Scenes from a failed novel: Special "Ripped From The Headlines" edition!

Earlier this month I read about the latest developments in a notorious suit based on allegations that University of Miami didn't fulfill its Title IX obligations to investigate charges of sexually inappropriate behavior by one of its faculty luminaries:

When Morrison worked as McGinn's research assistant, the famed professor pressed the student for a photo of her, repeatedly asked if he could come to her apartment and made multiple references to Lolita, the novel in which an older professor becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl, according to emails HuffPost reviewed. At the time, McGinn was 62 and Morrison was 26, something he noted in one email. In the emails, McGinn wrote about wanting to kiss her, floated the idea of their having sex over the summer and stated she was "much better off with my support than without it." [. . . ]

Morrison's attorneys say she often avoided his direct questions about his coming to her apartment or wanting to see her, saying she was sick or had spotty Internet or simply was too busy.

One March 2012 text message exchange provided to HuffPost is emblematic of her general response to his comments, the attorneys claim:

McGinn: I love your essence
McGinn: Plus it gives me a slight erection
Morrison: Can I borrow your philosophy of physics book…the one by lange [sic].

There's more at the link, and you're certainly welcome to follow the link and read about it, but I've already thrown up a little in the back of my mouth as it is, so you'll have to make that journey on your own. (Pro tip: If you're texting someone about your erection rather than sending a photo, it's okay to go ahead and tell her you have a "substantial erection." No one will be the wiser, eh?)

But the story sounded familiar. And after some digging around in the cellar, I discovered the following fragment of a manuscript, circa 1992, covered with whisky-glass stains and half-hidden under a pile of hard drives found in a recycling bin ("Think Globally, Act Locally") about two blocks from the Clinton compound in Chappaqua NY: 

She took a seat at a table and looked over her list again. Wormel had let it slip that it was a faculty member who was holding onto her book. The odds were good that only one professor was both theoretically interested in that particular book and relentlessly self-centered enough to keep an overdue library book for over a year: Emile Thoreau.

Maggie felt her spirits slip slightly lower. Emile Thoreau, self-conscious bad boy of the art history faculty; Emile Thoreau, whose French accent came and went according to the number of sophomore coeds present in the class; Emile Thoreau, tenured champion of the masses, ass-grabber extraordinaire. Maggie groaned to herself. Kathleen had once called Thoreau a "Volvo Marxist": He believed that, after The Revolution, his second car would still be a Volvo and he would still get to nail his grad students. Still, if he had the Jaeger and Prinz book, maybe she could borrow it from him.

She fished some change out of her copy machine bag and walked over to the pay phone. His number was listed, and she dialed it. Thoreau's answering machine took the call. She hesitated, then hung up without leaving a message. If he did have the book, leaving him a message would only give him time to move the book into the bedroom and dim the lights. Maggie shuddered.

Well, it's not the first time a book idea has tanked because it was ahead of its time, I suppose. (For other excerpts from this tragically doomed work, go here.)

Scenes from a failed novel: The adversary

(The following pages were found among several hundred sheets of print-out spilled in and around a dumpster near the one-time offices of St. Martin's Press in the storied Flatiron Building in Manhattan, in the early 1990s. The decision to release these materials now was inspired by Lance Mannion's recent meditation on writerly discipline and inspiration. For other excerpts from this doomed work, go here.)

The name plate on her desk identified the circulation desk librarian as Dorothy Wormel. She was fifty-ish, with greying hair cut unflatteringly short and straight, dressed in typical Pacific northwest fashion: layers of natural fibers, finished out in wool socks and Birkenstocks. The aimed-at effect may have been natural and woodsy; in her case it was pugnaciously frumpy. She was studying a computer printout, accordion-folded into a stack about three inches thick on her desk. If she was remotely aware of Maggie's presence at the desk, she shouldered that distraction aside like a pro.

Maggie waited for what felt like a decent interval, then cleared her throat.

"Excuse me?"

Dorothy Wormel remained precisely as she had been sitting, except that her eyes snapped upward to meet Maggie's over the rims of her reading glasses. Maggie actually made a slight yipping noise and stepped back. The regard behind that glance had hit her like a concentrated blast of arctic air. She fought down the reflexive impulse to shiver.

"I'm trying to locate a book that's in the catalog but not on the shelves. Can you tell me if it's been checked out?" She tried to give one of her pleasant, business-like smiles. The librarian briefly strafed the printout with her gaze, then stood and walked toward the counter. Mercifully, she was looking at the list in Maggie's hand, not at Maggie. Maggie didn't feel quite ready to stand up to one of her glances again, especially at point-blank range. Maggie turned her list around and tapped her finger next to Jaeger and Prinz's book.

