The Human Stain

The husband falls silent and grows more and more depressed, and she has never encountered this in any other country. If Sara Lee is an academic who can't find a job while he, say, is barely holding on to his job, he would rather lose his job than have her think she is getting the bad end of the deal. There would even be a certain pride if the situation were reversed and he was the one who had to stay home while she didn't. A French woman, even a French feminist, would find such a man disgusting. The Frenchwoman is intelligent, she's sexy, she's truly independent, and if he talks more than she does, so what, where's the issue? What's the fiery contention all about? Not "Oh, did you notice, she's so dominated by her rude, power-hungry husband." No, the more of a woman she is, the more the Frenchwoman wants the man to project his power. Oh, how she had prayed, on arriving at Athena five years back, that she might meet some marvelous man who projected his power, and instead the bulk of younger male faculty are these domestic, emasculated types, intellectually unstimulating, pedestrian, the overprais- ing husbands of Sara Lee whom she has deliciously categorized for her correspondents in Paris as "The Diapers."

Then there are "The Hats." The Hats are the "writers in residence," America's incredibly pretentious writers in residence. Probably, at little Athena, she hasn't seen the worst of them, but these two are bad enough. They show up to teach once a week, and they are married and they come on to her, and they are impossible.

When can we have lunch, Delphine? Sorry, she thinks, but I am not impressed. The thing she liked about Kundera at his lectures was that he was always slightly shadowy, even slightly shabby sometimes, a great writer malgré lui. At least she perceived it that way and that's what she liked in him. But she certainly does not like, cannot stand, the American I-am-the-writer type who, when he looks at her, she knows is thinking, With your French confidence and your French fashions and your elitist French education, you are very French indeed, but you are nonetheless the academic and I am the writer—we are not equals.

These writers in residence, as far as she can surmise, spend an enormous amount of time worrying about their headwear. Yes, both the poet and the prose writer have an extraordinary hat fetish, and so she categorizes them in her letters as The Hats. One of them is always dressed as Charles Lindbergh, wearing his antique pilot gear, and she cannot understand the relationship between pilot gear and writing, particularly writing in residence. She muses about this in her humorous correspondence to her Paris friends. The other is the floppy-hat type, the unassuming type—which is, of course, so recherché—who spends eight hours at the mirror dressing carelessly. Vain, unreadable, married by now a hundred and eighty-six times, and incredibly self-important. It's not so much hatred she feels for this one as contempt. And yet, deep in the Berkshires starving for romance, she sometimes feels ambivalent about The Hats and wonders if she shouldn't take them seriously as erotic candidates, at least. No, she couldn't, not after what she has written to Paris. She must resist them if only because they try to talk to her with her own vocabulary. Because one of them, the younger, minimally less self-important one, has read Bataille, because he knows just enough Bataille and has read just enough Hegel, she's gone out with him a few times, and never has a man so rapidly de-eroticized himself before her eyes; with every word he spoke—using, as he did, that language of hers that she herself is now somewhat uncertain about—he read himself right out of her life.

Whereas the older types, who are uncool and tweedy, "The Humanists"

. . . Well, obliging as she must be at conferences and in publications to write and speak as the profession requires, the humanist is the very part of her own self that she sometimes feels herself betraying, and so she is attracted to them: because they are what they are and always have been and because she knows they think of her as a traitor. Her classes have a following, but they think of that following contemptuously, as a fashionable phenomenon.

These older men, The Humanists, the old-fashioned traditionalist humanists who have read everything, the born-again teachers (as she thinks of them), make her sometimes feel shallow. Her following they laugh at and her scholarship they despise. At faculty meetings they're not afraid to say what they say, and you would think they should be; in class they're not afraid to say what they feel, and, again, you would think they should be; and, as a result, in front of them she crumbles. Since she doesn't herself have that much conviction about all the so-called discourse she picked up in Paris and New Haven, inwardly she crumbles. Only she needs that language to succeed. On her own in America, she needs so much to succeed!