On
Naomi Lebowitz’s Retirement
(April 27, 2000)
Coming soon to an MLA Jobs Information List near you:
Washington
University’s English Department is accepting applications for a
tenure-track position in modern narrative. The teaching load is four
courses per year, and the successful candidate should plan to design
two new courses every year covering the full historical, philosophical,
and cross-cultural foundations of modern narrative. Fluency in German
and French is required, with additional proficiencies in Latin,
Italian, Spanish, Icelandic, Russian, and Hebrew or Provençal
preferred. In addition to full advising, committee, and publication
responsibilities, the candidate should be prepared to simultaneously
orchestrate as many as half-a-dozen dissertations to successful
conclusions, returning forty-page chapter drafts an hour after
submission with insightful commentary crowding all the margins. As a
teacher, the candidate should be capable of inspiring a roomful of
undergraduate non-majors to tears while presenting the final chapters
of Don Quixote. The candidate
should also maintain active correspondences with dozens of former
students, colleagues, and dissertation advisees, not to mention any
residents of the White House who find themselves under seditious attack
by a Republican Congress. The candidate can also expect to serve as the
department’s resident movie critic, C-Span monitor, and amateur
baseball scout, delivering regular updates on the most promising
prospects in the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm system. Duties as the
university’s and the neighborhood’s moral conscience may include the
drafting of passionate letters to the chancellor on the need to
preserve all trees threatened by parking lot expansion, devoted
patronage of local non-chain bookstores, and regular walks of any
under-exercised dogs within a one-mile radius of home. Candidates who
are invited to campus for interviews may be required to deliver a
50-minute lecture (without notes) on one of two topics: (1) Yeats,
Irish folk tradition, and the designated hitter rule or (2) the
Dachshund as Conrad’s Ubermensch. Alternatively, the candidate could
provide his or her own accompaniment on the cello while singing
“Funiculi Funicula” in Yiddish and juggling the complete correspondence
of Henry James, blindfold.
Rank
open.
How in the world could we ever dream of replacing Naomi? Who would
be crazy enough to try to bear up under a fraction of the chapeaux she
so ably wears, the five hundred hats of Naomi Lebowitz? A prodigy of
curiosity and passion, a mentor, mystic, and delightfully bubbly muse,
Naomi has been the animating spirit of Duncker Hall from the moment she
set foot in it, just as she is in any building, any party, any
gathering lucky enough to include her. When the time comes to sign up
for the departmental potluck, the rest of us just write “mushroom
curry” or “pasta salad” under the column heading “Dish.” Only Naomi, of
course, can simply write “Myself.”
Some of you in this room may not have had the pleasure of taking a
class with the English Department’s resident Eighth Wonder of the
World. Those of us who count ourselves among the illuminati cannot but
feel sorry for the rest of you. Imagine hopping aboard the Millennium
Falcon for a warp-speed run through an asteroid belt of European
masters, careening in and among Flaubert, Nietzsche, Dinesen, Rousseau,
Hardy, Joyce, Ibsen, and Moliere and somehow emerging an
hour-and-a-half later exhausted but exhilarated, blessed with a greater
appreciation not only for the enormity and complexity of the course you
have just mapped, but also for the skill of the daredevil pilot who has
somehow conducted you through the intricate gauntlet with such
remarkable speed and facility. I once ran into a fellow graduate
student on his way home from class several years after he had completed
his course work. I was surprised to learn that he was still sitting in
on classes at that point, until he mentioned that it was Naomi’s
lecture that had drawn him away from his dissertation post. As he put
it – and as I couldn’t help agreeing – Naomi’s class offered far richer
entertainment than anything on television.
To those of you who haven’t yet struck up a correspondence with Naomi,
let me heartily recommend that you do so. One of Lynnea’s and my great
pleasures during our two-year stint in the Ozarks was the regular
arrival of Naomi’s letters, which we would pass back and forth at the
dinner table, reading and re-reading our favorite parts aloud to each
other. Naomi always confined herself to a single sheet of paper in her
letters, but just barely, the thoughts, terms, and ideas pouring out of
her in remarkable profusion and profundity. Of the innumerable gems
that strewed her letters to us, I’ve culled just one to share with you,
her response to the news that I would be delivering a chapel talk. She
wrote,
I had a
funny pang when you said you were to give a chapel sermon. We had those
at Wellesley when I was an undergraduate and, being a Rabbi’s daughter,
bored with [the] service but drawn to powerful sermons (my father was a
great sermonizer) I was crushed that I was never asked to give one (I
think there was a lot of anti-Semitism going around, but I was so
naïve. Being the Chief-Jew’s daughter in U. City, I rarely heard
it as a child just as Jesse Jackson’s kids never got pelted in
Hymietown.) & to this day [I] long to belt one forth in the style
of Donne or Bossuet. I think I could have been very happy as an English
teacher at a prep school in the 1930’s. There’s that streak in me.
Going back through her letters to select an excerpt for this tribute, I
resolved once again to subordinate all professional goals to the simple
intention to live long enough to see Naomi become an old person. But
the truth is, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever achieve that goal.
Like most of you, I have a thousand more Naomi stories I’d love to
share. One thing I had hoped to do was to use her teaching copy of
Rousseau or Montaigne – holy relics of this profession – to demonstrate
the meaning of the word “Naomified,” but I’m already over time. So let
me close with a comment by Larry Ross, the English Department’s
long-time Shakespeare professor who passed away a few years ago. Those
of you who knew Larry may recall that he was willing, every now and
then, to weigh in with critical opinions on most things under the sun,
especially when the topic in question bore the slightest whiff of
modernism, a period he didn’t have much use for, to put it kindly. But
whenever a conversation with Larry was growing a bit too strident for
comfort, I knew that all I had to do to disarm him completely was to
invoke the name of the department’s senior modernist. “Naomi,” he would
say, with sincere gratitude and rare reverence inflecting his tone,
“Now there’s a beautiful woman. I mean that, a beautiful woman – a
beautiful person.” To quote Molly Bloom – yes.
I don’t envy the search committee.
Thank you, Naomi – for everything.
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