"Just a moment," said the librarian, not quite concealing her disdain, although whether it was for Maggie personally or simply for anyone who would interrupt her pure contemplation of the Dewey Decimal System, Maggie could not have said.

She moved to a computer terminal at the end of a counter. As she entered the book's catalog number, Maggie stepped cautiously nearer, surreptitiously watching the woman's stare, so intent that even the computer screen seemed to flicker in a cowed way before her.

"The book is checked out," she said shortly. Her eyes slowly turned toward Maggie. Maggie braced herself.

"Can you tell me when it's due back?"

The librarian focused her lasers on the terminal again. "It was due July 19th."

Maggie's jaw dropped. "But it's March!" The librarian offered no response.

Maggie tried again. "It's been overdue for"--pause for some quick mental arithmetic--"eight months?" The librarian apparently regarded this as a rhetorical question. "Who checked it out?"

The librarian stared unblinking. "We do not release that information. If you like, I can put an R. C. on the book."

"An R. C.?"

"Yes, a return call. We send the person a notice that the book has been requested. That person then has seven days to return the book to us. When it arrives, we notify you."

"Do you think a person who's already kept the book eight months too long will find this notice compelling?" The librarian seemed to treat this question as rhetorical, too.

Maggie shrugged. "Okay, fine. Please put a call on the book for me." The librarian took Maggie's name and address from her student I.D.

"Thank you for your help," said Maggie, as she lifted her book bag off the counter. The librarian apparently chose not to consider this sarcasm. She was already back at her desk, studying the printout. Maggie turned to go, then stopped and turned back toward the counter.

"Excuse me, but could you answer one more question?" The librarian turned her dissecting-probe gaze back on Maggie. "Can you tell me roughly how much eight months in overdue book fines would add up to?" Then the librarian gave Maggie a look even more alarming than her reptilian gaze: she smiled faintly. "It doesn't matter. It's university policy that faculty members are not charged fines for overdue books." She returned her attention to the printout. Maggie waited for the chill to pass over her body, then took her book bag and headed for the library lounge in the basement. This was too much to take on an empty stomach.

She took a seat at a table and looked over her list again. Wormel had let it slip that it was a faculty member who was holding onto her book. The odds were good that only one professor was both theoretically interested in postmodern critique and relentlessly self-centered enough to keep a library book for almost a year: Emile Thoreau. Maggie felt her spirits slip slightly lower. Emile Thoreau, self-conscious "bad boy" of the art history faculty; Emile Thoreau, whose French accent came and went according to the number of sophomore coeds present in the class; Emile Thoreau, tenured champion of the masses, and ass-grabber extraordinaire. Maggie groaned to herself. Emile Thoreau, Volvo Marxist, who believed that, after The Revolution, he would still be entitled to drive an import and nail his grad students. Still, if he had the Jaeger and Prinz book, maybe she could borrow it from him. She fished a quarter out of her copy machine bag and walked over to the pay phone. His number was listed, and she dialed it. Thoreau's answering machine took the call. She hesitated, then hung up. If he did have the book, leaving him a message would only give him time to move the book into the bedroom and dim the lights. Maggie shuddered.

She sat down again and pondered her list. If she couldn't get the Jaeger and Prinz book, she could still get the MacReady article through the interlibrary loan service. Since she had all the bibliographic information, it should be easy to obtain a photocopy from another university library in two or three days. She picked up her book bag and returned to the main floor.

At the information desk, she held up the maimed journal like a specimen of road kill. "Is this where I report mutilated books?" she asked. The student worker nodded. Maggie showed him where the missing pages of the MacReady article had been excised. He dutifully recorded the information and took the book, or what was left of it, to a rolling cart. Maggie thanked him and crossed the main floor to the interlibrary loan office.

Clearly, interlibrary loan was not where the big players were to be found. It was a small and windowless cubicle, little more than a desk, a computer terminal, and a phone. The man behind the desk looked faintly surprised that anyone had found him. Unlike Dorothy Wormel, he had no name plate on his little desk to identify himself.

"I'd like to order a copy of a journal article," said Maggie as she sat down across the desk from him. The anonymous little man nodded shyly and pushed a pen and a form toward her.

