tried to strike up a conversation, I closed my eyes and pretended to be dreaming.
From this point on, I should promise to tell the truth.
*
During Crispin’s last months we became closer than I expected. I even reached the point of being able to cuss in his company. The friendship started with me doing a profile on him for my class with Lis Harris. Crispin and I would sit stiffly formal, a tape recorder like a string of barbed wire between us, always at some coffee shop or restaurant. Usually Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway, the one they always used in
Seinfeld
. I finished the semester and turned in the profile. I had a feeling Crispin wanted to see it, though he didn’t askand I didn’t offer. A couple of weeks after our last interview I was finally invited into his office for a cup of Lapsang souchong and some madeleines. He was visibly more at ease now that he was no longer under scrutiny. His smile, I noticed, was unexpectedly shy. We sat and nibbled and talked about stuff. I don’t remember what. Books, probably. Writing. Crumbs clung to the front of his argyle sweater. When I saw him the next day they were still there.
I don’t know if it was from need or whether he actually liked me, but we started to hang out often. In the beginning I felt uncomfortable, the way one does when first spending time with the obviously lonely. Crispin was a fixture on the busy campus, and his solitude was as familiar to everyone as the bronze Alma Mater statue. Every morning and afternoon he would lope up and down the steps between Butler Library and his office in Philosophy Hall—his countenance rueful, his attire that of a flaneur with tenure. He reminded me of the way a Tokyoite looks in a cowboy hat, though Crispin somehow almost succeeded with his affectation of brown tweeds and a wilting red fedora with a green feather in its band. Always a variation of that outfit, no matter what the weather; always a notebook covered in orange suede tucked under his arm. Usually he’d be staring into an open book; I watched with a mix of anxiety and guilty anticipation to see whether he’d trip or be hit on the head with a football or Frisbee.
During our interviews, however, he was lucid and confident. He held court on such subjects as the primacy of literature as “
the
art,
the
record, of the human condition”; or the “arbitrary scrim” between fiction and nonfiction; or the ailments of our national literature; or the challenges of literary bricolage as a narrative structure. I learned much from Crispin, though a lot of the things he went on about passed over my head. But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion.
In his mind, the trivial shared equal prestige with the academic, and his sudden flaring intensities, set off by a word, an image, a private thought, made his conversation unpredictable. Listening, you lived vicariously within the corners of a kind of universal mind, thenear and far reaches of the universe, the infinite expanses of the ages. An idle conversation could, for example, and did once, stretch elegantly from fractals to the complex etymologies of Filipino slang to the honest agonies of self-doubt in Steinbeck’s diaries, then onward to the intimate but epic histories of Herodotus and the challenge of fitting reality “into the lacy corset of language,” to the shortcomings of Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage, and then forward to José Rizal’s reversal of the Spanish derogatory
indio
into a mark of pride as “Los Indios Bravos,” and comparing such self-conscious flippings of meaning to African-Americans’ exclusive appropriation of the word “nigger”; from there Crispin lingered on Australian Aboriginals and their dot paintings as “the last frontier of modern art,” before growing flushed over the geologic wonders extant from
From this point on, I should promise to tell the truth.
*
During Crispin’s last months we became closer than I expected. I even reached the point of being able to cuss in his company. The friendship started with me doing a profile on him for my class with Lis Harris. Crispin and I would sit stiffly formal, a tape recorder like a string of barbed wire between us, always at some coffee shop or restaurant. Usually Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway, the one they always used in
Seinfeld
. I finished the semester and turned in the profile. I had a feeling Crispin wanted to see it, though he didn’t askand I didn’t offer. A couple of weeks after our last interview I was finally invited into his office for a cup of Lapsang souchong and some madeleines. He was visibly more at ease now that he was no longer under scrutiny. His smile, I noticed, was unexpectedly shy. We sat and nibbled and talked about stuff. I don’t remember what. Books, probably. Writing. Crumbs clung to the front of his argyle sweater. When I saw him the next day they were still there.
I don’t know if it was from need or whether he actually liked me, but we started to hang out often. In the beginning I felt uncomfortable, the way one does when first spending time with the obviously lonely. Crispin was a fixture on the busy campus, and his solitude was as familiar to everyone as the bronze Alma Mater statue. Every morning and afternoon he would lope up and down the steps between Butler Library and his office in Philosophy Hall—his countenance rueful, his attire that of a flaneur with tenure. He reminded me of the way a Tokyoite looks in a cowboy hat, though Crispin somehow almost succeeded with his affectation of brown tweeds and a wilting red fedora with a green feather in its band. Always a variation of that outfit, no matter what the weather; always a notebook covered in orange suede tucked under his arm. Usually he’d be staring into an open book; I watched with a mix of anxiety and guilty anticipation to see whether he’d trip or be hit on the head with a football or Frisbee.
During our interviews, however, he was lucid and confident. He held court on such subjects as the primacy of literature as “
the
art,
the
record, of the human condition”; or the “arbitrary scrim” between fiction and nonfiction; or the ailments of our national literature; or the challenges of literary bricolage as a narrative structure. I learned much from Crispin, though a lot of the things he went on about passed over my head. But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion.
In his mind, the trivial shared equal prestige with the academic, and his sudden flaring intensities, set off by a word, an image, a private thought, made his conversation unpredictable. Listening, you lived vicariously within the corners of a kind of universal mind, thenear and far reaches of the universe, the infinite expanses of the ages. An idle conversation could, for example, and did once, stretch elegantly from fractals to the complex etymologies of Filipino slang to the honest agonies of self-doubt in Steinbeck’s diaries, then onward to the intimate but epic histories of Herodotus and the challenge of fitting reality “into the lacy corset of language,” to the shortcomings of Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage, and then forward to José Rizal’s reversal of the Spanish derogatory
indio
into a mark of pride as “Los Indios Bravos,” and comparing such self-conscious flippings of meaning to African-Americans’ exclusive appropriation of the word “nigger”; from there Crispin lingered on Australian Aboriginals and their dot paintings as “the last frontier of modern art,” before growing flushed over the geologic wonders extant from
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