First Person - November 3, 1999
Dreams of graduate school
Or why Princeton looks different from the window of a red pickup
truck
by Susan Lowell Humphreys *79
Last night I dreamed I was a graduate student
again. It was not the horrible dream where I must engineer a functional
bridge from matchsticks and Double Bubble gum or flunk out (the English
major's worst nightmare). But it was bad enough: I found myself stuck halfway
through a master's degree, a dropout, a desperate academic outlaw. I'd have
to plead for mercy from my professors, but...
"Wait!" I told myself. "You can't be stuck in the middle of a master's degree." I visualized a human ant-the perfect Kafakaesque symbol for a graduate student-wedged between an "M" and an "A," feebly kicking. "You already have a master's degree," I reminded myself sternly. "In fact, you have two. And also a Ph.D. It's total degree overkill! Wake up!"
The terror faded away. "Even if you were a graduate student again," I scolded, "why, then you could go back to Princeton. Princeton was great! And you loved reading Trollope manuscripts all day." Wide awake now, I had to laugh. For an instant I'd recaptured that old contradictory feeling of intellectual exhilaration and servitude, aspiration and anxiety. The very term "graduate student" is paradoxical, like the condition.
On a steamy July afternoon in 1976, my husband, Ross, and I arrived at the main entrance to Princeton with a red pickup truck, a 14-foot U-Haul trailer, three English springer spaniels, my great-aunt's sterling silver, half a ton of books (mostly mine), three broken ribs (his), and not nearly enough money. It was a long way from our hometown of Tucson, Arizona, where we had married the year before. In a freak accident, the silverware had caused the broken ribs. We all moved into 220-A Harrison Street in Butler Project, and Ross embarked on an M.B.A. at the Wharton School while I started a Ph.D. in English at Princeton. I was the only person driving a pickup in Princeton except for plumbers. Ross and I trudged, drudged, scrimped, and borrowed; our shoes froze to the closet floor in winter. We learned so much that I wondered why our heads didn't bulge, for certainly our minds did. It was a splendid and terrible time.
"Graduate students are different from undergraduates," reported our daughter Anna '02, not long ago. "They sit around dressed in black, drinking coffee, and having serious conversations. Did you do that?"
"Of course," I said. "Graduate students are so outnumbered at Princeton that they almost form a secret society, entirely surrounded by the charming springer-spaniel exuberance of undergraduates."
"Mom!"
I did have secrets. I wanted to be a writer, with college teaching as my safety net. And I was deeply involved with another man, an elderly, ugly Englishman, old-fashioned yet full of fascinating perceptions, and dead since 1882. To this day I love the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope with "an affection that I cannot myself fathom or understand," as he described his own eccentric attachment to fox hunting.
My ostensible goal was to study the marvelous collection of Trollope manuscripts donated to Princeton by the great bibliophile Robert Taylor. And thanks to kind professors and librarians, especially A. Walton Litz '51 in the English department and Nancy Coffin in the Taylor Room, I did it. But my true goal was to discover, to uncover, Anthony Trollope, the obsessive author of 47 novels. Why and how did he write? And why does he speak so directly to me? In some ways I've spent the last 20 years trying to answer those questions.
Since Princeton, I've been more of a writer than a teacher, and some of my books are for children. I believe that an author cannot do anything more important than encourage young readers, and it's a great joy to hear a small girl confide, "You wrote my first real novel."
It's an equal joy to find myself at this moment in the middle of writing an adult novel (an activity rather like building a bridge from matchsticks and gum). Based on family papers I found in an iron strongbox, my story moves between Victorian England and the American West. It's long, with plots and subplots and a big cast of characters, and it really began at Princeton, when I asked those questions about Trollope. But many answers, I know now, aren't found in school. Not even graduate school.
Susan Lowell Humphreys' books include The Three Little Javelinas (Northland, 1992) and Ganado Red (Milkweed, 1988).
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