Deadline deadbeat

Although advancing, er, maturity, although advancing maturity makes me feel increasingly distant from the lived undergraduate experience in many respects, there is at least one cause for which my sympathy with my students, already heartfelt and entire, only grows in its intensity as the years go by: the subject of writing deadlines. I regard writing deadlines as unfair constraints against intellectual trade and therefore in violation of spiritual antitrust laws which, while suffering from the inconvenience of never actually having been written down, still ought to be recognized by all people of good sense and good will. I have long held writing deadlines in disdain and, whenever possible, in contempt. (It is possible to do so when they apply to me, less so when I must uphold them against the young.) But only fairly recently have I begun actually to forget about them. Last week I simply forgot to write a 'Prince' piece that I had promised — until emailed down, at what was quite literally the last hour, by my unforgiving editors.

The dilemma is a painful one, for of course even in our revolutionary and antinomian age, when so many of the traditional barriers of restraint and decorum once separating the young from the old have crumbled, there are still certain rigid limitations on the commerce between students and professors. I have in my time hitched a ride from a student. I have borrowed a shirt from a student. On more than one occasion I have shaken down a student for a quarter for a parking meter. But the 'Prince' is a student publication, and a professor can never, ever, ask a student for an extension.

Still dilatory cliffhanging with regard to copy deadlines is an honored tradition in the journalistic trade. If a "man of letters" is someone who makes a living from journalistic writing and scholarship over a protracted career, Samuel Johnson has a good claim to an honored place among the first men of letters in English. (Actually there are various scurrilous Elizabethans one might mention, and in French he was anticipated by a few centuries by the woman of letters Christine de Pisan, but I let that pass.) The great Doctor Johnson was nowhere greater than in his sublime indifference to writing deadlines. His ordinary mode of operation, during the years of his "Rambler" essays, appears to have been to defer even to begin to think about a subject for his column until the printer's boy showed up at his lodgings to rush the finished copy to the compositor. The duress of his printers seems to have sharpened his literary powers. As he remarked in a slightly different context, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Since I haven't yet thought of a topic for this week myself, I take heart from Doctor Johnson. My greatest inspiration, however, is my fellow medievalist, F. J. Furnivall (1825-1910), a slightly kinky Victorian scholar who published about 70 books and founded, among numerous other worthy organizations, the Early English Text Society, the Ballad Society, the Wyclif Society and the Hammersmith Sculling Club for Girls and Young Women. (This last-named was the chief but not sole arena of his kinkiness; and his only surviving claim to fame in the lay world is the scruffy public park called "Furnivall Gardens" next to the boat houses at the foot of Hammersmith Bridge in London.) Furnivall's deadline for the completed volume of Robert of Brunne's "Chronicle" for the Rolls Series was 1860. When the manuscript was still not ready 26 years later and his editor, Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte, wrote to him a scolding letter, Furnivall was insouciant: "All that you say of my failure to turn out Robert de Brunne's Chronicle is, alas, too true, but there is no hope whatever of my being able to complete the introduction by August 2. Just now I am good for nothing but a scull on the river, or a ride on a bicycle . . . "

For the deadline deadbeat Furnivall's statement is instructive and, in its quiet way, inspiring. Here we have a proud moment in the annals of procrastination. Not merely does he express in memorable and world-class fashion his injurious disdain for writing deadlines; he also infuriates his editor by cataloguing for him the insulting pastimes that, he implies, are more important than the "Chronicle" of Robert de Brunne. In this matter is it precisely the ability to move gracefully from the level of injury to that of insult that distinguishes the professional procrastinator from the amateur. Most students, in their youthful inexperience, naturally enough hesitate at the threshold of insult. Each year in my department our Committee for Departmental Students must review the written explanations of those students who have been tardy in submitting their theses. Usually the explanations can be summarized as illness, idleness or writer's block; even computer crashes are comparatively rare, although paper-eating printers and at least one paper-eating dog have made their appearance. But not once have I encountered an explanation founded in the priority of sculling or cycling. But alas just now Lake Carnegie is in any event covered with a thin and slushy icecap, and the state of the roads is far from welcoming for the cyclist. Still there must be something else that absolutely needs doing now. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.