The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [23]
Affenlight told him. The old professor lifted an eyebrow and walked him down to the campus watering hole. There, over beers, he administered an impromptu oral examination that ranged from Chaucer through Nabokov but dealt mainly with Melville and his contemporaries. Satisfied, perhaps even impressed, the old man placed the call.
That September Affenlight trimmed his beard, bought a suit, and began Harvard’s doctoral program in the History of American Civilization. There he became for the first time—excepting a few lucky moments on the football field—a star. Most of his fellow students were younger, and none had achieved so desperate a grasp on the literature of his chosen period. Affenlight could drink more coffee, not to mention whiskey, than the rest of them put together. Monomaniacal, they called him, an Ahab joke; and when he spoke in seminar—which he did incessantly, having suddenly much to say—they nodded their heads in agreement. Thirty-page papers rolled out of his typewriter in the time it had taken to write a single paragraph of his not-quite-forgotten novel.
At first, Affenlight felt uneasy about his newfound sense of ease. He considered himself a failed writer, nothing more, and there didn’t seem to be much honor or grandeur in having read some books. But soon he decided—whether because it was true or because he needed it to be true—that academia was a world worth conquering. There were fellowships to win, journals to publish in, famous professors to impress. Whatever he applied for, he got; whatever he hinted he might apply for, his classmates shied away from. His successes were social as well. He’d always been tall, square-shouldered, and striking; now he had a purpose, an aura, a name that preceded him. The Cambridge ladies come and go / from Guert’s flat at 50 Bow. That was another joke of his classmates, and it was true.
He wrote his dissertation in the kind of white heat in which he’d always imagined writing a novel—the kind of white heat in which his hero Melville, over six torrid months in a barn in Western Massachusetts, had written the greatest novel the world had ever seen. The dissertation, a study of the homosocial and the homoerotic in nineteenth-century American letters, turned into a book, The Sperm-Squeezers (1987), and the book turned into a sensation: academically influential, widely translated, and reviewed in the Times and Time (“witty and readable,” “augurs a new era of criticism,” “contains signs of genius”). It wasn’t Moby-Dick, but it sold more copies in its first year than The Book had, and it became a touchstone in the culture wars. At thirty Affenlight had been nobody; at thirty-seven he was debating Allan Bloom on CNN.
Just as abruptly, he’d become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he’d been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up—Sarah initiated the split—she called to say that she was pregnant. “It’s mine?” asked Affenlight. “He or she,” replied Sarah, “is mostly mine.”
They named the child Pella—that was Affenlight’s idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella’s Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there’d been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn’t keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his own townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing.
Soon after Pella turned