Dear Committee Members: A Novel by Julie Schumacher Page B

on her, throw her a lifeline, and allow her to dry herself off among friends.
    From the prow of the Titanic , JTF

March 24, 2010
    H. Reginald Hanf, Professor Emeritus Hollyhock Terrace, Grovewood Homes
    19803 Wellington Avenue
    Hartford, CT 06120
    Dear Reg,
    After some effort, I believe I have tracked you down at the above address. I hope you’re well. I was sorry to hear about the stroke (news of your retirement traveled in seismic shivers through the daily papers), and I can appreciate your desire for privacy as well as rest. I wouldn’t bother you on my own behalf: I’m writing for the benefit of and unbeknownst to my advisee, Darren Browles, truly a diamond in the rough and one of the most original student writers I have encountered in the twenty-two years since I graduated, grateful for everything you did for me, from the Seminar.
    Briefly: Browles’s funding at Payne has been cut by the technocrats who have lately seized power over this institution, and he can’t afford to finish his degree or—more crucially—his novel, currently titled For the Sake of a Scrivener . Remembering how crucial your support of Stain was for me, I’m taking the liberty of enclosing several of Browles’s chapters: I’m hoping you can peruse them, see the raw potential, and use your influence—either to connect Browles with an agent (Ken Doyle is not theright fit for this project) or to recommend that he be admitted, belatedly and with funding (and I know it’s not the same now, without you), to the Seminar.
    You might logically suggest that the easier route would be to send Browles to Bentham. I’ve already tried: I wrote him an over-the-top letter, but Eleanor has rejected him repeatedly, despite or because of my panegyrics. Her rancor is personal and dates back to Stain: she claimed that my object in writing the novel was humiliation—specifically, that I made her the unwilling model for my character, Esther, and that the sex scenes in the book (though I did eliminate one of the most lurid) too nearly depicted the stormy liaison in which we briefly engaged. She said your enthusiasm for Stain was misogynistic—and that it was vanity and a “puppeteer’s obsession with control” that led you to help me win that first publication. My ex-wife, Janet (I’m sure you remember her: you described her work as “unrealized” and “sterile”), originally dismissed Eleanor’s complaints as overreaction. She pointed out that the book wouldn’t have gone into paperback and a third printing if its only attribute was the embarrassment of a former flame. Now that we are divorced, Janet sympathizes with Eleanor; they correspond. As for Stain: how excruciating two decades later, those blowsy fanfaronades of the prose; and who is that beady-eyed intense young author with the full head of hair?
    I’m not asking for eleventh-hour honesty here: you were a terrific advisor, whether you believed in what I was writing orwhether—amused by Stain ’s teasing references to the intimate lives of those who gathered around you at the Seminar table—you viewed my work as an experiment, a test of your influence, both on me and the market. The outcome for me, no matter your motive, was the same, and in either case, I am grateful. Though most of my work is out of print (perhaps deservedly so, in regard to Save Me for Later and Alphabetical Stars ), Stain secured me a job, a tenured position that many would envy. (My pre-Seminar career involved the sale of cleaning products from the back of a Chevy Chevette.) Still, I feel a moment of reckoning approaching. My own writing interests me less than it used to; and while I know that to teach and to mentor is truly a calling, on a day-to-day basis I often find myself overwhelmed by the needs of my students—who seem to trust in an influence I no longer have, and in a knowledge of which, increasingly, I am uncertain—and by the university’s mindless adherence to bureaucratic demands.
    I’m sure you