Yet another girlfriend (the third this year) writes to say she is leaving her graduate program, speaking (like the others) of her weariness, loss of faith, and her bitter experience with the systemic cruelty and institutional stupidity and sexism that have hurt and hounded her (and all the others) out of her love. That so many of us leave — but women especially — and so late ( ABDs beyond their fifth year) makes me very sorry (and there is too much to say about that). But I am also beginning to realise that people are writing to me when they contemplate leaving because they dearly wish for assurance that it is all right to leave. they want to know that it is at worst a dishonourable defeat but not a betrayal, that it is possible to leave without permanently forfeiting one’s intellectual life (or at least some semblance of it, for dignity’s sake), that one could and would find alternative fulfillment elsewhere. After all, I was a casualty too, wasn’t I? And I rebuilt my life, switched fields, found a ‘real world’ job, and seem content enough, sometimes even taking pleasure enough. But that is not a role I play well. And as I find myself writing a similar kind of letter to each of them, I see too that maybe this needs saying, and saying publicly. (With redactions), the letter I wrote to one of them:
“I think we — you as well — and many others who have spent almost all of their adult lives invested in the life of the mind will always find it very difficult to disengage our personalities from our research and our love of the Academy. When we talk of ‘our work’ we mean our writing, where others use it to mean “a profession”, “a job”. And I think there is a particular danger of us feeling that we are losing a vital part of ourselves if we leave academia. And also the collateral terror: ’what now?’, which is a fear of ending up in some form of work that does not involve the exercise of our intellectual personality. At the same time, I suspect deep down we don’t really feel we’ve ever been trained for the real world, whatever the ‘real world’ means. I went back to look at the letters I had written to friends and professors just after I left Harvard. And in all of them, even the optimistic ones, the fear about my fitness (rather, unfitness) for the “real world” was very clear. To my advisor, to whom I kept a stiff upperlip and wrote in a jolly manner:I had especial difficulties when I left Harvard because I was forced to leave the US immediately when I lost my student visa status (the whole thing was rather brutal — I was caught by the technicalities of a new rule that was never meant to apply to me) so I had no chance of looking for a job or transferring to a different school in the US. And once I was outside of the US, it became very difficult to get back in. Coming back as a student meant reapplying to schools, something I did not have the emotional wherewithal to do then. And what special talent had I for an American firm to hire from outside of the US? And my first 18 months at home were especially unhappy and demoralising: like many MAs and ABDs I had never prepared myself for a job that was not research and teaching, and because any training I had (had I wished to wrangle an adjunct or tutoring position) was completely ill-suited for Southeast Asian universities: I’d positioned myself for a life in the English or Comp Lit department of a North American university. I did the things I was supposed to: read career books, did psychometric tests that told you your strengths, bought a black interview suit and wrote job applications (a terrible genre), and was met with many closed doors. When I did find a job I found I’d underestimated the difficulties of adapation to non-academic, non-intellectual work — everything is antithetical to the flexible and independent way we’ve learnt to work best — having to keep regular hours, observe strict lunch times, not having a time-cycle that is tied to the semester’s ebb and flow, having to work in a physical office, deal with bureaucracy, take orders from superiors, work on projects not of my own choosing or interest.“I’ve just been reading Diana Athill’s memoirs, and she said she pities people whose minds have not been sharpened by an interesting education and profound work. I’ve had the interesting education all right; I can’t get the profound work. All the things that I could possibly do well are not in fashion these days — I am now resigned to the fact that I’d better “go into an office,” in that 19th century way that young men without the fortune to be gentlemen had to, and that is exactly as dreary as it sounds, but unfortunately also the best that I can manage for now. Even this proving to be quite difficult, people think I’m overqualified, and in the wrong subjects. Also thought to be getting long in the tooth for the so-called entry-level jobs, but how can anyone hire me for more senior positions? When an American turns his back on grad school he goes and joins a really cool publishing house like New Directions or teaches in a swanky New England prep school or joins a magazine, out here in the wasteland you’ve got to work in cubicles from 8 to 8 unless I wanted to teach high school, which I don’t.”For a long time I told myself a white lie: that I would go back to grad school one day. Maybe I’d believed in it too, at the time. I’d give myself 5 years to do it in, but as time passed the possibility of coming back to English seemed more and more remote. I might never have moved on, and it was quite by chance that I met some lawyers, became involved in learning about their work, about systemic, inadequate access to justice, and became gently nudged towards lawyering. I entered law school not knowing if I was cut out for this profession but believing it was at least something contiguous to English. For the first year I was unsure what I was doing there. And often, as I look on Facebook at my former classmates’ doings, the ones who stayed, who are one by one publishing, organising conferences, placing at this or that college, one or two even getting tenure, I feel a sense of loss and envy, because I can never return to that, only live vicariously through their lives. It was only over time that I came to find pleasure and interest in my new field, but it took time.
A friend says that the trick is not to look back, because looking back you will turn into a pilar of salt. You can only go on. I used to hate that advice. But after I had been in law school for a year, I wrote to a friend from college. She loved literature and majored in it, but went to law school whereas I went on to my PhD program. I knew she had a successful corporate practice in New York, and when I wrote to her it was almost by way of seeking absolution. I said (half confessional, half defiant) that I knew I was simply masquerading as a lawyer, only because the literary scholar part of my life is painfully over. To my surprise, this is what she wrote back:
“This is a subject about which I feel profoundly. I still struggle, though now I feel like a caged animal. I will always be that literature worshipper at heart and never a lawyer, no matter how much time passes. I can’t shake the feeling I was meant to do something other than what I’m now doing. I went through several years of struggle after I started practicing. The result of that (and it was no easy thing) was that I figured out how to be happy, but I wasn’t able to find meaning or fulfillment in my chosen field.”
Her letter made me think that perhaps for some of us, especially those of us who work in the humanities, scholarship is tethered to our souls — we will never, outside of our scholarship, whatever we are doing, feel like we are doing what we really should be.But I’ve come to look at it in a different way. What we do outside of the academy will always be second best. And I think that’s as it should be — for if it could be anything else but what we loved best and wanted most, then we should never have gone into it in the first place. But I think we must also recognise that we are multifaceted creatures (polutropos, many-turned, was the word used to describe Odysseus), and that we find meaning and pleasure in other things in life, too. It never replaces the academy, it doesn’t even come close, but doing something else need not be a compromise or a cop-out. If it helps then choose to do something with social utility, too. You say to yourself: Yes, it is second best, and it was not what I started out to do, nor yet even what I do best or love best, but it is something I am able to do well, and do take pride in doing well, and what I do has meaning and real-world impact for people. As for your former life, you learn to nurse it as something very precious and very true, a hidden flame you carry in you, whatever you are doing, and that makes you more than what you do. In that way I think leaving can be liberating too: whatever you choose is okay, because it is not your “real talent”; you already know what your real talent is, and this is not it. But of the many, many secondary talents you have — it is the act of choosing that gives your talent meaning and shape. And I hope that as you go on your journey ahead, away from Cambridge and to beyond, in all your choices, you will always take courage from the act of choosing.”
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