Elaine Showalter

‘We’re ideally situated,’ said my host from the University of Lethbridge: ‘We’re three hours’ drive from Calgary and an hour from Glacier National Park.’ Not everyone would say the location was ideal but that sort of cheerfulness was typical of many academics teaching off the beaten path in the United States and Canada. Invited to do so by Phi Beta Kappa, the American university honour society, I spent most of the fall toting the torch of learning from sea to shining sea.

In the Seventies, I had a colleague who joined the cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his title in the university catalogue from ‘professor’ to ‘swami’; teach ‘The Wisdom of the East’ instead of ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner’; and replace the furniture in his office with a simple prayer mat. His spiritual elevation seemed almost predestined to David, since his adoring parents had raised him to feel like the Messiah; in contrast, he recalled, his sister had had to settle for being the sister of the Messiah.

Who is hotter than Mary McCarthy? Smarter than Susan Sontag? Funnier than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes. But what really made her famous were her attacks on feminism and academia, coupled with her paeans to pop culture. Naming names and kicking butt, Paglia quickly became a media celebrity, who hit the gossip columns when the model Lauren Hutton took her to the National Motorcycle Show in Manhattan, and posed for Vanity Fair in full make-up and a bulging décolletage, her arms around the bare biceps of the two black bodyguards she calls ‘my centurions’. In the introduction to Sex, Art and American Culture, a bizarre grab-bag of book reviews, interviews, transcribed lectures, classroom notes and personal memorabilia, Paglia gleefully provides an annotated bibliography of all the news articles about herself, and attributes her fame to astrological cycles, the Zeitgeist, and a new Age of Aquarius: ‘At the end of the century and the millennium,’ she writes, ‘the culture has suddenly changed … Anti-establishment mavericks like me are back in fashion.’

In 1895, at a café in Algiers, Oscar Wilde procured a young Arab musician for André Gide, and thereby launched the French writer into a new life. It probably wasn’t Gide’s first homosexual experience, but it was the one he credited in his journals with the initiation into his real sexual nature, the moment, he recalled, in which he began ‘to discover myself – and in myself the tables of a new law’. He felt that he had thrown off the suffocating constraints of a ‘worn-out ethical creed’, and joyfully embraced his true and liberated desire. In later books like Corydon (1924) and If I die (1926), he defended homosexuality as a mark of creative genius, a sexual nonconformity with affinities to other kinds of passionate rebellion.’’