Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Filadelphia Story

Filadelphia Story n 1971 I moved from a ranch outside Buda, Texas (population 498) to Philadelphia (population 1,949,996) to take a teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a big step for me, and like every step in my pursuit of what I had trouble thinking of as a "career," it was happenstance from the word go. At the time I had almost no conception of the University of Pennsylvania, nor of its actual location. I knew it was somewhere on or near the East Coast. Many of my friends in Texas never did get it straight. They always confused Penn with Penn State. They believed that I taught at Penn State for five years, and occasionally, years later, one would ask me what I thought of Joe Paterno--the absolute extent of their interest in the whole idea of Pennsylvania. I 3 Giant Country 4 told them that, overall, he seemed like a nice guy, despite the swarthy ethnic look and the incredibly ugly uniforms his team wore (which they still do). I tried once to tell my friends about a game at Penn, but they couldn't conceive of what I was talking about-the lazy afternoon, the smell of pot wafting through the stands, and down on the field, the Quakers playing like a bunch of hippies throwing Frisbees at a Sunday picnic. I got the Penn job by the usual route, through interviewing at the Modern Language Association. Academicians remember their interviews the way combat veterans recall firefights. Two heavyweights from Cal-Davis, both of whose names I recognized from having read their publications, gave me a very hard time of it, and I felt like a piece of meat from Rocky when I staggered into the Hilton hallway afterwards. But the Penn interview was nice, even pleasant. Of the four interviewers on the Penn team, two were southerners, and that helped relieve my nervousness a bit. What helped most was the tone set by the chairman, R. M. Lumiansky, a famous medievalist and a no-nonsense sort of fellow. He began by asking me to "tell us about that dentist in San Francisco." (He meant the title character of MeTeague, a novel by Frank Norris.) It was very refreshing to hear a question about my dissertation on Norris posed in English because I was trying to write the dissertation in English instead of some special lit crit twilight-zone academese. After gnawing on MeTeague for a while, we moved on to a book I'd recently reviewed, a study of Ezra Pound by a scholar with a Chinese name. The other southerner made a crack about the name's sounding like what they'd had for supper last night. I really liked the joke-it was exactly the kind of humor that would get me in trouble more than once in the years ahead. The interview sped along, and I emerged with no serious hemorrhaging. Back in Buda, early in January, the call came. Lumiansky was direct as always: "We've got a job--do you want it?" I said I had to check a couple of possibilities, and he said okay. Actually I didn't have anything else going except some state university in upstate Filadelphia Story New York where the chainnan said he could see cows from his office window. Outside my window in Buda I could see a horse trying to bite the orange Plymouth sitting in the driveway. In time the horse managed to ripple the hood with his teeth. I waited a decent interval and called Lumiansky back and said yes. Months passed and then it was U-Haul time. In San Marcos where I rented the U-Haul, the man named Daryl-he had it stitched on his shirt in order not to forget-looked up Philadelphia in the U-Haul Book to see if there was a drop-off station there. Of course there had to be, but Daryl said, "Nope, this truck don't go there." "You've got to be kidding," I said. "Lookee here, you don't see it, do you," he said with no small amount of pride in his competence. "Why don't we try the Ps, Daryl?" He was looking it up in the Fs. Arriving in Filadelphia in late August was a bit overwhelming. At ninety degrees, the heat surpasses Texas's IOO-plus temperatures...