The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  Now, perhaps that was because of the plaid kilt—the miniskirt-like kilt might have made him think of a schoolgirl’s uniform, especially as the person wearing it was a trim, tiny, dark-haired young woman with a small face that was almost entirely eyes and who weighed, clothes and all, barely a hundred pounds. All she’d intended, with the kilt as with the black cashmere turtleneck, black tights, and high black boots, was neither to desexualize herself by what she chose to wear (the university women she’d met so far in America seemed all too strenuously to be doing just that) nor to appear to be trying to tantalize him. Though he was said to be in his mid-sixties, he didn’t look to be any older than her fifty-year-old father; he in fact resembled a junior partner in her father’s firm, one of several of her father’s engineering associates who’d been eyeing her since she was twelve. When, seated across from the dean, she had crossed her legs and the flap of the kilt had fallen open, she had waited a minute or two before pulling it closed—and pulling it closed as perfunctorily as you close a wallet—only because, however young she looked, she wasn’t a schoolgirl with a schoolgirl’s fears and a schoolgirl’s primness, caged in by a schoolgirl’s rules. She did not wish to leave that impression any more than to give the opposite impression by allowing the flap to remain open and thereby inviting him to imagine that she meant him to gaze throughout the interview at her slim thighs in the black tights. She had tried as best she could, with the choice of clothing as with her manner, to impress upon him the intricate interplay of all the forces that came together to make her so interesting at twenty-four.

  Even her one piece of jewelry, the large ring she’d placed that morning on the middle finger of her left hand, her sole decorative ornament, had been selected for the sidelight it provided on the intellectual she was, one for whom enjoying the aesthetic surface of life openly, nondefensively, with her appetite and connoisseurship undisguised, was nonetheless subsumed by a lifelong devotion to scholarly endeavor. The ring, an eighteenth-century copy of a Roman signet ring, was a man-sized ring formerly worn by a man. On the oval agate, set horizontally—which was what made the ring so masculinely chunky—was a carving of Danaë receiving Zeus as a shower of gold. In Paris, four years earlier, when Delphine was twenty, she had been given the ring as a love token from the professor to whom it belonged—the one professor whom she’d been unable to resist and with whom she’d had an impassioned affair. Coincidentally, he had been a classicist. The first time they met, in his office, he had seemed so remote, so judging, that she found herself paralyzed with fear until she realized that he was playing the seduction against the grain. Was that what this Dean Silk was up to?

  However conspicuous the ring’s size, the dean never did ask to see the shower of gold carved in agate, and that, she decided, was just as well. Though the story of how she’d come by the ring testified, if anything, to an audacious adultness, he would have thought the ring a frivolous indulgence, a sign that she lacked maturity. Except for the stray hope, she was sure that he was thinking about her along those lines from the moment they’d shaken hands—and she was right. Coleman’s take on her was of someone too young for the job, incorporating too many as yet unresolved contradictions, at once a little too grand about herself and, simultaneously, playing at self-importance like a child, an imperfectly self-governed child, quick to respond to the scent of disapproval, with a considerable talent for being wounded, and drawn on, as both child and woman, to achievement upon achievement, admirer upon admirer, conquest upon conquest, as much by uncertainty as by confidence. Someone smart for her age, even too smart, but off the mark emotionally and seriously underdeveloped in most other ways.