"Fill this in with as much information as you can, please." Maggie scanned the form and quickly recopied the information from her list onto it. The man seemed startled when she finished so soon, and he ran a suspicious eye over the form, but it was clearly complete. He smiled briefly and turned to his computer. He tapped in an entry, looked at the screen with vague surprise, compared the information there with Maggie's form, and then looked at Maggie. He seemed faintly disappointed, not so much for her as for himself; he was a fisherman who at last had a nibble on his line, only to find his bait gone.

"There's no need to order this article," he said, almost wistfully. "We have that journal here in Anderson in the stacks."

"Well, actually," said Maggie, "someone cut that article out of our copy of the journal." The poor man looked genuinely shocked. It took him a moment to recover. Then he frowned.

"But the journal's still listed as being in circulation by the main library computer." He nodded toward the screen. "I can't order it for you if the computer says we already have it." He smiled apologetically.

"So how do I get to see this article?"

"You have to report it to circulation. Once circulation declares the book missing or damaged, and I get that confirmed here"--he tapped the screen--"we can order the article for you whenever you want."

Maggie felt her blood run cold. "Circulation?" She drew a little closer and lowered her voice. "Is there any way of doing this without going through Ms. Wormel?"

The nameless man shook his head gravely, in deep and sympathetic disappointment. "And she pronounces it 'Wor-mel,' not 'Worm-el,'" he added sadly.

With powerful misgivings, Maggie retraced her steps to the circulation desk. Dorothy Wormel had apparently not moved since their last interview. Maggie hesitated at the counter, mustering her resolve. She arranged her face into a smile.

"Excuse me, I'd like to report a damaged book."

The librarian silently turned her gaze toward Maggie, like gun turrets swiveled toward their target. She said nothing for a moment while they computed strike trajectories.

"Do you have the book here?"

"Well, no, he has it over at the information desk." Maggie turned and nodded toward the desk, and noticed to her dismay that there was no one there now. "But I have the catalog number and the citation," she added, turning back to Wormel. "And I can tell you which pages have been cut out."

The librarian shook her head slightly. Coming from her, it seemed like a hysterical outburst. "We have to process the physical book here before it can be listed as damaged." Maggie felt her blood pressure going back up again. Wormel went on. "In the meantime, I suggest you order the missing material through interlibrary loan."

"But they won't order the article there until you list the book as out of circulation here!"

For the second time that day--and perhaps, thought Maggie, the second time in the decade--Dorothy Wormel smiled. It was not the easy smile of someone practiced at smiling, but it was all the more effective for that.

p3 Crime week continues: Scenes from a failed novel

The avatar

(Excerpt from a manuscript discovered in 1956 by a demolition crew worker in a time capsule placed in the cornerstone of the C. M. Jones Building in Burbank CA. The author of the manuscript is unknown. The demolition crew worker died, penniless, several years later under unexplained circumstances.)

She dumped the contents of her book bag onto the dining room table and poured herself a glass of wine. Where to start? The Hetrick book? No, too many fresh and nasty memories there. Besides, what she needed was a task she could finish in the next hour or so, a quick victory to regain her psychic momentum. Reading and taking notes on one of the articles she copied would be a more manageable task for the short time she had to work in. She pulled the two photocopies out and hefted them, one in each hand. The Durbin article on the skyrocketing price of modern art auctioned by Christie's and Sotheby's during the 1980's felt almost twice as heavy as Selinski's account of the forged Vermeer paintings of the 1930's. The Vermeer forgeries it would be. She slung the longer article back into her book bag.

Careful reading was, for Maggie, a pleasurable activity. It could be less pleasurable if the writer was not very good, and that was the case with many scholarly articles. But Selinski was a historian of some prose skill, and the topic was fascinating enough in its own right. She was soon deep in concentration, making occasional checks and notes in the margin with a pencil.

Han van Meegeren was a painter in Amsterdam at the turn of the century. His early career was successful, but he was soon overtaken by the rapid changes sweeping Dutch and European art of the early twentieth century. Once a darling of the art world, by the end of the 1920's van Meegeren was out of fashion, and had lost his support among dealers and critics, whom he came to regard with deep, if understandable, resentment.

Resentful and disappointed artists are not normally the objects of careful later study, but van Meegeren was different. At the end of World War II, van Meegeren was charged with wartime collaboration. Specifically, he was accused of helping arrange for German Air Marshal Hermann Goering to purchase The Adulteress, a recently discovered work by the seventeenth century Dutch master Jan Vermeer, for his private collection.

