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Chapter 6: John Peck: The Road to Zurich
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Chapter Six John Peck The Road to Zurich “Mere Amusements” Let me begin by going back to Robert Pinsky’s “Essay on Psychiatrists ,” with its depiction of Yvor Winters addressing his graduate students circa 1963: you will grow up To become happy, sentimental old college professors, Because they were men of genius, and you Are not; and the ideas that were vital To them are mere amusements to you. Those of us who entered the academic job market in the 1990s faced long odds in our quests to become happy, sentimental old college professors. The job market was desperately anemic, especially in the humanities, so when one of our number landed a decent tenuretrack job in his or her field of studies, we were torn between celebration and envy. We all harbored a fear that our fate would be to serve as the part-time replacements for a slowly retiring generation of tenured, tweedy dinosaurs. Happy, sentimental old college professors ? We should be so lucky. We were terrified at the prospect 189 of ending up as embittered, disillusioned, old diploma-mill adjuncts. In the gallows-humor atmosphere of the hotel lobbies of late-1990s MLA conventions, though, among the newly purchased navy-blue blazers and the leather portfolios full of sample syllabi, there was one consolation : we were not alone in our misery. We had been preceded by a generation that faced a market even more benighted, an MLA job list even more barren and stricken than ours. Back in 1970, when John Peck was still three years from finishing “Pound’s Idylls, with Chapters on Catullus, Landor, and Browning,” his enormous 700 page dissertation, the chairman of the MLA’s Commission to Study the Job Market reached the “melancholy conclusion” that the new generation of Ph.D.s faced a situation that “could turn grim indeed” (Orr 1185). His sad prophecy soon came to pass. Peck confronted a job market that was rapidly coming to resemble the sterile, Eliotic wasteland that so many of his fellow Ph.D.s had spent years annotating and explicating. He, unlike so many others, did well, starting with a visiting position at Princeton and moving on to a tenuretrack job at Mount Holyoke, where he made tenure after three years. Had he been cut out to be a happy, sentimental old college professor, he would have stayed put and been the envy of all the young English Literature Ph.D.s of the 1970s, who found themselves eking out uncertain livings teaching huge survey courses at obscure institutions in states devoid of coastline. Instead, Peck left. In 1982, one of the bleakest years for academic employment on record, Peck resigned his associate professorship and went to Zurich, Switzerland, where for the next dozen years he studied at the C.G. Jung Institute. It is a move almost beyond understanding for a happy, sentimental, college professor such as myself. Beyond understanding, that is, until one realizes that Peck’s writing of a 700-page thesis (such overkill, from an institutional standpoint) and his quitting an enviable tenured post are symptoms of the same condition. We might call this intellectual seriousness, a condition shared by Yvor Winters. Winters experienced intellectual imperatives as personal imperatives . When he arrived at the conclusion that modernist poetics led to mental instability and moral decrepitude, he abandoned them to become a neo-Augustan. To understand just how strange this is, you may ask yourself whether you or any of your colleagues have ever felt a moral 190 | John Peck [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:33 GMT) imperative to change your writing style and, if so, whether you devoted decades to carefully developing and defending your new style. Is style that serious to you? For most of us, the answer would be no. Peck’s deepest affinity with Winters—an affinity deeper than the subscription to any particular tenet of Wintersian doctrine—comes through the sharing of this disposition, and this conflation of the intellectual and the personal. When Peck left Mount Holyoke for Zurich, he did not do so for professional reasons or in response to any familial or romantic developments. He did so because he sensed an urgent need to understand more fully his own poetics, and he found in Carl Jung a mind that had thought deeply on the matters most urgent to him. Unlike his more conventional colleagues, Peck did not wait for a sabbatical, scan the back pages of...