I was about to ask how she got interested in the subject, but stopped myself in case I would be trespassing on sensitive personal territory. She noticed my hesitation, and laughed. ‘I can see you’re wondering why I chose such a morbid subject. Everybody does. I was dating this clinical psychologist at Columbia a while back and he was doing a content-analysis of suicide notes for purposes of risk assessment, comparing notes by successful and unsuccessful suicideattempters. He’d acquired a small corpus and I thought it would be interesting to analyse them stylistically, you know? Like, are they a genre? Do people under such extreme stress fall back on rhetorical formulae? Or does their desperation make them transcend the normal limits of their expressive skills?’
‘How can you tell,’ I said, ‘without getting hold of other writings by these unfortunate people?’
‘You can’t, of course, except from internal evidence - every now and then you get a sentence that rises expressively way above the rest of the discourse. But that’s only one aspect of my dissertation.’
I asked her where she was doing the PhD, and was surprised to learn that she is a postgraduate student in our English Department, being supervised by Colin Butterworth.
‘Why in England, rather than America?’ I asked.‘You are American, I take it?’ Her accent was not strongly marked by any drawl or twang, but it was unmistakable.
‘Right. When Bush was re-elected I felt I just had to get out of the country. I’d been working for the Kerry campaign for months and I was so depressed . . .’
‘You were a volunteer?’ I asked.
‘No, I was paid. I’d been thinking of working in government actually, but I decided to go back to school, try for an academic career. I like England, I spent some time here when I was a kid - my dad had a job at the Embassy in London. And doing a PhD here costs a whole lot less than in the States. I didn’t realise when I applied that’s because they don’t teach you anything.’ She laughed as I showed my surprise at this judgement. ‘I mean there are no courses, no exams, just the dissertation, which you’re expected to do on your own, with an occasional meeting with your supervisor.’>
‘Surely there’s a research seminar of some kind?’ I said.
‘You mean where people get to talk about what they’re working on, and everyone else is terribly polite and supportive and asks easy questions? Yeah, we have that,’ she said drily. ‘Fortunately I like working on my own. The system suits me fine, or it would do if the supervisions were any good.’
‘You don’t get on with Professor Butterworth?’ I asked. I began to understand why she had not wanted to meet me on the campus.
‘That’s an understatement,’ she said.‘I read an article by him about the effect of email on epistolary style which made me think he would be a good person to work with, that’s why I applied to come here, but he’s really been no help at all.’
‘He probably just doesn’t have enough time,’ I said. ‘He’s probably too busy attending meetings, and preparing budgets, and making staff assessments, and doing all the other things that professors have to do nowadays instead of thinking.’
‘Maybe, but he’s not very smart either,’ Alex said.
I could not suppress a faint smile of complicity in this judgement. I have always thought Butterworth’s reputation is somewhat inflated, owing more to his instinct for trendy subjects, and his popularity with the media as a pundit on contemporary linguistic usage, than to original scholarship. But I was disconcerted by her next remark.
‘That’s why I want you to supervise me.’ She said that she had been reading a lot of my work lately and been very impressed by it. ‘I’d read some things before, of course, way back, when I was doing my Master’s at Columbia, but when I found out you actually taught here till recently, I was really excited . . . I’ve read everything by you in the Library. I think you’re just the adviser I need.’
‘But I’m retired,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But I’ve heard that some retired faculty go on supervising graduate students.’
‘Those would be students they were supervising before they retired,’ I explained.‘They’re just seeing them through to the completion of their dissertations. But one can’t take on new students after full retirement.’
‘Can’t one?’ she said, with a little pouting smile. ‘Can’t he make a special arrangement?’