What Academics Do on Thanksgiving Weekend

The X-BF once told me, “Shopping is an activity that may or may not end in a purchase.” Finally I began to understand the endless trips looking for the perfect drapes for the living room. Those windows were bare for years, even after he’d found the perfect curtain rods.

My own world was so different from his, but I found comfort and wisdom in this idea. Applying this saying to academic work leads me to consider research as an activity that may or may not end up in any findings.

Sometimes finding nothing is an answer, e.g., My Dead Poet did not keep any letters. Ever. From anybody. (Cursing the Dead Poet, optional.)

Sometimes finding nothing means you keep looking, which can seem futile, but can also lead to narrowing your search. Or it may lead you to look somewhere else. For example, Nope, nothing about this issue in the WHOLE Huntington Archive. Maybe I should go to New York and look at the public library. (This is either an exciting opportunity or a chore, depending on the status of your travel funds.)

So what’s all this about a Dead Poet? I’m glad you asked.

Last spring I was asked to contribute a chapter to a book about W. H. Auden, hereafter referred to as My Dead Poet (oh, let’s just go with the acronym, MDP, this is a blog). The book, called “Auden in Context,” is slated for the Cambridge University Press. My chapter is to be on Auden in the context of his lifelong friend and sometime collaborator, Christopher Isherwood. My deadline is sometime in Spring 2010.

A literary Hope and Crosby, Isherwood and Auden head to China to write about the Sino-Japanese War.

Toot Your Own Horn Department, All False Modesty Aside Unit: I am something of an authority on Isherwood and have published three books on him and his work. (See here.) Two with my own Sometime Collaborator, Chris Freeman, about whom more in a minute.

See the University of Minnesota Press page on Isherwood. Please.

I spent several weekends at the Huntington Library and Gardens last summer reading letters from My Dead Poet to Isherwood. MDP wrote a lot of letters to CI, who really must have written back, because many of MDP’s letters begin “thank you for the letter.” But, as we know, MDP never kept anything that was useful. On the other hand his personal life and living quarters were always a messy mess mess.

My research agenda was to find in the Isherwood papers some new, undiscovered vein of raw material that would show this relationship in a new light. Trouble is, while this material is newly available in the archive, every every scholar who has written about MDP seems to have had access to these papers before. There are several biographies of MDP and CI, and their relationship has been written about ad nauseum. (Seriously, after shopping, er, researching, for a few months on this you do get a little sick of them both.)

Auden in later years.

So there it sat, this little Dead Poet Project. Sad and dejected, the project languished. I let leads go unfollowed. I consulted with an Eminent Scholar in England (via email) and dropped that inquiry.

Until once again, on the cusp of admitting defeat, I consult with Sometime Collaborator. Over coffee the morning before Thanksgiving and cocktails later on, we’re on a roll again. Co-authoring will be the way out of this morass! We’ll consult Eminent Scholar again! We’ll interview The Widow again!

We’ll challenge the conventional view.

We’ll head back to the library.

And life is a celebration again.

Happy Black Friday.