Richard Russo's Straight Man – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Academic Life While Living It

Richard Russo published Straight Man in 1997 and I must have read it for the first time not too long after that.  The story, told in the first person, of the interim Chair of the English Department in a small State University in Pennsylvania, led me to think, the first time I read it, of Phil, a friend of mine who teaches in an English Department in a small State University in Pennsylvania, but in a vague and abstract way.  The hero of this story, Henry Devereaux, Jr., sees the world as a joke and is constantly treating the people in his life as straight men (and women) who are merely setting up the punch lines that he delivers.  My friend Phil, while being fun loving, is also very serious – and takes himself more seriously than Henry Devereaux does.

I chose to re-read Straight Man in part because more than one person recommended it.  I remember enjoying it, but not much else about it.  There was a bit about a duck, but I couldn’t even remember the details of that.  The reason people were recommending it, I think, is that I am the chair of a department in a small private school.  The issues, they thought, would be similar.  And they were right.  Hank faces the same craziness that I am experiencing as a middle manager.  He is at a state school, so he is at the mercy of the legislature; I am at a private one, and so am at the mercy of the board, but we are both frequently waiting on funding.  This time I identified closely with the hero, and the story hung together better (though I have never had the temerity to threaten to kill a duck a day until the budget is approved – I will have to remember that tactic next year when the administration is sitting on it – again…).

But what does this book have to offer people who are not chairs – or even middle managers at whatever organization they may be in?  From a psychoanalytic perspective, Hank’s approach to life is very interesting.  He consistently occupies the “joking” state of mind.  He gives us as much access as he is able to the rest of his experience, but it is frankly – and he would be the first to say this – pretty limited – especially at the most critical moments (such as when he lifts a goose aloft and threatens to kill a duck a day while the news cameras are rolling).  Why does he do these crazy things?  It seems like a mystery to him, and to most of those around him – except his wife, who is actually bored by the predictability of his antics, and his boss’s secretary, who also gets him.

What do they get?  I think they are able to see something that Hank can’t possibly recognize from within the protected zone of his joking attitude towards the world – that his jokes betray not a disdain or disinterest in the world; quite the contrary, they display an almost painful reverence for it.  As his daughter remembers, when she went head over heels while learning to ride her bike, it was her father who cried all the way home, even after the pain, for her, had subsided.  This pain is too difficult to live with on a daily basis, so he distances himself from it with humor.  It is only when what he has been able to convince himself is a distant and unworthy world is threatened that he becomes directly aware of how desperately attached to that world he really is.  The humor, most of the time, keeps him safe.

This is the beauty of defense mechanisms.  They protect us from something threatening – an awareness of threat.  The intriguing thing is that this threat is frequently internal and mushy rather than external and physically dangerous.  Hank is afraid of the power of his attachments to make him vulnerable to being sad at a loss or anxious about an impending one.  He grew up in a family with two distant academic parents who saw him largely as an inconvenience.  He desperately wanted to connect with them – and failing that, to connect with a dog, something they were resolutely opposed to obtaining for him.  He fought and clawed and scrambled to get that dog only to have the dog his father finally obtained for him die the day he arrived.  He had to learn to protect himself, and humor became his go to protection.

My friends who have pointed me to this book have presciently pointed to a part of my experience I did not expect to discover from it – the power of the attachment that I feel to the place that I work.  In the midst of reading the book – swirling through my reading of the book – I felt the integrity of my University was threatened by the crazy actions of an administrator.  I am highly, consciously, ambivalent about the institution.  I like what it stands for.  I like what we do in our best moments.  I am appalled by our internal inconsistencies and the ways in which we don’t accomplish what we say we intend to.  I feel and resonate with Hank’s sarcastic relationships with students, fellow faculty and, above all, the administration.  I find almost everything about the University disappointing at one time or another.

At one point, Hank is describing the student ghetto and states that his Ivy League schooled buddies assure him that the slum-like conditions are to be found universally on or near all college campuses.  For an Ivory Tower place, academia can be quite gritty.  And Henry has seen the academic stars up close – his father was one – brilliant, but remote and self absorbed.  We want the academy to be Utopian, but it fails us – not least because it is tilted towards the intellectual life so much that the emotional life can be constricted and only seems to leak out in sophomoric humor and immature and highly objectified sexuality.

Many things on college campuses have changed since the writing of this book.  It would no longer be possible for a chair not to use email.  There are no phone booths on campus and being out of touch for periods of time in the midst of crisis the way this guy is seems very last century.  Hopefully there is less of a casual, wink wink say no more attitude towards sex between faculty and students – I hope that most schools, and faculty, have gotten how significant power imbalances rule out mutual consent and that, when these relationships inevitably emerge, they indicate a problem that should be attended to.  But, despite the different technologies and mores that have emerged in a relatively short period of time – the sense of the University – and I have it on good report that this is true of the Ivies as well – the sense of the University as less than we imagined is, I think, very current – perhaps even timeless.

So, it comes as some surprise then – when we have been complaining of the lack of resources, of the banal qualities of our students – that they are now millennials and that means that they can’t write or appreciate the written word – when we pooh pooh the administration; that, when there is a threat to this institution to which we are ambivalently (dare I say reluctantly) attached, we rally to defend it.  We lose sleep over how to ward off the threat – and think about how to make it better.  We may  use – or overuse – humor to protect ourselves.  In fact, unlike this character, who is, after all, a character – we inhabit multiple states of mind and, even if we have a home base, we move around,  organizing our internal world through a humorous lens one day, a blazing lens of fury the next, then an Eeyore/depressive one, and then maybe a somewhat aloof and better than it all one.  We put these selves on like costumes – and like costumes they distract others and ourselves from what we look like naked, but also serve as conduits for our naked feelings – allowing us to express them in ways that authenticate them.  So, when I am truly appalled by what an administrator is doing, my righteous indignation is both deeply genuine and a sham – an act.  It is a means of dressing up, of expressing, something that is not directly knowable, but only through acting it out can we know who it is that we are.

Russo maintains that the reason “… we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, is because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.  We need them to tell us.  We need them to say, ‘I know you Al.  You’re the kind of man who.’”  They see us in our many costumes, and they observe what is constant, what is at the core, what makes us who we are.  Russo has constructed, in Henry Devereaux, Jr., a person who clings to a particular costume – that of the jester – to have a clear sense of himself.  It takes a great deal of courage to put the costume down – or perhaps more aptly – to try on various costumes – to become what it is that is evoked by a situation – with the faith we can use a particular costume to express what is needed at this moment, and to be able to shed it, to move to a different position, to understand ourselves at this moment from that moment where we have a very different vantage point.  Russo’s protagonist resists doing this.  He clings to the jester’s cap.  Or maintains that he does.  In the epilogue, though, he acknowledges things – like the depth of his love for his wife – directly.  He puts on the clothing of the lover – and it seems to fit OK.  He doesn’t feel too awkward or vulnerable, but rather – finally – more at home in that role, in the role of pater familias, and in a few other roles (including NOT being chair – but remaining comfortably in the role of faculty member).   And, from this perspective, this is a coming of age novel – even if the age of the one coming along is 50, and even if he may have to come of age again next year, and perhaps the year after that, too.

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Post script:   It's two years later and the administration has found yet another way to appall me and the rest of the faculty....  The more things change....  You can see a diatribe about the state of higher education at higher education.

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