The Transom: Caveat Publicatur

Had he not become a member of the professoriat, he might have been a grifter, a con man coming into town to fleece the unsuspecting locals before catching a bus to the next burg up the highway. Born a hundred years earlier, he might have been a snake-oil salesman, hawking useless concoctions from the back of a gaudy wagon pulled by a team of spavined horses. Living in the Middle Ages, he might have travelled from village to village, peddling enough splinters from the True Cross to build a good-sized barn.

Instead, he got himself a PhD, became a professor, and spent a good deal of time victimizing scholarly houses, professional journals, and editors generally.

He was a scoundrel.

Aside from that . . . well, the truth is, you couldn’t get away from it. He seemed amiable enough, but he had a look about him, a look that said, ‘I’m sizing you up, to see if you are friend or foe and whether, in either capacity, I can use you to my advantage. And if I can, rest assured that I will.’

Nobody knew what made him the way he was. Perhaps he’d had an unhappy childhood. Perhaps he’d been denied things he’d always wanted. He spoke incessantly about money, so perhaps that was one of the things he’d always wanted. He said he had plenty of it, with more rolling in every day. He’d tell you all about how much money he’d made last year, how much he was making this year, and how much he was sure to make next year. You guessed that he must have all that dough stashed away somewhere, because none of it was evident, either in his appearance or his behaviour. His wardrobe could have been selected right off the rack at a thrift shop. You had time to contemplate the clashing colours of his mismatched threads when he invited you to lunch, gave you a monologue about his money, and concluded the affair by asking the waiter for separate cheques. Some other things he did were considerably less amusing.

The scoundrel published enough to obtain a position at a second-rate university that believed it had found a celebrity scholar. He’d tell you he published so much that his new colleagues were jealous of him. He revelled in their discomfort. To add insult to injury, he wrote a book exposing the foibles (classroom and otherwise) of some of those colleagues, publishing it under a nom de plume (or perhaps de guerre), making the second-rate university look even worse than it was. He’d had the gall to bite the hand that fed him, but he’d done it in the dark. Courageously, don’t you know.

But not to worry. Anonymity did not suit the scoundrel, and he soon announced to all and sundry that he was the author of the exposé. Then, to add a bit of icing to the cake, he persuaded the editors of a reputable journal to allow him to review his own book. How he persuaded those editors is anybody’s guess, but he did it; and when the review appeared, the scoundrel could be said to have betrayed his vocation twice. And the journal lost much, if not most, of its credibility.

The episode only encouraged the scoundrel. He wrote well enough, if a bit too quickly and carelessly, but he could grind out the prose on schedule, and he was able to have his way with publishers—characteristics he claimed placed him several rungs above his colleagues on the ladder leading to success. He was prideful and arrogant, personality traits he tried to disguise beneath an aw-shucks-I’m-just-an-ol’-country-boy demeanour.

He’d tell you a story about the time he planned a trip to a certain foreign country and sold the idea for a book about it to a large publishing house. The advance, he’d tell you, was substantial. When the time came for his departure, however, difficulties arose and he could not make the trip...