  From her c.v. and from a supplementary autobiographical essay of fifteen pages that accompanied it—which detailed the progress of an intellectual journey begun at age six—he got the picture clearly enough. Her credentials were indeed excellent, but everything about her (including the credentials) struck him as particularly wrong for a little place like Athena. Privileged 16th arrondissement childhood on the rue de Longchamp. Monsieur Roux an engineer, owner of a firm employing forty; Madame Roux (née de Walincourt) born with an ancient noble name, provincial aristocracy, wife, mother of three, scholar of medieval French literature, master harpsichordist, scholar of harpsichord literature, papal historian, “etc.” And what a telling “etc.” that was! Middle child and only daughter Delphine graduated from the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where she studied philosophy and literature, English and German, Latin, French literature: “. . . read the entire body of French literature in a very canonical way.” After the Lycée Janson, Lycée Henri IV: “. . . grueling in-depth study of French literature and philosophy, English language and literary history.” At twenty, after the Lycée Henri IV, the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay: “. . . with the élite of French intellectual society . . . only thirty a year selected.” Thesis: “Self-Denial in Georges Bataille.” Bataille? Not another one. Every ultra-cool Yale graduate student is working on either Mallarmé or Bataille. It isn’t difficult to understand what she intends for him to understand, especially as Coleman knows something of Paris from being a young professor with family on a Fulbright one year, and knows something about these ambitious French kids trained in the elite lycées. Extremely well prepared, intellectually well connected, very smart immature young people endowed with the most snobbish French education and vigorously preparing to be envied all their lives, they hang out every Saturday night at the cheap Vietnamese restaurant on rue St. Jacques talking about great things, never any mention of trivialities or small talk—ideas, politics, philosophy only. Even in their spare time, when they are all alone, they think only about the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century French intellectual life. The intellectual must not be frivolous. Life only about thought. Whether brainwashed to be aggressively Marxist or to be aggressively anti-Marxist, they are congenitally appalled by everything American. From this stuff and more she comes to Yale: applies to teach French language to undergraduates and to be incorporated into the Ph.D. program, and, as she notes in her autobiographical essay, she is but one of two from all of France who are accepted. “I arrived at Yale very Cartesian, and there everything was much more pluralistic and polyphonic.” Amused by the undergraduates. Where’s their intellectual side? Completely shocked by their having fun. Their chaotic, nonideo-logical way of thinking—of living! They’ve never even seen a Kurosawa film—they don’t know that much. By the time she was their age, she’d seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmüllers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars. In earnest at Yale she resumes her intellectual mission, taking classes with the most hip professors. A bit lost, however. Confused. Especially by the other graduate students. She is used to being with people who speak the same intellectual language, and these Americans . . . And not everybody finds her that interesting. Expected to come to America and have everyone say, “Oh, my God, she’s a normalienner But in America no one appreciates the very special path she was on in France and its enormous prestige. She’s not getting the type of recognition she was trained to get as a budding member of the French intellectual elite. She’s not even getting the kind of resentment she was trained to get. Finds an adviser and writes her dissertation. Defends it. Is awarded the degree. Gets it extraordinarily rapidly because she had already worked so hard in France. So much schooling and hard work, ready now for the big job at the big school—Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Chicago—and when she gets nothing, she is crushed. A visiting position at Athena College? Where and what is Athena College? She turns up her nose. Until her adviser says, “Delphine, in this market, you get your big job from another job. Visiting assistant professor at Athena College? You may not have heard of it, but we have. Perfectly decent institution. Perfectly decent job for a first job.” Her fellow
foreign graduate students tell her that she’s too good for Athena College, it would be too déclassé, but her fellow American graduate students, who would kill for a job teaching in the Stop & Shop boiler room, think that her uppityness is characteristically Delphine. Begrudgingly, she applies—and winds up in her minikilt and boots across the desk from Dean Silk. To get the second job, the fancy job, she first needs this Athena job, but for nearly an hour Dean Silk listens to her all but talk her way out of the Athena job. Narrative structure and temporality. The internal contradictions of the work of art. Rousseau hides himself and then his rhetoric gives him away. (A little like her, thinks the dean, in that autobiographical essay.) The critic’s voice is as legitimate as the voice of Herodotus. Narratology. The diegetic. The difference between diegesis and mimesis. The bracketed experience. The proleptic quality of the text. Coleman doesn’t have to ask what all this means. He knows, in the original Greek meaning, what all the Yale words mean and what all the École Normale Supérieure words mean. Does she? As he’s been at it for over three decades, he hasn’t time for any of this stuff. He thinks: Why does someone so beautiful want to hide from the human dimension of her experience behind these words? Perhaps just because she is so beautiful. He thinks: So carefully self-appraising and so utterly deluded.

