He was snobby. “I gave the department secretary the syllabus for this course to type up,” he told us, his Northwestern University undergraduates in a course called Joyce/Nabokov. “She said Oh, I’ve heard of Joyce Nabokov.” Imitating her uneducated speech.
A few students laughed. Most of us were taken aback.
Alfred Appel, who has died, was very kind to me. Had me over to his house and showed me his inscribed Nabokov novels, in some of which the writer had drawn butterflies. He was funny. His Annotated Lolita (which Gore Vidal thought a creation of Nabokov… Vidal thought Alfred Appel was a creation of Nabokov…) is hilarious.
May 19th, 2009 at 4:39PM
What strikes me most in this story is that there was a time when departmental secretaries acted as, you know, secretaries, doing typing chores and such for the department.
At my uni, they’re mostly office adminiscogs who like bossing around work study students while treating adjuncts like chattel. The "uneducated speech" remains though, often despite free tuition for degrees earned on-the-job.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:50AM
If she found out, any secretary worth her salt would have made sure that half his mail never arrived after that.
May 21st, 2009 at 7:18AM
Never ever annoy the department secretary.
BTW, UD, did you know Harold Kaplan?
May 21st, 2009 at 7:30AM
A little bit. My first semester at NU I took a course on James Fenimore Cooper with Kaplan and was appalled. I’d been reading Dostoevsky and company, and could not believe there were university-level courses on pure-hearted woodsmen. I think I was too young to have the confidence to drop the course (maybe it was a requirement?), so I’m pretty sure I actually spent three months of my life studying Cooper.
It’s a tragic irony that the closest fun town to my little vacation house in the Catskills is Cooperstown, where every year I must deal with statues and museums in his honor.
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:01AM
I took two courses with him: one was an introduction to modern American poetry and the other an upper-level course on the imagination in American literature, focusing on Wallace Stevens and Henry James. Great courses, both of them. Lovely man, too, and a very good teacher.
I recall that Cooperstown had a very good used book store when I visited there.