(the) American (Novel of)

88 Alison Leigh Brown
my students to get tenure-track jobs. This is what I do when I am not
writing on my current paper. (Sweetheart, you would die to read it but
it is two drafts away from that. It is a comment on the bitchiness
underlying the civility in Austen’s middle-period novels. I am having
ever so much fun with it and think it will be a perfect conference paper
for the Literature and Civility conference—I’ve covered both bases,
don’t you think? Then I can send it out, where I don’t know. Finally,
it will be a good chapter for the book I’m working on too. So three
birds with one stone, eh?)
In any case, of course I will not help in sabotaging Kathy’s career.
You are not mistaken in your assessment of her; she is an insipid,
humorless little thing, but so what? The academy needs such creatures
to function. Who else would do all that committee work? So enough
of your petty meanness. Really darling you must move down here
where manners abound. I fear that I do not believe in American culture.
We are worlds apart from south to north. If we were to sabotage
dear Kathy we would have to do an encoded silent body discourse with
each other on the subject, do our worst work, and never reference it
again. You are losing your touch there in the Midwest. No offense intended
if these comments have set you fuming. By the time you receive
this we will have chatted on the phone and I can tell you in person, as
it were, my incontrovertible refusal to participate in such shenanigans.
In your letter you ask forgiveness for your most recent attempts
to manipulate me. Darling. If you had read my penultimate letter you
would recall that this is not the way in which you should talk to me.
You will recall my whole forgiveness/forgetting riff. (In this context,
one might say, for instance, “Forget Kathy.”) If you wish to engage me
in this sort of discourse you would do better to give me reasons to
forget what you had said. But don’t do me the incivility of begging my
forgiveness. To forgive is always uncivil. The assumptions of forgiveness
involve all sorts of inequalities and presumed states of grace, or lack
thereof, which seem a little out of place from our theological perspectives.
I mean, darling, do you suppose that an atheist can forgive another?
How exactly would that make sense? No, dear heart, what we
must do as a fast and true friend is forget the injustices we have
inflicted on each other. I can say no more on this subject. But on other
subjects I can converse at length, as you know all too well. And I am
holding you to your vow of silence by refusing to comment further.