A Tenured Professor, by John Kenneth Galbraith
Bownam, James
nce upon a time there was a poor governess whose life had been largely spent amid romantic daydreams of her own invention. Having recently recovered from an unhappy and unreciprocated passion for a...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990...
...But the information is gratuitous, an academic distillation of some offstage experience whose comic potential he couldn't be bothered to exploit dramatically...
...None of this, however, could be an excuse for relaxation in weapons devlopment [sic...
...Even liberals, it seems to me, would rather read a novel based on the exploits of Donald Trump...
...She returns to him and they live happily ever after as a rich married couple...
...Here is an example of it...
...Another man, a minister of the church, falls in love with her, but, though tempted, she rejects him because of her hopeless passion for the first man...
...The only real character in this book is its omniscient narrator, who sounds suspiciously like good old Uncle Ken himself, everybody's favorite socialist...
...People talk...
...few can be so excited by the tale of a Harvard egghead who finds true happiness by using his easily acquired wealth to relieve Harvard of its South African securities and endow chairs of "peace studies" at the service academies...
...U nfortunately for Galbraith, however, she does have two, more serious advantages over him: the breadth of her appeal and the passion and energy of her writing...
...All over the English-speaking world, young ladies thrilled vicariously to Charlotte Brontes exercise in wish-fulfillment...
...Perhaps it does...
...But Galbraith's implicit advice boils down to this: buy low, sell high—or rather, buy high, sell short...
...Then there is a fire, the madwoman in the attic is burned to death, and the widower, having been blinded in his attempt to save her, contacts his lost love, the governess, by telepathy to let her know that he needs her more than ever...
...Clever (if trendy...
...A respectful show of attention is all that is required until the listener takes over in his or her turn...
...But he works so hard at being witty that the result might be described as urbane blight—a murrain upon the human and dramatic landscape of the novel...
...His years of familiarity with that milieu seem to have robbed him of his own ability to listen—and so to create interesting and believable characters...
...Moreover, you'd think that the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo would have some better use for the money than reforming the military-industrial complex or countering the pernicious influence of Political Action Committees...
...It is true that Professor Galbraith, who has a reputation for wit and urbanity to keep up, writes well in a desiccated sort of way...
...That genius results, in A Tenured Professor, in something called the IRAT, or Index of Irrational Expectations—a foolproof scheme for anticipating movements in the stock market, or in individual stocks, which we know is based upon the natural assumption of the Harvard petty gentry that the crowd is always wrong but about which further details and technicalities are tantalizingly unforthcoming...
...plain girls who knew that they would be lucky to marry at all found there a wild hope that, like plain Jane Eyre, they might by virtue of wit and spirit alone enthrall someone like the dashing Mr...
...Don't quit your day job...
...When it transpires, in the novel, that the man is married—to a madwoman who is kept locked up in the attic—he begs the heroine to stay with him...
...Rochester—someone rich and visually handicapped...
...That had a need and a life of its own...
...See what you think: A Soviet ambition to take over and run anything so intricate as the West German or Japanese economy was coming to seem somewhat improbable...
...If your dream is to put the world to rights by using a private fortune to accomplishwhat democracy stubbornly refuses to attempt, that won't matter to you...
...For one thing, Marvin has nothing of Galbraith's wit and patrician charm...
...Even the ostensible hero, Montgomery Marvin, does not so much as rise to the level of his creator's alter ego, as Jane Eyre does, with some benefit to her eponymous romance...
...Now, nearly a century and a half later, an old economics professor, whose voice has been little heeded among economists or businessmen, has written a novel about a young economics professor who is so brilliant that economists and businessmen alike are James Bowman is American correspondent of the Spectator of London...
...For all I know, what passes for political satire in A Tenured Professor may have them slapping their thighs and wiping the tears of laughter from their eyes...
...A TENURED PROFESSOR John Kenneth Galbraith/Houghton Mifflin/197 pp...
...forced to sit up and take notice...
...It would be something if the book was at least useful, like Napoleon Hill's Do You Sincerely Want to Be Rich...
...At any rate, the theme is something less than universal in its appeal, which is a fact likely to be reflected in the book's permanent reputation, if not in its immediate sales figures...
...Having recently recovered from an unhappy and unreciprocated passion for a married employer and on the verge of descending into old maidenhood, she wrote a novel about a poor governess who captivates her wealthy and romantically mysterious employer...
...a clever pundit whose contributions to political discourse have been treated with little deference in Washington has written a novel about a man whose wealth and power, amassed by sheer cleverness, shake Washington to its foundations...
...Green girls whose boringly domestic futures promised little of romance found there a romance for themselves that was almost believable...
...Rochester respect you more for it in the end...
...a left-liberal, whose tired prescriptions for the common weal are increasingly disregarded even by those who call themselves "liberal," has written a novel about a left-liberal who is able to advance progressive causes from his house in Cambridge without the tiresome necessity of getting elected to anything...
...So also its passion, which was shared by many Americans, for mutually assured destruction...
...Here he is at the top of his form: By long custom, social discourse in Cambridge is intended to impart and only rarely to obtain information...
...Charlotte Bronte has nothing on John Kenneth Galbraith for wish-fulfillment...
...That need and that life were threatened by SPELCO's ill-advised, irresponsible preparation for peacetime production...
...For another, Galbraith has nothing of Marvin's economic genius...
...Everyone can believe in the image of happiness afforded by the tale of a poor, unattractive girl's marriage, after many tribulations, to a wealthy man who adores her...
...What a price the poor professor has paid for this insight into the social mores of Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...He does have a mad wife, it's true...
...it is not expected that anyone will listen...
...No one has ever been known to repeat what he or she has heard at a party or other social gathering, only what he or she has said...
...19.95 James Bowman THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 37 The gags come thick and fast, all right, but somehow you get the feeling that you've heard them before...
...Oh yes, the man's sight is partially restored in the end...
...but instead of locking her in the attic he encourages her to blackmail large corporations to put more women in executive positions—not the most original sort of lunacy these days...
...o f course, they may be out for another sort of delectation...
...But Montgomery Marvin is more boring than St...
...John Rivers, the earnest missionary who fails to persuade Jane Eyre to go off to India with him...
...Jane Eyre was an enormous success...
...But if your dream is to be rich and happy, you would do better to feed your fantasy life on Jane Eyre...
...She refuses...
...moral girls who were getting tired of saying no found there a welcome confirmation that saying no eventually pays off—guys like Mr...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
