The Pearly Gates Close

Sally is bored of her writing tone. She has to talk like this all day – though she gets away with a livelier style whenever she can.

Professor Mitty obviously was enjoying freedom from the constraint of academic writing with his daft little bit of nonsense. She had kept his work from the writing group, whilst ensuring he had not hung on to hers – that really would be Pearl Before Swine.

I shall analyse it, Sally is now speaking directly and verbatim. Does he think that making words appear to odd ways on the page is creativity? whoosh zoom                                                             the night sky lights up the florid thoughts of the                                                                         zzz zzz

Is he trying to be neo Lewis Carroll? No doubt there'll be some intellectual excuse for this – he’ll have to be neo somebody! He’ll say he has a relationship with words on the page, scatter–ology or some daft made up phrase to infer a thousand layers if pretentious meanings.

I like my anal phase comment. I think he's having a I Really Ought to Retire Crisis, and is being, if not rebirthed, going back to his early twenties to the writing career he’s always wanted but ran out of money so he stayed in uni which he thought was the next best thing. He shared this with me over a glass of sherry in his living room, which I once would’ve told you was a precious day, but being a writer’s writer you’d have perceived that and would prefer not to be told. He’s forgotten how to write after all those years of sensible – no dull - prose, telling all his students to write the same five chapters in their thesis. How can he bear to be an examiner and read so much of the same? Sometimes I think we his students were little elves to his Santa. He had a big project and hoped that our work would help his. Our thesis titles got clipped to be ever more like his research field. How apt that I mistyped rehash for research. But as our supervisor, he held sway so that we didn’t see over time how far our proposals were stretched. Over 6 years, he probably thought I couldn’t trace such a trajectory. But I did.

I want to share the worst of it – something which has recently been dragged out of its cupboard and I am fearful that this could change my …ahem, career in most detrimental ways.

He liked me because I am original, but my most original work was something that he had also written. As an undergraduate, this had happened in an essay, and the kindly professor had credited me with it as original. How generous. But not HE, Mitty. He said that at post doctoral level I should be aware of all the work in the field and especially my own supervisor’s. This does not sound unreasonable but my dear readers, the truth is….

he stole from me. Having been, er shall we say channelled into a line of study that I hadn’t originally wanted to go in, I was thrilled to find an exciting new angle which won me much attention. But I say that he saw that his pupil was about to overtake her master, and that he wanted his career to go out with a bang. Rumour has it that he was now so expensive that the university hoped to encourage him to retire; and therefore he was supposedly nearly at the end of his formal working life.

The idea was partly thrashed out through discussions we had; no – discussions suggest that I was speaking as much as he. Seminars are soliloquies and supervisions were just that  - a kind of telling off, and then him staring out of the window and philosophising. Sometimes I think he was schizophrenic, yes I know I have chicket and you’re probably thinking that too is a mental disorder. However this is as inaccurate as it is offensive and I have charged people against the discrimination act with such talk. But my point is that he seemed to not be able to tell the difference between inner and outer dialogue. He talked for both of us, as if he couldn’t tell the difference between his questions and my answers. I understand I was not the only one who felt this. But when I had been permitted to speak – or I had grown assertive and put in my ideas  - I had spoken of… I can’t remember now if I pitched an idea, elucidated or expanded… In truth the exact origin of this thesis is a little grey. We had planned to work together but by now I could see that I could not work with him; and neither of us wanted to give the idea to the other.