The English department I hoped to join had two tenure-track jobs going that year, and one of them looked straightforward enough. They needed a medievalist, someone to do Chaucer and Beowulf; though later I learned the position had long been a revolving door, ever since a negative tenure decision had ended up in the courts. But the spot I applied for was a different one, even if it too spoke to a history of trouble, a department that couldn’t decide what it wanted. The ad in the MLA job list named five fields, and candidates had to have two of them. British literature of the Romantic, or modern, or contemporary periods; and then film or, finally, linguistics. I knew almost nothing about film and even less about linguistics; nor was I entirely sure about the difference between the modern and the contemporary. Still, I could cover the twentieth century, and once hired I was also told to learn as much about the movies as I needed to teach them to freshmen. A real film person would have to wait.
Two spots—and two more the next year, a film person indeed, along with a Shakespearian. It seems incredible now, when my old department’s faculty lines have been cut from something like twenty-three to fourteen, and every retirement, my own included, ratchets up the collective anxiety about the improbability of any replacement at all. But what seem really incredible, in retrospect, are the circumstances of my own first interview. A woman in the department lived in Cambridge, a morning’s drive from campus. Since two jobs meant more MLA interviews than anyone’s conference schedule could handle, why not have the search committee make a road trip and meet some people in her living room? I had been in the Boston area for a couple of years, where my then-wife was in law school, and was teaching freshman writing at Tufts while trying to finish a dissertation for my West Coast program. So a few days before Christmas I was called to a gray-green house on Lancaster Street, half a mile north of the Cambridge Common, where four of the six people who faced me had Harvard PhDs. It must have seemed natural to them to find their candidates in that zip code; and, honestly, it seemed natural to me as well.
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