is the light. The professor performs his brilliance — in the classroom, in conversation, in the privacy of his own mind — and the story quietly records the size of the room where the brilliance is being performed. The committee meeting that follows the lecture. The parking lot. The apartment with its one shelf of books and its view of a fire escape.”

This was the first time they had built something together rather than against each other, and I could feel it — the fragile architecture of an idea neither would have arrived at alone. A prose style that is ornate inside the professor’s consciousness and austere in the narration that surrounds him. His inner life is Nabokov. His outer life is Cusk. And the campus novel form — the comedy of institutional absurdity — becomes something else. Not comedy. Not elegy. Both at once.

“The danger,” Cusk said, and I could hear her pulling back, stress-testing the structure, “is that you end up with a split that’s merely clever. Interior grandeur, exterior smallness. That’s a thesis, not a story.”

“What makes it a story?” I asked.

“The moment when the character realizes the split,” she said. “Or doesn’t realize it. Or realizes it and does nothing.”

“Dixon realizes it and rebels,” Nabokov said. “He burns the bedsheet and gets the girl. Williams’s Stoner realizes it and stays. He remains. He teaches his classes. He dies. These are the two options the tradition offers: escape or endurance. I find both unsatisfying.”

“What’s the third option?” I said.

“The third option is that the character has been performing for so long that there is no longer a distinction between the performance and the person. He cannot escape because there is no self to escape to. He cannot endure because endurance requires a self that exists prior to the institution. He has become the institution. The hallways are his nervous system. The syllabus is his autobiography.”

“That’s a horror story,” Cusk said.

“It is a love story,” Nabokov said. “A man who loves something so completely that he disappears into it. Whether that is horror or love depends on where you are standing when you look at it.”

Cusk picked up her tea, found it cold, set it down again. “The question I keep returning to is: who is watching? Every campus novel needs someone who sees the absurdity, and in Lucky Jim it’s Jim himself, and in Stoner there isn’t anyone — that’s what makes it so painful. Williams refuses to give the reader an ironic observer. You’re left alone with Stoner’s sincerity, and it’s almost unbearable.”

“In Pnin, the observer is the narrator,” Nabokov said. “And the narrator is unkind.”

“You’ve said the narrator is wrong to be unkind.”

“He is. That is the point. The reader watches the narrator watching Pnin, and the reader’s sympathy crosses the narrator’s cruelty, and the interference pattern —” He waved a hand, impatient with his own metaphor. “The reader sees more than anyone in the book sees. That is the gift of the structure.”

I thought about this. An unkind observer. A kind subject. The reader caught between them. But what if the professor is both the observer and the subject? What if he narrates his own diminishment with the ornate precision of someone describing a rare butterfly, not realizing — or knowing perfectly well — that the butterfly is himself?

I started to say this and Cusk interrupted me. Not rudely — she simply began to speak, as though the thought had arrived with physical urgency.

“The worst thing about academic life isn’t the pettiness or the committee meetings or the institutional absurdity. The worst thing is the way it gives you a language for your own suffering that sounds, to everyone else, like self-importance. The professor who says ‘the institution has failed to recognize the value of my work’ is saying something true and something ridiculous at the same time. And he knows it’s ridiculous. And he says it anyway. Because what else can he say?”

Nabokov nodded, slowly. “This is good. This is the sound of a person trapped in their own eloquence.”

“A person trapped in their own eloquence,” I repeated, writing it down.

“Don’t write that down as though it’s a thesis,” Cusk said. “It’s an image. If you turn it into a thesis, you’ll kill it.”

She was right, and I put the pen down. Something was bothering me, though — a structural question I hadn’t solved and couldn’t stop circling.

“Can I ask about comedy?” I said. “Because the campus novel tradition is fundamentally comic, and we’ve been drifting away from that. Lucky Jim is farce. Even Pnin has set pieces — the bowl, the party. But what you’re both describing is closer to tragedy, or at least to elegy. And I worry that if we strip the comedy entirely, we lose something the form is supposed to do.”

“What is the form supposed to do?” Cusk asked, and I could tell she wasn’t being rhetorical. She genuinely wanted to hear my answer.

“It’s supposed to puncture pretension,” I said. “The campus novel exists because the university is a place where people take themselves more seriously than their circumstances warrant. And comedy is the tool that reveals the discrepancy. Without it, you just have a sad man in an office.”

“A sad man in an office can be very good,” Nabokov said. “But you are right that something would be lost. The question is what kind of comedy. Amis’s comedy is broad — Dixon pulls faces, there are drunken mishaps, the social disasters escalate. This is farce. Farce requires that the audience be above the character. You laugh at Dixon because you see what he cannot see.”

“And the comedy I’m interested in,” I said, testing this as I said it, “is different. It’s the comedy of a man who is too articulate about his own predicament to change it. He can describe the trap with extraordinary precision. He can name every mechanism. He can see the absurdity of the committee meeting, the joke of the tenure review, the farce of the departmental retreat. And this vision — this capacity to see it all clearly — is itself the trap. Because seeing it doesn’t help. Seeing it makes it worse.”

