Donald Nichols
BOTH SIDES NOW
An essay forthcoming in Currency of the Heart: A Year of Investing, Death, Work, and Coin, from the University of Iowa Press, Fall 2002.

When I was in grade school Dad surely wondered what career I'd choose. When I was a teenager he probably wondered if I'd ever look for a job. When I stayed in grad school forever, he thought I'd be a professor. When I went to business, I don't know what he thought. Now, to my surprise and probably his, I've been designated an elder in the profession I floundered into: my former English department wants an article from me about how English grads can use their skills in corporate jobs. Not exactly your honorary doctorate, this request, but some validation I haven't totally been the lost vocational cause Dad might have imagined. As I ponder my article, though, the issue is what to tell my readers, not what I would have told my father.

An education in English used to be about books and literary skills: the logic of utterance, the structure of sense, felicity of style, perspective, plot, theme, character, consistency of narrative, point of view, the brains of beginning-middle-end from someone else's pen or yours. As a result, it was axiomatic, if not always true, that English majors could write, and I landed a corporate writing job because I'd also studied business, economics, and finance --- not so odd, considering notable links between culture and commerce: Bookseller's like Blackwell's, Shakespeare the entrepreneur, the poet and insurance agent Wallace Stevens, John Maynard Keynes stirring up currency markets and the Bloomsbury Circle. I thought I'd tell my readers that combining a little business with their literary skills might make them employable. Then I realized an English education mostly isn't about literary skills any more. It's about GRICE, as a former professor calls it: gender, race, identity, culture, and ethnicity. Judging by articles in literary journals I glance at in the big Barnes & Noble in Georgetown, the skill English students seem to be cultivating is using books to prove white male imperialists mistreat women, persons of color, foreigners -- everyone, basically. I've not seen big demand for that skill in business.

I should've seen this high-handedness coming, though. Even back then, English students thought superiority to business, economics, and money proved their moral authority --- as business students thought near-illiteracy proved their practicality. Seems nobody aspired to be John Maynard Keynes. That must have been my goal as a student, as I wasn't preparing for anything. Which may be how I wound up with five degrees plus detours into Carl Jung, German, philosophy, and calligraphy. I've seldom aspired to be anything in a career sense, either, which explains why I've been a student, soldier, teacher, investment advisor, author, ghost writer, Senate staffer, federal employee --- and, multiple times, a Fortune 500 hand.

However, there's someone I've wanted to be since I was a boy: I wanted to be Paladin --- a white man in black leathers, a trailwise aristocrat and gunman accurate with Shakespeare whose ambiguous occupation was Have Gun Will Travel. The world of black-and-white TV was a world of moral and cultural black and white, but that fueled my wanting to be a gentleman who was at home in a San Francisco hotel and on the prairie and everywhere was unfailingly capable and unchangingly himself. As an English student I'd have said I wanted to be a scholar-warrior, a Renaissance man, Gracian's true person, Shaftsbury's man of parts, but what explains my becoming an English student --- and probably explains most things about me --- is that I've always wanted to be Paladin.

Eventually I wanted money, too, so I tried business. That's another reason I've not begun my article. For if English students' "skill" is maligning the sensibilities of men and moguls, I can't fault their conclusions. One Caligula I worked for fired a whole department whose chairs weren't tucked under their desks one Friday night. Several were duck hunters. Bhopal, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Pinto, and massive personnel downsizing never surprised me, coming from men who'd shoot a duck in the back. Another invited us to Easter buffet attended by rented black women wearing white gloves. In a burst of ebullience, he grabbed a cleaver, heaved the sterling silver cover off a serving platter to unveil a ham big as a bolt of cloth, and asked the first person in line, "Mrs. Rosen, would you like some ham?" So it went: "Hello, Mr. Eisenberg, have some ham" ... "Good to see you, Mr. and Mrs. Ginsberg. Ham?" I relive it in slowest motion: the beaming CEO, the bison-sized hunk of prostrate pork, the misty spray as the precisely aimed cleaver bit into it with hostly vigor, the aghast silence as each severed slab hesitated one guillotined head of an instant before calving like icebergs from a glacier onto the reluctantly outstretched plate of a grimacing Jew.

Yet I stayed in business, partly because I couldn't go home again. English departments changed those final semesters of the seventies when I studied prose style, rhetorical theory, and twentieth century American essays. I was reading great writing and hoping to add just one sentence of mine to it while my department championed idiolects, Black English, "students' right to their own language," and "spelling doesn't count." My choice was business or $14,000 no-tenure jobs fighting to teach educated expression in an English department. I persisted because the slow effect of corporate America was cumulative. Not until my third corporate job did I find my boss --- whose face had acquired the pallor and perimeter of the many asses against which it had been eagerly pressed --- rifling through my briefcase. And when doing my actual work, I was doing what suited my temperament, talent, and, yes, education. Plus there were intermissions during book tours, self-employment, and becoming an investment advisor before the life-change of joining the Senate Finance Committee and the half-business/half-government U.S. Mint.

Money also counted. Not from stock options and Croesus salaries: money saved from average salaries --- for non-teaching jobs --- began small and grew. Savings I saved to save myself, my portfolio proclaimed liberty within imprisonment more eloquently than poets and was portable property, sir, portable property writ larger than Dickens. It was mine, like my degrees, forever mine and growing, mortgaged to no other will. Money saved by discipline and multiplied through diligence, my money, was an exponent of my wit independent of jobs "Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight ... Past reason hated as a swallowed bait." Investing offset the expense of spirit until the merely witless became savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.

If I knew today's English students could appreciate paradox and irony, I'd say what they're learning, as I perceive it, won't qualify them for any corporate job, although it applies to all of them I've had. But what I really want to say is "Jeez, kid, you read books for that?"

I think they asked the wrong guy for an article. I studied English and business but left the one before it betrayed me and the other before it killed me. I only wanted to be civilized, multicultural, a well spoken and well ordered mind, and my skills brought me jobs from men who serve pork to Jews. Talk about irony: my skills made me palatable to them.

I've decided I'll just send whatever I write and hope other English students get lucky earlier than I did. Anything else might confirm them in a prejudice they tortured out of books and haven't earned. In my case, what matters is that everything did work out. I'm relieved that Dad lived to see me content in a non-teaching job. I know he worried. So did I.