Van Meegeren's claim to an asterisk in the art history books was his defense against these charges. He floored his accusers by insisting that he had not, as the prosecution claimed, turned over a national treasure to the Nazis -- for he himself had painted The Adulteress and passed it off to Goering as a genuine Vermeer, recently discovered. In the course of the interrogation, it came to light that several of the "Vermeers" hanging in the best collections of Europe during the previous two decades, and a handful of works attributed to other artists as well, were also forgeries by the industrious van Meegeren. Van Meegeren even painted yet another "new Vermeer" while in police custody, just to make his point. At worst, he argued in his own defense, he was guilty of fraud, and perhaps even heroic fraud at that, considering the infamy of his victim in the case of The Adulteress.

Well, yes, retorted the prosecution, but for each of these "acts of heroism" he certainly had been well compensated, hadn't he -- since the forged Vermeers had all sold for handsome prices? Van Meegeren shrugged modestly; it had been his desire simply to create paintings that would appreciated again, and this he could no longer do under his own unfashionable name. He would happily have given the paintings away, he insisted, just to have them enjoyed. But to do this he was instead forced -- sadly, he allowed one to gather, and reluctantly -- to misrepresent his own works as Vermeers. And how could he possibly pass off these forgeries without arousing suspicion if he did not charge the buyers an authentic-sounding price?

Yet few historians rule out another motive: the sweet taste of revenge taken against the experts and dealers who had abandoned him years earlier, however cold the dish when it was finally served (van Meegeren died of a heart attack only a few weeks after he was eventually convicted and given the minimum sentence). True, not all critics had been taken in: Even at the time of their original "discovery" several experts had been nervous about the "new Vermeers," pointing out that they showed very un-Vermeer-like problems of perspective, color, and form. But these voices were soon in the silenced minority. Once he began producing forgeries, Van Meegeren even found he could fool a given expert more easily if he first studied that expert's published essays, and then used subjects or techniques that would appear to corroborate his prey's pet theories about Vermeer and seventeenth century art. Thus, in a perverse dance, the critics and the forger used one another to bolster the reputations of their own work.

Maggie looked up from the article and chuckled to herself. Han van Meegeren may have been convicted as a forger, but he was her kind of forger. Whatever else he accomplished, he had clearly provided a brisk tutorial in humility for the dealers, historians, and critics of his time. Maggie lifted her wine. "Here's to you, Han," she said softly, and drained the glass.

Scenes from a failed novel: The heavy

Excerpt from a manuscript discovered in an abandoned cellar in a west coast city. Neighbors insist that the cellar has been boarded up since the early 1990s.

Edmond Volker's toupee was widely, if tacitly, regarded as the most pitiful example of a hairpiece in all of the Pacific Northwest Conference. If someone had torn the upholstery out of an old Chevy pick-up and fastened it to the man's head, in the dark, with loops of duct tape, the effect could not have been much worse. Yet, like Cyrano's nose, it was an extraordinarily dangerous feature even to notice, let alone to comment upon.

New grad students in his seminars were always easy to spot: Unpracticed but already warned by their peers, they diligently tried to focus their gaze anywhere but there. The result was a look of watery-eyed desperation, of glances darting here and there but always slinking home to that awful rug.

A year or two before Maggie had entered the program, a promising grad student named Calvin Bender had been washed out during his second semester. The first day of Volker's class, Bender had had the mortally bad luck to be seated directly across from him at the seminar table.

Witnesses later reported that, as the minutes ticked by, Bender slowly grew red-faced, the cords in his neck tightened, a thin sheen of sweat appeared on his face, until finally his whole frame began to shudder almost imperceptibly with the terrible strain of ignoring it. After about twenty minutes, his self-control abruptly cracked, if only for a split-second, and from that tiny chink emerged a sputtering giggle that in another second would have burst into a full-blown guffaw. Bender made an inspired but unsuccessful attempt to disguise the outburst as a sneeze. The result was a strangled paroxysm that sprayed his notebook with spit and snot and sent him tottering and reeling out of the room.

Volker had been answering a question from another student, and Bender's fit had caught him amid-sentence like a torpedo. He stared, white-faced but immobile, until the echo of Bender's footsteps had died away in the hallway. Then, with only the slightest twitch below one eye, he resumed precisely where he had left off.

It was over in an instant. Volker made no mention of the incident, then or ever. Bender had recently moved to the region from Arizona, and so the official story was that it had been "a reaction to the high local concentration of allergens." A few months later, of course, his unceremonious departure was explained by another official story: "Mr. Bender, despite his early signs of promise, just hadn't quite measured up to the program's standards after all." But everyone knew what had happened; everyone understood. Calvin Bender had snickered at the dean's hairpiece, and he had paid the price.