Cusk looked at me directly for the first time in several minutes. “That’s not comedy. That’s hell.”

“In the Inferno,” Nabokov said, and I could see he was enjoying himself now, “the damned are fully conscious. That is the punishment. Not the fire — the awareness. A professor in hell would teach a seminar on the phenomenology of hellfire while the flames consumed his notes.”

I laughed. Cusk did not laugh, but something shifted at the corners of her mouth.

“There’s a colleague I had once,” she said, which was the first time she had offered anything personal. “A woman. Brilliant — everyone said so. She had written two books that were admired by everyone who had read them, which was perhaps forty people in the world. She sat on every committee. She supervised twelve doctoral students. She organized the reading series, booked the rooms, ordered the wine, printed the programs. And at a dinner once she said to me, very quietly, that she had not written a sentence of her own work in two years. She said it the way you’d report a medical result. Factual. No self-pity. And I thought: this is what the university does. It makes you so necessary to its operations that you have no time left to do the thing that made you want to be there.”

The room was quiet. The radiator clanked twice. I could hear a vacuum cleaner somewhere on another floor.

“This woman,” Nabokov said carefully. “Did she eventually write again?”

“I don’t know,” Cusk said. “I left that university. I never asked.”

Nabokov tilted his head. “In a story, you would have to decide.”

“In a story, you might not. The not knowing could be the point.”

“I am suspicious of stories where not knowing is the point,” Nabokov said. “Often this is a way for the writer to avoid making a decision. Ambiguity can be laziness dressed in sophistication.”

“And resolution can be comfort dressed in craft,” Cusk said, and her voice had an edge now that I hadn’t heard before. “You resolve the story, the reader feels they’ve understood something, they close the book satisfied. But the satisfaction is a lie. The woman is still sitting in her office. The committee still meets on Thursdays.”

This was the deepest disagreement of the afternoon, and I didn’t want to smooth it over. Nabokov wanted the story to arrive somewhere, even if the arrival was strange or painful. Cusk wanted the story to refuse arrival. And the campus novel as a form — with its tradition of comic resolution, the misfit escaping or the institution being satirized — seemed to demand some kind of reckoning. What if the reckoning was that there would be no reckoning?

“What about the students?” I said, partly to break the tension and partly because I’d been thinking about this. “Every campus novel I can think of is really about the faculty. The students are backdrop, scenery. But the professor’s whole justification for being there is the students. What if the story included a student who is — not a mirror, not a protege — but a genuine complication? Someone who makes the professor’s performance of brilliance inadequate. Not because the student is smarter, but because the student needs something the professor’s brilliance can’t provide.”

Neither of them answered immediately, which I took as a good sign.

“The student as disruption,” Cusk said, testing it. “Not the comic disruption of Lucky Jim — not the wrong person at the wrong dinner — but an epistemological disruption. Someone who asks the one question the professor’s framework cannot answer.”

“And the professor, being who he is, would answer it anyway,” Nabokov said. “He would give a brilliant answer. A dazzling answer. An answer that uses every tool in his considerable arsenal. And the answer would be wrong. Not factually wrong — worse. Irrelevant. Beautiful and irrelevant.”

Outside, the quad had emptied entirely. The November light had gone from gray to the particular amber-gray that precedes early dark, and somewhere in the building a door closed with the heavy institutional thud that means everyone has left except the people who haven’t noticed the day is over.

Nabokov was examining the table’s surface — the scratches, the rings from a hundred coffee cups, the institutional grain of cheap laminate pretending to be wood.

“In my experience,” he said quietly, “the professor who stays late in his office is not working. He is sitting with the door closed, looking at the books on his shelf, and he is wondering whether the books have read him more thoroughly than he has read them. Whether his life has been a footnote to their arguments. This is not self-pity. It is a genuine question. And the answer — whatever the answer is — arrives in the quality of the light through the window, at that hour when the campus has gone home and the building becomes his.”

“Becomes his,” Cusk repeated, and I couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or dissecting. “That’s the word, though, isn’t it. Becomes. As if the building has been someone else’s all day and only at five-thirty, when the last secretary locks the main office, does it belong to him. The ownership that comes from being the last one left. From having nowhere else to be.”

Nabokov stood up. He walked to the window and looked out at the empty quad, his hands clasped behind his back, and for a moment he looked exactly like a professor — his own professor, or the professor we were trying to invent, or both.

“I had an office in Goldwin Smith Hall,” he said. “At Cornell. A small office. From the window I could see students walking to their dormitories in the afternoon. I had my index cards, my specimens, my lectures. I was very happy. I was also” — he paused — “performing happiness. I do not know, even now, where the happiness ended and the performance began. This is not a confession. It is a description of the condition.”

I wanted to ask more but Cusk was already putting on her coat, not because the conversation was over but because, I sensed, she had heard something she needed to sit with privately before it became contaminated by further discussion. She buttoned the coat methodically. Top button, second button. She left the third undone.

“The story should smell like this room,” she said from the doorway. “Coffee and carpet adhesive and the particular loneliness of furniture that was chosen by a committee.”