  Of course she had the credentials. But to Coleman she embodied the sort of prestigious academic crap that the Athena students needed like a hole in the head but whose appeal to the faculty second-raters would prove irresistible.

  At the time he thought that he was being open-minded by hiring her. But more likely it was because she was so goddamn enticing. So lovely. So alluring. And all the more so for looking so daughterly.

  Delphine Roux had misread his gaze by thinking, a bit melodramatically—one of the impediments to her adroitness, this impulse not merely to leap to the melodramatic conclusion but to succumb erotically to the melodramatic spell—that what he wanted was to tie her hands behind her back: what he wanted, for every possible reason, was not to have her around. And so he’d hired her. And thus they seriously began not to get on.

  And now it was she calling him to her office to be the interviewee. By 1995, the year that Coleman had stepped down from the deanship to return to teaching, the lure of petitely pretty Delphine’s all-encompassing chic, with its gaminish intimations of a subterranean sensuality, along with the blandishments of her École Normale sophistication (what Coleman described as “her permanent act of self-inflation”), had appeared to him to have won over just about every wooable fool professor and, not yet out of her twenties—but with an eye perhaps on the deanship that had once been Coleman’s—she succeeded to the chair of the smallish department that some dozen years earlier had absorbed, along with the other language departments, the old Classics Department in which Coleman had begun as an instructor. In the new Department of Languages and Literature there was a staff of eleven, one professor in Russian, one in Italian, one in Spanish, one in German, there was Delphine in French and Coleman Silk in classics, and there were five overworked adjuncts, fledgling instructors as well as a few local foreigners, teaching the elementary courses.

  “Miss Mitnick’s misreading of those two plays,” he was telling her, “is so grounded in narrow, parochial ideological concerns that it does not lend itself to correction.”

  “Then you don’t deny what she says—that you didn’t try to help her.”

  “A student who tells me that I speak to her in ‘engendered language’ is beyond being assisted by me.”

  “Then,” Delphine said lightly, “there’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  He laughed—both spontaneously and for a purpose. “Yes? The English I speak is insufficiently nuanced for a mind as refined as Miss Mitnick’s?”

  “Coleman, you’ve been out of the classroom for a very long time.”

  “And you haven’t been out of it ever. My dear,” he said, deliberately, and with a deliberately irritating smile, “I’ve been reading and thinking about these plays all my life.”

  “But never from Elena’s feminist perspective.”

  “Never even from Moses’s Jewish perspective. Never even from the fashionable Nietzschean perspective about perspective.”

  “Coleman Silk, alone on the planet, has no perspective other than the purely disinterested literary perspective.”

  “Almost without exception, my dear”—again? why not?—“our students are abysmally ignorant. They’ve been incredibly badly educated. Their lives are intellectually barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing nothing. Least of all do they know, when they show up in my class, how to read classical drama. Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they’re all in the room. They know, like, nothing. After nearly forty years of dealing with such students—and Miss Mitnick is merely typical—I can tell you that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need. Providing the most naive of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it’s even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless ‘likes.’ I have trouble believing that an educated woman coming from a French academic background like your own believes there is a feminist perspective on Euripides that isn’t simply foolishness. Have you really been edified in so short a time, or is this just old-fashioned careerism grounded right now in the fear of one’s feminist colleagues? Because if it is just careerism, it’s fine with me. It’s human and I understand. But if it’s an intellectual commitment to this idiocy, then I am mystified, because you are not an idiot. Because you know better. Because in France surely nobody from the École Normale would dream of taking this stuff seriously. Or would they? To read two plays like Hippolytus and Alcestis, then to listen to a week of classroom discussion on each, then to have nothing to say about either of them other than that they are ‘degrading to women,’ isn’t a ‘perspective,’ for Christ’s sake—it’s mouthwash. It’s just the latest mouthwash.”

