Going into the family business

Academe, May/Jun 1999 by Booth, Wayne C, Booth, Alison, Davis, Chandler, Davis, Natalie Zemon, Et al

A CHANCE REMARK BY A COLLEAGUE WHO SAID she was amazed by how many of her graduate students were faculty brats aroused my curiosity. Why would the children of academics choose the same line of work as their parents? Had their parents encouraged them to become professors or to enter a particular field? How does being the child of an established scholar or scientist affect the career of a young faculty member? Academe asked several eminent academics and their academic children to reflect on these questions. Here are their answers.

-ELLEN SCHRECKER

Wayne C Booth

MOST OF LIFE'S BLESSINGS ARE UNEARNED GIFTS, the Giver defined in radically different ways, depending on one's religion or antireligion. I can think of no way to claim full credit for Alison's career: no sermon pressuring her to follow my professional lead, no serious meddling in her choice of college or university (I did try-perhaps foolishly-to talk her out of going to Bennington, but failed.) Still, I can think of no blessing greater than seeing one's daughter flower into an admired teacher and feminist scholar.

No doubt as a child she encountered daily evidence of my enthusiasm about my vocation. When over dinner I would tell anecdotes about the fun I'd had during a day of teaching, she must sometimes have thought, "I want something like that." When she would observe my neglect of her and her two siblings as I worked on a book, she must have heard an implicit message: "You should develop that kind of blind passion." When my wife and I read stories aloud to the three of them, or when we made up wild bedtime tales, I suppose there was always the implicit suggestion that to live in the "world of story" is one of the greatest of all life's blessings.

I do remember how engrossed the five-year-old Alison always was in whatever stories came her way, even when we read aloud Dickens or Shakespeare-works that her older brother and sister could fully grasp while she was puzzled. -. When she was about seven we took them to a performance of Hamlet, one of those "full text" renderings that lasted until about midnight. I have a vivid picture of her engrossed all the way through, especially when a chandelier on stage crashed down on the head of Hamlet.

Aside from all these half memories of mine, "how she got here" is for her to say. And it's impossible to pin down all the differences between how "here" is now and how it was back then. I could dwell on the appalling market differences. For example, I never had to apply for any job, anywhere, because in the late forties job offers flooded the stage. I could dwell on subject differences. When I was being trained, hardly any critic even mentioned matters of race, class, or gender, though there was a battle about Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism when he received the Bollingen Prize in 1949. Back then, students learned that to impose ethical or political judgments on pure poetry was an immoral act.

Alison entered the field just at the time when such matters were flooding back in, so she had the fortune of being trained both in traditional "close reading" and "formalist" interests and in the "resistant," "strong," "ideological" reading that my mentors had ruled out. It was partly her criticism of my work that turned me into what I can only call a feminist. How rare it must be for a father to be taught effectively by a daughter!

It has actually been fun to wrestle with those moments when the postmodernist daughter seemed to the troglodyte father to be going too far. When the early postmodernist moves seemed too extreme to me, I wrote (but did not publish) a parody, tracing the history of "smells in literature." Now I have the pleasure of reading a serious article by Alison on that very subject, without feeling even the slightest hint that it deserves parody. As I learn from her article how much I have missed about authors' use of smell, I can count up many such moments of sheer intellectual pleasure, reading her drafts of books and articles and hearing her lecture at conferences.

Perhaps the achievement she deserves most credit for is conquering the bugbear of false pride/ambition/competition. As her statement notes, academic children of academics often live miserably competitive lives. In my weaker moments, I find myself taking personal pride in the fact that she has-as she puts it"silenced that anxiety." Surely it must have been something about my totally humble nature, my absolute immunity to any competitive impulse, that influenced her in that mastery of pride!

Irony aside, and using once again the words I began with, Alison's decision to join the profession has been for me an unearned gift.

Wayne Booth is professor of English emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Alison Booth

IT'S TRUE, SOME OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE OF MY father's study: the sleek silhouette of the torch-bearing runner on the spine of old paperbacks; the old typewriter rounded and chromed like a 1950s car. I am the same age as The Rhetoric of Fiction, my father's prize-winning first book, begun the year I was born. I remember the index cards for that book spread across a big table in our flat in London, during the trip we took with Earlham College students one spring. I remember pondering the alarming sound of the word "deadline," as I stood on the deck of the ocean liner heading home, at about the age of six.