RIP Janel Mueller

Kind of a long story.

Just heard today of the death of an old Nemesis of mine. I thought I might suppress her name, turn her into a type, or a mere character in my personal romance; then decided against it. She’s gone from among us, and immune from any harm I might do.

Her name was Janel Mueller. You can look her up. I enrolled in her course in 17th-century prose in my first year of grad school. I had no idea that grad school was going to be very different from the Care Bears environment of undergrad, but Janel set me straight in short order.

Among the authors we read in Janel’s course were Bacon and Bunyan. Now I’ve always loathed Bacon, and still do. Loathed Bunyan at the time; changed my mind since. Janel was a big fan of both.

I wrote some very callow essays on these Great Men, and Janel tore them to ribbons. The essays I mean. I won’t go into detail, but the nicest thing she ever wrote to me, in a large bold slanting Palmer cursive, which I can still see in my mind’s eye, was this:
“At last I see some twitching signs of life along the spines of your trailing sentences.”

The stylist in me observes that there are too many plurals there, but it was written in the heat of the moment.

I’ve often wondered since, what gave rise to the heat?

She was, it turns out, eight years older than I. I was 21 or 22, so I suppose she was around thirty. Seems amazing to contemplate this.

The year was 1970. Feminism was a coming thing. I was an overconfident undereducated male asshole; Janel a well-read studious feminist, who had, against all odds, a great job and went on to become a huge academic star. As I say, you can look her up; she became a very big deal, and did a lot of really good work. Which I respect immensely.

Our personal chemistry was bad, though; I wasn’t the student for her, or she the teacher for me. I was very annoyed with lit-crit at the time – an attitude which has remained rock-solid, I might add. I was into philology and intellectual history. Janel, though – I remember her talking enthusiastically about the “circularity of the Ciceronian period,” with an enthusiastic sweeping circular gesture. This irritated me immensely. “What’s circular about it,” I muttered. “You mean he finally gets to his verb, the awful old bore?”

(We disagreed about Cicero too.)

I went to see her in her office a few times, earnestly trying to sort this out. And we flirted like mad. The guy/girl thing was definitely part of it – some real mutual attraction. Neither of us could go there, as they say, or wanted to go there, so mutual hate was the only place to go instead.

It all seems very sad to me now; like a missed connection. We had so much in common, really; we liked a lot of the same stuff, and for similar if not exactly the same reasons, and the flirty thing was, or could have been, a sweet lagniappe. Even, or especially, if never acted on.

But she was a lieutenant and I was a buck private in the infantry of the arts and sciences. No fraternization.

I’ve spent the last fifty years or so hating her, or rather, my memory of her, but Samael, that ancient and distinguished servant of God, has a way of wiping such ledgers clean. So let the record show that she was a real lover and close reader of old books, to say no more, though much more might be said. Higher praise have I none. I wish we had liked each other better. Sit levis terra.