with a sociologist named something like Biff. Biff was a likablenlout, forever asking his colleagues to meet him somewhere andn”throw the old ball around.” Never very good at math, henbecame a devotee of “humanistic sociology,” by which henapparently meant editorializing on current events. His bignchance came when the nearby county seat experienced thenlargest family murder in American history. Biff went on localntelevision to explain the event. “It’s simple,” he declared, “annobvious case of repression-aggression.” A middle-aged mannblows away his brother, sister-in-law, parents, nieces, andnnephews over a breakfast table dispute, and the academic findsna simple explanation in a phrase that, when you analyze it,nmeans nothing. If there were a Nobel Prize for sociology, Biffnwould have been eligible.nIn such an environment, it is hardly surprising that capablenartists and scholars should find themselves doubly alienated,nfirst from the real world beyond the academic groves andnsecond from the folly and inconsequence of academic life.nSmall wonder that writers cultivate a Bohemian irresponsibilitynas a cover for their real seriousness. The public drunkenness,nlechery, and malicious humor of writers-in-residence seemnpositively amiable and wholesome qualities when they arencontrasted with the petty malice that serves as the norm ofnacademic respectability.nNot all of them play the aesthete’s game, but even thosenwho buy their clothes from Brooks Brothers are subject to thensame hothouse atmosphere and find themselves writing onlynfor the connoisseurs. The poetry is especially bad, but whonoutside the academy has ever enjoyed any example of thatnswelling genre, the campus novel? The exceptions proving thenrule are Lucky ]im and A New Life, both written by nonacademicsnand told from an outsider’s point of view.nBut the faults of academic novels are not restricted to thencampus setting of so many of them. The problem is morenbasic. They constitute a kind of court literature designed tonappeal only to a small circle of cognoscenti, with this difference:nMuch court literature is, in fact, antiprofessional andnaddressed to aristocratic amateurs with good taste. Our ownnacademic writers, however, would never dream of writing annovel that could be enjoyed by, say, Roger Smith.nIt is not so much the Royal courts that serve as a model butnthe Alexandrian Library. “Chickens in a coop” — so thenwriters at the Library were described by a satirist. ThenAlexandrian Library was the first actual institution to employnwriters-in-residence, and under the first Ptolemies (third centurynB.C.) it attracted both scholars—like Eratosthenes, who firstncorrectly calculated the earth’s circumference — and poets likenCallimachus and ApoUonius. The Library flourished in an agen• of uneasy cosmopolitanism, and the literature it nourished —npersonal, idiosyncratic, technical—stood in stark contrast withnthe communal and religious poetry of the Greek city-states.nThe combination of offhand colloquialism with obscure references,ntechnical brilliance with minor themes is the hallmark ofnCallimachus, and more than one modern critic has made thenobvious comparison with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Indeed,nPound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius is a tribute to Callimachus’nRoman disciple, an imitation of an imitation thatnacknowledges the influence of the master.nFor the serious reader, Alexandrian verse can be verynmoving, but for the casual lover of poetry, it is often asnperplexing as the Cantos — even the ancients found Lyco-nJanuary 1, 1987nby Elizabeth MarionnHAPPY NEW YEAR! SIX STABBINGS OVERNIGHTnARSON SUSPECTED IN BIG HOTEL FIREnAppropriately, dense, cold moisture shroudsnCONGRESSMEN RECONVENE, DISCUSS THE DIREnEFFECTS OF COUNTRY’S DEBT; VOTE SELVES A RAISEnwhat’s past, what’s yet to come, prevents our seeingnDRUG OVERDOSE KILLS TEEN PUNK ROCK CRAZEnPERSISTS MURDERER GIVEN LATE REPRIEVEnwhat’s near, distorts heard sounds, both soft and loud:nHELL HATH NO FURY—FEW LEFT WHO BELIEVEnBABY ABANDONED AFTER PARENTS FIGHTnin fog we live and move and have our being.nphron’s Alexandra impossible, and it is Lycophron, not Callimachus,nthat John Ashbery resembles — gibberish arranged attractivelynon the page. There are several reasons for thenobscurity of Alexandrian verse, but the existence of thenLibrary, with its vast collection of books and its staff of gabblingnintellectuals, must have exerted a powerful pressure.nThe parallels with our own time are too obvious to belabor:nan urban cosmopolitan civilization whose deracinated intellectualsnand writers travel about the world in search of adulationnand security — “diaphanous gowns and regular meals,” asnW.C. Fields explains to his daughter in You Can’t Cheat annHonest Man; a proliferation of books about books, a crushingnsense of the past’s masterpieces on which the writer reflectsneven as he is scurrying to distance himself.nHow many serious novels today are really ironic literaryncriticism in the guise of fiction? Updike’s Roger’s Versionncomes immediately to mind, along with much John Barth, butnit is not these obvious allusive patterns that define contemporarynfiction so much as the layer upon layer of borrowednimagery and points of reference. There are writers likenDoctorow and Hawkes who must lie awake nights calculatingnthe little tricks that will keep dissertation writers busy until thenend of the century. If the end result were anywhere near songood as Callimachus’ epigrams and hymns or Apollonius’ litflenepic, the Argonautica, a temperate man might be inclined tonmerciful judgment. In fact, the state of serious writing in thencountry is far worse than I have suggested in this best-casencomparison with Alexandria, and the result of all the institutionalizationnof writing in America has been to literature angenuinely academic question.nnnJANUARY 19881 7n