Quad Talk: Kindness of actress was deserving of a pint

The last few hours have been such delicious agony that I almost forgot I had a Quad Talk deadline on the horizon. For I have been consumed today by the loving and laborious production of academic prose. It’s the first time since the beginning of the academic year in October and I’m feeling a bit rusty.

You may not appreciate the difficult pleasures involved in revising, expanding and referencing an academic paper. Whenever I’m engaged in such an activity I always think of Anne Hathaway (the actress, not Shakespeare’s wife). She once gave me some heartfelt words of encouragement about these matters.

It was the year of my second ever academic conference, which took place in Bordeaux, and during which I’d read aloud my first ever paper, very nervously, to an audience of five. I don’t remember much about the celebratory wine stained dinner afterwards, but it was during my fat hangover on the TGV the next morning that I planned grimly to revise my paper into an article for a journal.

Several months later I received the anonymous readers’ reports on the article that I had eventually submitted, reports that should determine whether or not the essay is worthy of publication. Reader 2, clearly an elderly and benign academic, enthused about how I had made “a fine case of showing how Wallace Stevens carried the idea of the dandy, the flâneur, far beyond the usual notions of manner and style and into the realm of metaphysics and narrative process”.

It was Reader 1 who caused me some considerable consternation. My work on Milton was deemed “poor” (“to the point of embarrassment”), and it was asked: “Has he never read any Christopher Ricks, for example, on how writers talk to each other in their poems? Or A or B or C?” Finally, most devastatingly of all: “Still, the article shows enthusiasm, and the author might want to think about what his real subject is.” It was like getting a bad school report or an unfriendly review by Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books.

When I quoted those lines to Anne Hathaway in a Dublin pub the day that I received them (she was seated with a friend of mine who’d been acting in a film with her that summer), rather sweetly she tried to console me by recounting the bad reviews an early film of hers had received. “But, hey,” she concluded, “you know what, that film went on to gross over $100 million”. I replied, in utter dejection, but much to my friend’s amusement: “I don’t think my PhD thesis is going to make $100 million, Anne.”

I still genuinely appreciate the actress’s attempt to raise me from academic despondency, but I now know that I was right about my thesis, or any of my academic writings for that matter, not making $100 million. While I was fishing out those readers’ reports from over a decade ago I also happened upon the last royalty statement for my first book. Apparently, The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens made me £5.38 last year: barely enough money to buy Anne Hathaway a pint and a packet of crisps to thank her for her kind words.