Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
On top of this, his meeting an hour ago with Don Hillary was total shit. All Hillary would say about Beans’s work was that he thinks Beans’s stuff is “very advanced,” that Beans is definitely onto some “high-level concepts.” He is looking forward to Beans’s “perspective.” Beans knows this is just code for Don Hillary hating everything he does, but for whatever reason Hillary didn’t find it convenient to come out and say so, perhaps because he’s checking to make sure Beans isn’t going to report him for fueling his office hours with gin conveyed via Sprite can. Instead of providing any sort of usable feedback, Hillary launched into one of his down-home routines about how he, Hillary, is but a poetry simpleton who can’t get beyond the basic themes of love and death and war. Hillary went off on a tear about the finesse of Frost, the aplomb of Lowell, the swagger of Berryman. He told Beans he just wished he could tune into that erudite postmodern frequency Beans has locked as the permanent station on his “poem radio.” That was literally, no joke, Hillary’s metaphor. Poem radio.
Hillary owns a ranch in Colorado and knows how to ride a horse and shoot a gun. But everyone knows that Don Hillary hails from a wealthy Connecticut clan and was a legacy at Princeton, like both his grandfather and father, pioneering psychiatrists. People will, as they say, talk. And while it’s not entirely clear how the heavy drinking fits in with the true-blue cowboy routine, whether the former excuses the latter or it’s the other way around, any kind of proximity to Hillary’s person will let you know that he is either slowly embalming himself as a source of obdurate patrician fun or is unaware that suicide is best accomplished by more direct means.
Because Marta Hillary and Donald Hillary, as everyone knows, have gone well beyond being on the rocks. To further mix the metaphor, they’re straight out of the bottle, paper-bagging it. Or, at least, they would be, if Marta hadn’t so clearly moved on. As things stand, these days only Don seems to indulge on the job.
There is speculation among the students about what will happen to the poetry program if their marriage collapses this academic year, in medias res, for example. Would one of them leave town? Who would take the hatchet?