Chapter 4

In ancient Judea, the way to allow the land to regain its vigor was to let it lie fallow periodically. Doubtless there was a relationship between the religious day of rest and allowing fields to rest that was approved by our ancestors, and so the fields were rested every seventh year -- a sabbatical year. Similarly, several thousand years later, it was felt that the intellectual soil needed to rest from time to time, and so the sabbatical year for professors came about. A time for rest, for recuperation; a time to (re)assemble one's thoughts.

But most universities no longer recognize this. Among others, the University of Toronto no longer awards "sabbaticals." One earns "research leave." The field no longer lies fallow; the institution just changes the professor's status (and, perhaps, location) in the database for a time.

So I'm in San Diego on research leave. Researching a Danish author whose works cannot be found in most Californian libraries, though both of his novels have been translated into English and his works -- Samlede Skrifter -- are available in a single fat paperback in Danish. That fat Danish paperback and my Danish-English dictionary had been carefully transported from Toronto to San Diego by American Airlines and now constituted my "research library." Having combed the bibliographical tools available at the two university libraries, I now possessed a wad of 3" x 5" cards with references and sporadic notes on them, which spent most of their time in my pocket. Their existence and presence were a great comfort to me as most of the articles cited were in Scandinavian journals inaccessible to me and I was relieved of the necessity of reading them. There were a few items in English, French and German, and I'd read them at some point. But it was so easy to be diverted.

For example, one day I had been determined to read a massive work on the Danish-German war over Schleswig-Holstein and was meandering through the stacks of the Central Library at the University of California when I saw a book called Feudal Germany. Now that may not grab you, but it hit me. When I was an undergraduate I had taken mediaeval history and mediaeval German literature in the same year. Being a foxy character, I'd asked whether I could write a common paper for the two courses. The two professors had agreed and the historian had suggested Feudal Germany as a starting point. I recall getting it out of the library, but nothing else. And here it was. I took it from the shelf, found myself a table, and settled down to read. It was after lunch when I emerged from skimming and browsing. I never got to the 1864 war.

That was what Jim had been talking about. Gillespie's murder was a way for me to avoid doing any "real" (= scholarly) work. In fact, I guess that even agreeing to serve on that SDSU committee was work-avoidance. One could, after all, weasel out of everything. Serving on committees -- both at one's own institution and as an "outsider" -- was an important academic function, wasn't it? Maybe even the investigation of a colleague's [?] murder was research of a sort -- even if it wasn't the sort UofT appreciated most. Nonetheless, here I was on the bus again, this time northbound to UCSD, to do library research.

My immediate plan was to dig up Gillespie's biography -- surely he was in the Directory of American Scholars -- and then read my way through his oeuvre. Yesterday, a variety of human views, today his image on the printed page.

Clearly it was my duty. The police were getting nowhere. I had gleaned that much from the Union, where the two-day-old murder had retreated to page 16. There had been no "release of further information" from the department. And that meant there was nothing to release.

The Directory was a great help. Not wanting to bore you, I'll just say that he had attended Northwestern as an undergraduate after graduating from high school in Winnetka, Illinois. He had served in the Navy, rising to Lieutenant-Commander (I'd bet he was in NROTC at Northwestern!), and then on to Stanford, where he'd received his MA and PhD. He had begun his teaching career at San Jose State, then moved to SDSU. He'd been promoted to Associate Professor and then Professor. His dissertation, "Frances Burney: Mediating between England and France" had been published by a mid-western university press. He had edited a text edition of Evelina, Burney's most famous novel, had written several articles about Burney, and had written a book about Eliza Haywood.

That wasn't too bad: I'd only need to go through two decades of the MLA bibliography -- and I'd only have to look at a few authors. I could recall never finishing Evelina, but I had no idea who Eliza Haywood was. Why would a nasty male chauvinist do research on female authors?

I jotted a few notes and glanced around the reference area of the library. Then I decided to look at Alice's entry in the Directory.

What I read surprised me a bit. She was the same age as Gillespie. Her dissertation (at Johns Hopkins) had been on Ford Madox Ford's Fifth Queen. She had come to San Diego State the year after Gillespie, but they had been promoted to associate professor at the same time. She had spent two years as a Fulbright lecturer in Trondheim (which might explain why she knew of my work on Laxness). Alice's publications looked like a buckshot pattern: an article on Kim; one on Firbank's The new Rythum; one on Meredith and antisemitism (One of Our Conquerors, I'd bet); one on Morris and Butler; one on Conrad's debt to Ford; one on "Haggard's Zulu trilogy." If only she had the sense to concentrate! Her publications looked as though she'd strolled through the late nineteenth-early twentieth century stacks and pulled out a book here, another there, and then written something.

I put the Directory away, located a librarian, and she found me the 1660-1800 volume of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, in which I located Eliza Haywood under "Minor Fiction."