Paul's Case

            On Wednesday morning’s song practice it didn’t feel like I was singing any louder than usual and yet more people than usual looked up at my window. Was there something in the air that carried my voice further or was it simply a coincidence?

            Later that morning I received an email from my 20^th Century Literature of the United States professor telling us all that our classroom had changed because the room they’d given us was terrible, windowless and had no teaching station. Our room for the fall would be in the Fitzgerald building. I’d never been there but since room 103 on the main floor of 150 College sounded pretty easy to find I didn’t bother to leave for class early.

            Earlier that day I’d read Augustine’s dialogue On Free Choice of Will. One can definitely see the influence of Plato in his rhetoric.

            Benji knocked on my door to give me the copies he’d made of his apartment and mailbox keys. I gave him my number so he could call me if he locked himself out again. He thanked me again for my help.

            I overdressed again for my ride downtown, as it turned out to be quite a warm evening, but I figured it would be cooler on the way home that night anyway. I got there half an hour early and found that there was an engineering class already in session. I went out the west side of the building and sat in the courtyard of 160 College on a long, polished granite bench. It was a pleasant evening as the sun was leaving the ancient ivy that climbed the old building that connected to the modern glass tower beside it.

            At five minutes before the end of the engineering class I went back inside. When the room was almost clear we all went in and I sat as usual in the front row. It’s an ugly room of yellow brick and just outside the window was the roof of the basement from which jutted a little stack that spewed white steam that seemed to claw desperately at the glass. 

            The old doors at either end of the room had large wooden frames that extended half a meter out from the wall, making them look like antique cabinets.

            The professor, Scott Rayter, a short guy with glasses in his late 40s, was late by about thirteen minutes but he explained that it was because he had gone to the other classroom just in case some students hadn’t gotten his email. He was wearing an expensive looking gold shirt with various patterns of circles arranged the way one often sees paisley patterns done.

            He took a roll call and it turned out that there were three Christians on the list, though I was the only one there.

            He commented that he’d just started wearing glasses that year and he’d always thought that people that put their glasses further out and down on their noses were just being assholes but now he finds that he has to do it.

            Our textbook was the Norton Anthology of American Literature, package II. He was curious about the price and was surprised when someone told him that it cost $108. I’m hoping that I can get by with either the version that I downloaded, a second-hand version of the anthology or second hand copies of each of the texts we’ll be covering.

            He told us we would be at University College starting in January.

            He shared the interesting statistic that 2,000 students are kicked out of U of T every year for either falling below the minimum GPA or for plagiarism. He said that he’d once had a student that had copied word-for-word a, essay from the internet but had just rearranged the sentences.

            For this class we would be reading from a handout a story by Willa Cather, but he went through the syllabus with us to let us know what was in store. We would start with Edith Wharton’s “Souls Belated” followed by “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James. He informed us that James had produced over 100 volumes of work. The other works were Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”; Sui Sin Far’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”; Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery”; “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Dubois; Zora Neal Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Coloured Me” (These last three authors were from the Harlem Renaissance which thrived during prohibition because of White interest and investment in the Black culture of New York. This ended when the money dried up during the crash); Nella Larsen’s “Passing” (which is not in my edition); Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (which I don’t have either); F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”; T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (there’ll be a film viewing too) and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Robert Frost’s “The Mending Wall”, “The Road Not Taken”, “The Oven Bird”, “Fire and Ice”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Design”, “The Gift Outright” (plus a film about him); William Carlos Williams’s “The Young Housewife”, “Portrait of a Lady”, “Queen Anne’s Lace”, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”, “Spring and All”, “To Elsie”, “The Red Wheelbarrow”, “This is Just to Say”, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and a film; Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, a screening of a film with James Franco reading Howl, plus an animated version and a film about the obscenity trial; William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”; Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”; Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man”; Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and the film; selected poems by Sylvia Plath (and a film), Frank O’Hara (our professor’s favourite), Pat Parker and Sharon Olds; Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”; Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith”; Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” plus the film, in which he thought Elizabeth Taylor was amazing. I was going to speak up to inform him that Albee thought she was wrong for the part, but he moved on; Bharatee Mukherjee’s “The Lady from Lucknow”; Thomas King’s “A Coyote Christmas Story” (Thomas King is the author that has popped up the most in other courses and the first that has fallen both under Canadian and U.S. lit because, being Native American he qualifies as both; Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”; and Lorrie Moore’s “People Like that are the Only People Here”.

            He told us that it’s ironic when people in the States say things like, “Speak English!” since the first hundred years of literature from that region wasn’t even in English. He added that in Canada no Canadian authors were included in literature courses until the 1980s.

            He informed us that a lot of U of T professors from the United States have renounced their U.S. citizenship because of the new tax laws that require U.S. citizens to pay taxes on any income they make outside of the United States, even if they haven’t lived in the States for most of their lives.

            Scott read Willa Cather’s entire sixteen-page story, “Paul’s Case” to us. He made several mistakes, mostly getting words wrong. Maybe it was because of his new glasses. The story was written in 1905 and she made changes to subsequent editions but returned to the original in the end. The original title was “Paul’s Case: a Study in Temperament.”

            After the break we had a discussion about the story. He asked what a “case” could be. I said that authorities might study someone’s case, so it could be a case study. Someone, like Paul could be a bad case and there is mention of flowers in cases, protected from the elements. Case histories were a new thing at the time and it was the era of the medicalization of identity.

            Paul lives on Cordelia Street, and Cordelia is the name of the tragic, banished daughter of King Lear. Paul stands out in his Pittsburgh high school because he wears a red carnation. His teachers find the gesture to be arrogant. The flower begins to fade as his stolen money is running out. He buries it in the snow just before committing suicide. He is a hothouse flower in a case. His eyes are described as dilated as if her were addicted to belladonna, which is also a flower. He is an unnatural but more beautiful improvement on nature. He stands out in Pittsburgh but in New York he blends in. He stays at the Waldorf, which was later razed to build the Empire State Building.

            Paul’s death is described of him dropping “back into the immense design of things”. Someone saw it as meaning the greater design of the universe. I said I saw it as the superficial design of his life. The picture making mechanism that was crushed was his brain. The train that killed him was on its way back to Pittsburgh.

            The weather is horrible throughout the story, symbolizing the unnatural indoor environment in which he felt most natural. It rained in Pittsburgh and there was a building snowstorm in New York as his own suicide approached. Nature was against him but he killed himself outside of his protective case even though he had a gun. He did not want to ruin the beauty of the case. Ugliness should only occur in nature.

            The story does not specifically indicate Paul’s sexual orientation but the words “gay”, “fagged” and “faggot” appear in their other meanings.

            Cather took her character’s name from the decadence poet, Paul Verlaine. She was a Pittsburgh schoolteacher. She only had emotional attachments with women. She was appalled by the Oscar Wilde trial.

            It was definitely more comfortable riding home with my jacket on but it really wasn’t that much cooler.