Baker's Dozen

with Jenijoy La Belle

The early career of Caltech literature professor Jenijoy La Belle reads like a plot from one of those self-referential novels set in academia: As the Sixties draw to a close, a brand new PhD becomes the first female hired on the tenure track by a university that has just begun to admit undergraduate women. Still very much in the minority eight years later at an institution she has come to love, she is denied tenure and decides to challenge the decision. A charge of sex discrimination follows, leading to an investigation, a settlement, and, in 1979, a second tenure review, at which point La Belle did receive tenure and settled into a long career of teaching literature to predominantly math and science students. The author of two books and numerous articles, she wrote a regular column for the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1990s and in recent years has focused her teaching and research on Shakespeare and poetry. In nearly 40 years at the Institute, she’s certainly compiled enough material to write her own novel, but says it’s more likely to be a memoir. Caltech News editor Heidi Aspaturian served up thirteen questions to one of the Institute’s senior humanities scholars and its longest-serving female professor.

In a 1996 piece that you wrote for the Los Angeles Times, you called teaching “one of the eternal mysteries.” What did you mean?

I meant that one is never quite sure how learning takes place. Good teaching stirs the students, and lousy teaching stifles them, but it’s hard to say what works and what doesn’t. I try to create in my students an awareness of what literature is and what it can give them. But there are days when I feel that I’m just pontificating, and that I’m teaching the subject and not the students. And sometimes the students say nothing, and I can hear them saying nothing. Those are the days when I go back to my office and drip with despair. Other times, somehow I’m able to bring light to the poetry and the prose, and the students are alive, and everything is wonderful. Patience is a great virtue in the classroom. It’s taken me a long long time to learn that the way to draw out a snail is not to grasp its horns.

How do you engage Caltech students, whose main interests are usually elsewhere, in your subject?

I think I start with the idea that literature can be a kind of liberation—not to be confused with escapism—for our students. That it can offer a whole other way of looking at the universe. Not the material universe, but the human universe—the inner world of the mind. If they can perceive it as an alternative way of thinking about their lives, that’s what I think will interest them.

Aside from their obvious intelligence, what do Caltech undergrads bring to the study of literature, and what do they take away from the experience?

What stands out for me is their passion—almost a rage—to excel. The introductory humanities courses here are pass/fail, and it would be perfectly easy for students to write mediocre papers and still pass the courses. And they don’t. They don’t want to just pass. They want to surpass—if “surpass” can be an intransitive verb—and that always amazes me. What I hope they take away from these classes is a larger sense of what it means to be human, a larger sense of the varieties of human experience, and, at least for some of them, an appreciation of aesthetic forms and an awareness that literature can be just as complex and as intellectually demanding as the sciences.

Suppose you had not become a professor—what is your career path not taken?

I grew up thinking I would be a poet—a famous poet, of course. My mother, who was a teacher, brought me up on verse. She started with nursery rhymes and then moved quickly to Blake and Keats and Dickinson and Yeats. And when I went to the University of Washington, I had some wonderful writers as teachers, including the American poet Theodore Roethke and the English poet Henry Reed. But year after year, in verse writing classes, I sat next to a girl named Theresa Bond. And no matter what kind of poem I wrote, hers was better. Also, she had such a store of painful material to write about. She was the oldest of five children, her father was an alcoholic longshoreman, and her family constantly quarreled. For a while, I was actually upset that my parents had given me such an exquisitely happy childhood. So after a few years, and, having at least learned a lot about the craft of poetry, I decided I would become a scholar and a literary critic, which is what I did. I thought, “I know I can’t hope to compete with T. S. Eliot, but if I can’t even write as well as the girl sitting next to me, I’d better go into another field.” And that girl who sat next to me in class grew up to be Tess Gallagher, the acclaimed poet.

So, the moral is: Be careful whom you sit next to.

Do you still write poetry?

I write verse. I wouldn’t call it poetry.

Who are a couple of your favorite authors, and are there any you particularly like whom you consider underrated?

I love the Renaissance poets—Sidney, Spenser, Surrey, Suckling, Herbert, and Herrick. Among contemporary writers, I like the novelists Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim. I love Anita Brookner. All three are stylistically brilliant and have a keen sense of irony. Among underrated writers, Chidiock Tichborne leaps immediately to mind—such a wonderful name. His most famous poem is the “Elegy” he wrote in 1586 in the Tower of London while awaiting execution. He was involved in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, and he was publicly disemboweled while he was still alive—the penalty for treason.
Another poet I think is greatly underrated is Edward Young. He belonged to the “graveyard school” of poets, and his 1740 poem “Night Thoughts” was perhaps reprinted more than any other work in the 18th century. Robespierre slept with “Night Thoughts” under his pillow. So do I. It makes for good, lugubrious reading in the middle of the night.