  “Elena’s a student. She’s twenty years old. She’s learning.”

  “Sentimentalizing one’s students ill becomes you, my dear. Take them seriously. Elena’s not learning. She’s parroting. Why she ran directly to you is because it’s more than likely you she’s parroting.”

  “That is not true, though if it pleases you to culturally frame me like that, that is okay too, and entirely predictable. If you feel safely superior putting me in that silly frame, so be it, my dear,” she delighted now in saying with a smile of her own. “Your treatment of Elena was offensive to her. That was why she ran to me. You frightened her. She was upset.”

  “Well, I develop irritating personal mannerisms when I am confronting the consequences of my ever having hired someone like you.”

  “And,” she replied, “some of our students develop irritating personal mannerisms when they are confronting fossilized pedagogy. If you persist in teaching literature in the tedious way you are used to, if you insist on the so-called humanist approach to Greek tragedy you’ve been taking since the 1950s, conflicts like this are going to arise continually.”

  “Good,” he said. “Let them come.” And walked out. And then that very next semester when Tracy Cummings ran to Professor Roux, close to tears, barely able to speak, baffled at having learned that, behind her back, Professor Silk had employed a malicious racial epithet to characterize her to her classmates, Delphine decided that asking Coleman to her office to discuss the charge could only be a waste of time. Since she was sure that he would behave no more graciously than he had the last time a female student had complained—and sure from past experience that should she call him in, he would once again condescend to her in his patronizing way, yet another upstart female daring to inquire into his conduct, yet another woman whose conc
erns he must trivialize should he deign even to address them—she had turned the matter over to the accessible dean of faculty who had succeeded him. From then on she was able to spend her time more usefully with Tracy, steadying, comforting, as good as taking charge of the girl, a parentless black youngster so badly demoralized that, in the first few weeks after the episode, to prevent her from picking up and running away—and running away to nothing—Delphine had gained permission to move her out of the dormitory into a spare room in her own apartment and to take her on, temporarily, as a kind of ward. Though by the end of the academic year, Coleman Silk, by removing himself from the faculty voluntarily, had essentially confessed to his malice in the spooks affair, the damage done Tracy proved too debilitating for someone so uncertain to begin with: unable to concentrate on her work because of the investigation and frightened of Professor Silk’s prejudicing other teachers against her, she had failed all her courses. Tracy packed up not only to leave the college but to pull out of town altogether—out of Athena, where Delphine had been hoping to find her a job and get her tutored and keep an eye on her till she could get back into school. One day Tracy took a bus to Oklahoma, to stay with a half-sister in Tulsa, yet using the Tulsa address, Delphine had been unable to locate the girl ever again.

  And then Delphine heard about Coleman Silk’s relationship with Faunia Farley, which he was doing everything possible to hide. She couldn’t believe it—two years into retirement, seventy-one years old, and the man was still at it. With no more female students who dared question his bias for him to intimidate, with no more young black girls needing nurturing for him to ridicule, with no more young women professors like herself threatening his hegemony for him to browbeat and insult, he had managed to dredge up, from the college’s nethermost reaches, a candidate for subjugation who was the prototype of female helplessness: a full-fledged battered wife. When Delphine stopped by the personnel office to learn what she could about Faunia’s background, when she read about the ex-husband and the horrifying death of the two small children—in a mysterious fire set, some suspected, by the ex-husband—when she read of the illiteracy that limited Faunia to performing only the most menial of janitorial tasks, she understood that Coleman Silk had managed to unearth no less than a misogynist’s heart’s desire: in Faunia Farley he had found someone more defenseless even than Elena or Tracy, the perfect woman to crush. For whoever at Athena had ever dared to affront his preposterous sense of prerogative, Faunia Farley would now be made to answer.