Try, Try Again

By Norman D. Plummer

As is the case with many doctoral students in large English departments, my financial support for the past six years has been contingent on teaching freshman composition. I have expended a good deal of energy trying to divest young undergraduates of the appalling adolescent belief that the best writing is measured in direct proportion to the number of clichés used.

And as much as I was, and still am, convinced that overly idiomatic language stops thought rather than facilitates it, a few of those bits of wisdom continue to seep into my own thinking. Namely: "Things are never as bad as they seem; they could always be worse." My guess is that most Ph.D. students have owned that particular maxim at some time or another. I've certainly convinced my fiancée that it is, in fact, the only socially responsible position and, therefore, the source of much solace.

But then, in the summer of 2006, I thought I had finally reached what could only be the pinnacle of academic pressure. Things could not have gotten worse, and they were exactly as bad as they seemed. You probably think you've got a story, one that'll stand up to any nightmare scenario -- but just give me a few paragraphs.

Earlier that year came confirmation that my paper had been accepted at a fairly significant single-author conference; even better, it was in Europe. So here was my genius plan: I would leave for England a couple of weeks early, go sightseeing for half of each day, and work on the paper for the rest.

After a week in London, I hopped Ryanair for the Continent. Believe it or not, my plan actually worked. It took a bit longer than anticipated, but three days before I was slated to give a 45-minute talk to widely acknowledged luminaries of my field, I finished writing.

To celebrate, I sat down in a pub to take in a World Cup football match -- the Czech Republic versus the United States, to be precise. It was a fine early evening: The conference began the next day, and I was well prepared. And even though the Americans were beaten rather soundly, I was in Europe, watching the World Cup, and hand-scrawled on a yellow legal pad in the bag sitting next to me was the better part of three years of thinking about an author whose novel is, on most days, still my favorite.

Standing to go, I realized my bag was gone. And, along with it, that crucial legal pad, and my heavily annotated copy of the novel on which my 45-minute presentation was based. With the flick of a practiced criminal wrist, my career was surely sunk.

In a panic, I hurried from alleyway dumpster to shadow-enshrouded garbage can, convinced that the thief would have kept the iPod and digital camera (including the picture of me in front of Stonehenge, my geekiest and most treasured lifelong dream) but ditched the tattered paperback and jargon-encrusted notebook. It was of no value to anyone other than me.

My former possessions were nowhere to be found. All of a sudden, my overseas adventure found me friendless and alone. I had ranged so far from the scene of the crime that it was clear that the only smart decision would be to return to my hostel. Conceding defeat, I raised my hand for a taxi.

At that point, things were as bad as they could get. This was no "my computer crashed and I lost all my work." That fear is somewhat alleviated by the certainty that somewhere, everything that is done on a computer will always exist and, with the assistance of even a mediocre information-technology major, a file can be recovered.

No, this was the work of a career criminal. I still cannot help but picture a pirate, one who plunders for the joy of it, and who sleeps comfortably outside the range of the law's alligator arm.

Slumping into the back seat of the taxi, I flashed the hostel's name and address to a driver with whom I shared not a word of common tongue but who nodded confidently. I was resigned to suffering a sleepless night of imagining my stammered-out apology to the aforementioned group of luminaries, about how I could not deliver my paper, as it had been taken from me under the most heinous circumstances.

But even the comfort of a cab ride was denied me. Before the driver could pull away, a middle-aged woman began gesticulating wildly into the passenger-side front window, at which point the driver got out, opened the car door nearest me, and gestured that I was to evacuate the seat. Immediately.

In perfect cinematic tragedy, as I began my slow trudge in the direction I believed was the hostel, it began to rain for the first time on my trip.

So I started over. Someone at the conference actually had an electronic copy of that very long novel saved on a stick drive; within that file, I was able to perform keyword searches for the words that meant most to my talk. The day before I was slated to speak, holed up in that tiny hostel, I reproduced as much of the paper as I could on the hostel's slow, shared computer. And a few people actually claimed, probably because word of my plight had spread quickly, that it was pretty good.

For a while, I believed I had experienced as much pressure as one could in an academic career. When my first run on the market produced nothing but a series of politely penned "many qualified candidates" letters, I was undaunted. After all, who would hire a soon-to-be-finished 20th-century Americanist when so many others were available who already had their degrees? I knew I needed to complete the Ph.D. before I could get the job. It was disappointing, but not really pressure.

And, really, what could feel like pressure after one has had his talk stolen, a mere 72 hours before it was to be given to a roomful of experts?

Nothing, I suppose, except for real pressure. In May, my fiancée found out she was pregnant.

To be clear: This is nothing like having one's smiling Stonehenge photo stolen. It is nothing even like having three years of one's life swiped from a Western European, English-style pub during a World Cup match. It is the greatest thing in the world -- simultaneously, the greatest gift and the greatest responsibility.

All at once, my career seems less a reward for graduate work well done than a means to an end. It is no longer the validation of 10 years of threadbare student living, or six years of graduate labor, or two-and-a-half years of spine-curving dissertation research and writing. It has become the only way I know how to keep my family in food, and diapers, and medical insurance.

It is precisely the biggest deal in the world that I can imagine.

So I have now finished my dissertation. And I'm busting my posterior to procure sufficient adjunct work to pay our bills, as well as produce sufficient publications to set myself up for that elusive tenure-track job in contemporary American literature.

My fiancée and I still console ourselves with the knowledge that things could be worse: We have amazing families, and wonderful friends, and faith in one another. But I also have the sweetest carrot, and most biting stick, to spur me along -- my child is due during the Modern Language Association's annual conference. I'm starting to get the feeling that I have no idea how intense the pressure can get.

I still believe that clichés make for weak writing. But maybe some of them have merit. Like maybe things do happen for a reason. So this hiring season, I'll get back up on that horse, and try, try again, and get going as the going gets tough, and bear my cross, and embody every other idiotic idiom I have prevented my freshman composition students from using to signify persistence.