As a teacher and scholar of Shakespeare, do you have a favorite play?

Othello. It’s so beautiful. Each time I read it, I hope it will come out differently.

What do you say these days to people who maintain that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have written his own works? You’ve written and lectured on this topic.

This is an idea I find so tiresome that I will no longer talk about it at cocktail parties. I think I hear it most from lawyers and retired army colonels. It’s gotten to the point where if someone says, “Don’t you think so-and-so really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?” I will say, “Why, yes. Yes, I do.” Because anti-Stratfordians are emotional and completely illogical. It’s like listening to someone insist that the earth is flat. There is not a shred of hard evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship. Anyone is a noodle who thinks someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays.

Are you interested in science after nearly four decades at Caltech?

The field of science I’m most interested in lately is gerontology, for obvious reasons. But mostly what I’ve learned from science, I’ve found out from scientists themselves. What I know about physics, I learned from Richard Feynman. He used to take me to lunch, and he would use the salt and pepper shakers to explain to me the structure of subatomic particles. And I would always feel that for a moment I had a glimmer of understanding. But, of course, what was really exciting and interesting to me was simply watching him, being with him, and being infused with his enthusiasm for his subject. I never saw him in the classroom, but he was always teaching. And being with him inspired me to take that kind of energy back to my own work. I would come back to my classes, and try to translate his zeal for his subject into how I taught and thought about literature.

What was Feynman’s take on your subject—literature?

Richard did tell me once that he did not like fiction, because it was not factual. I tried to argue with him that while fiction wasn’t factual, it was nevertheless true—great literature has its own commitment to reality. But that didn’t cut much ice. He did like some poetry. We would read some of William Blake’s poetry together. His favorite Blake poem was “Fair Elenor,” which may be the worst poem Blake ever wrote.

I’d like to briefly revisit your tenure battle in the 1970s. In 1977, after being denied tenure you filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which, after an investigation, charged the Institute with sex discrimination. The committee that Caltech appointed to look into the matter recommended that you and the Institute settle out of court, so under an agreement you came back, went through another tenure review, and became a tenured professor in 1979. How do you view all this in retrospect? May I start with a comment that you made to The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1970 shortly after joining the Caltech faculty: “In general, it seems to me that women have equal opportunities. . . . I’m not about to throw away my eyelashes or my lingerie.”— I see you have your head down on your desk.

First, that remark is simply—what can I say? I was insufferable. That much is obvious. But I did like my eyelashes. I’d put them on now except that I can’t see well enough. All that glue can be such a problem.

Okay, I was clueless. But I didn’t then, and I still do not think today, that my tenure issue was exclusively one of discrimination against women. That is what I had to use, because we fight with the weapons we have. The real issue was a division chairman who, in my view, thought he could play fast and loose with the rules. And this subsequently got him into a lot of trouble when he was chancellor of UC Santa Barbara. The main reason that I protested—and I would not have otherwise—was that I always had the complete support of everyone in Caltech’s literature department. It was the fact that the division chair dismissed their opinions, and then went about systematically soliciting opinions that supported his own and disregarding those that didn’t, that was so troubling. I was young, and I knew I could get another teaching position. But I wanted to stay here. I was near the Huntington Library, which is an incredible resource for scholars in my field. I had friends here; and I loved my job. Why would I have wanted to go somewhere else?

Before all that, I was not a very political creature; quite the reverse. But I had complete faith that it would work out at Caltech because I knew that once people knew the truth about what had gone on, I would prevail. I never felt that everyone at Caltech, or the administration itself, was against me.

And by the time it was all over, I had become a feminist. I like to think that I have since become a resource for other women who have come to me when they’re facing similar situations. I try to give them the benefit of my experience so that they don’t waste a lot of time initially barking up all the wrong trees, like I did. They usually want to keep my involvement a secret, and that’s fine. I always try to tell people not to get so depressed over these kinds of issues. It’s an adventure—I found it terribly exciting. Don’t get defeated by it. Enjoy it. And afterward, don’t look back in anger. And never be bitter: it’s ruinous to your looks.

Do you ever think of writing about the case?

I’ve considered making it part of a memoir that I’d like to call My Unauthorized Autobiography. I might write that after I retire, which I also often think about. I read just the other day that Cary Grant walked away from the movies at 62. Just walked away. It’s always good to know when it’s time to do that since we can’t possibly know what will happen in the time we have left.

Don’t you think that’s just as well?

I’m not sure. Sometimes I think if we were all issued with an expiration date, we’d make better use of our time.