Qualitative Inquiry

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Hunting Roaches: A Sort of Academic Life Graham Francis Badley Qualitative Inquiry 2014 20: 981 originally published online 29 October 2013 DOI: 10.1177/1077800413505548 The online version of this article can be found at: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/20/8/981

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Hunting Roaches: A Sort of Academic Life

Qualitative Inquiry 2014, Vol. 20(8) 981–989 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800413505548 qix.sagepub.com

Graham Francis Badley1

Abstract I have borrowed two images from Graham Greene. The first, hunting roaches, is a metaphor for attacking my own failures as a scholar. The second becomes a subtitle for this attempt to summarize a sorting of my academic life. I first explain why I have rejected autobiography, autoethnography, and mystory in favor of using Greene’s “sort of life” as a way of structuring my scrappy academic experiences. I then use another set of apparently frivolous metaphors to organize the reflective telling of my sort of academic life. These metaphors or processes are presented as a series of life phases: scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing. They are interrupted by a separate “doing nothing” phase, which is a commentary on a chronic case of writer’s block. Finally, I reflect on two more hopeful phases of my sort of life that I identify as usefully “frivolous” and fruitfully “post-academic.” Keywords life writing, life phases, postacademic writing

You, if anyone, will know how far I have failed in what I attempted. A doctor is not immune from “the long despair of doing nothing well,” the cafard that hangs around a writer’s life. —Graham Greene: A Sort of Life To cheer ourselves we used to hunt cockroaches . . . —Graham Greene: Ways of Escape

Cafards and Roaches Feelings of failure1 are not uncommon in academic life. So, why do I want to hunt down my own failures, especially as an academic writer? And would such a story be of any possible interest or use to anyone else? The main reason is concealed in the first part of my title and in the epigraphs from Graham Greene. I am trying to confront my own feeling of doing nothing well. I failed at university to the extent of being ejected from my honors course after my first year. I was lost in what became a sad funhouse (see Badley, 2013). I scraped a poor degree. I was a flop, a failure. In that 1 year, I had turned into a virtual insect, a cockroach, like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis.2 Coping with my own transformation from confident youth to continuing failure as both teacher and writer is a main theme of this tale. It is a theme which might resonate with a few others and, occasionally, cheer us all up by hunting our own cafards and roaches.

A Sort of Academic Life? The second part of my title comes from Greene’s description of his first autobiography as a sort of life. He recorded his scraps of the past not only because of his hungry curiosity but also his desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order (see Greene, 1971-1972). My sort of academic life is, as well, a sorting out or over of my own jumbled experiences as a teacher. I want to look at my own story as an academic writer as a way of escape in which writing, even of my tedious kind, is a form of therapy. Greene wondered how those who do not write (or compose or paint) “can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition” (see Greene, 1980, p. 9). While I don’t, fortunately, suffer his self-confessed manic-depression I do see writing, especially now that I am formally retired, as a way of connecting with others and with my own experiences of the past. It is more like a quest for collegiality, a “craving for company,” in which to escape from my own (after Beckett, 1989/2009).

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Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK

Corresponding Author: Graham Francis Badley, Anglia Ruskin University, Ashby House, Bishop Hall Lane, Chelmsford CM1 1SQ, UK. Email: [email protected]


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An Autoethnographical Mystory? I was initially attracted to writing a mystory, a combination of the personal with the more public story of an academic life. Such a text would be less a conventional academic text than an assemblage or bricolage or montage (moments quoted out of context or juxtaposed fragments from widely dispersed places and times; see Ulmer, 1989). The outcome would be connected bits of my experiences as a teacher and as an academic writer. The text would be woven out of autobiographical and even scholarly threads (see Ulmer, 1989). Mystory writing is an experimental way of encouraging self-reflective practice, of stimulating students and teachers into creative ways of inquiring into their personal and academic experiences (see, for example, Troutman, 2011). However, mystories are controversial. One criticism is that most academics are not that interesting or mysterious. A mystory is regarded by some social scientists as intellectually pernicious, as mere introspection rather than as the outcome of rigorous and systematic data collection, an abuse of the privilege of being an academic. Academics are not paid “generous salaries” [sic] to sit around focusing on and obsessing about themselves (see Delamont, 2007). But mystorians, and autoethnographers in general, can try to be self-reflexive without necessarily being melodramatically self-obsessed. Being self-reflexive should mean being self-appraising, being self-critical, showing strengths as well as weaknesses. Self-reflexivity is one way of contributing to the ongoing human conversation about who we all are, about learning from our few successes and our many failures. All autoethnographers can try to be self-understanding not just for their own self-indulgent sakes but also to help others enlarge and enrich their understanding too. It could be another way of describing the world, albeit from a personal stance. Isn’t there something potentially useful in that? To whom might any autoethnography or mystory be useful and relevant (see Denzin, 2006)? Perhaps such a tale might just be interesting to a few other academics. The strongest argument for such an introspective story is that, by carefully reading (and writing about) our selves, we would learn truly to read the thoughts and passions of all others in similar circumstances (see Hobbes, 1651/2010).

Writing a Sort of Academic Life I concluded that writing a mystory was not for me. Instead, I would write what Greene called a sort of life because I wanted to put my scrappy academic experiences into some sort of order. I deny that writing a sort of academic life is necessarily attention-seeking or data-free or lazy or obsessive or pernicious or un-analytical or un-ethical or un-interesting? If it were, then we, academics and students, would have to rule out all autobiography and biography as academically useless. Just as there are bad autobiographies and bad

biographies, there are, no doubt, many bad autoethnographies and bad life-stories which cannot escape Delamont’s polemics. Surely, too, we privileged (?) academics can help empower the powerless to write their own scrappy stories in order to alert the world about their anguish and their plight and even seek to change their world bit by bit. And even the privileged few are entitled to write their own sort of life-stories. Writing “a sort of academic life” may be useful and, at times, even cheerful when we focus on those events and parts which have most shaped who we are and what we have become. It will also be more useful and interesting to others if we leave out the boring bits by only “sketching out key developmental moments” (see Hughes, 2010, 2013). But can we find choice points in our academic lives which we can then assemble into a narrative which connects the “the autobiographical and the personal to the cultural and the social” (see Ellis, 2004, p. xix)? And can we, if that is what motivates us, use such a narrative to help build a “more just, democratic, and egalitarian society” (see Denzin, 2006, p. 285; Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000, p. 285)? However, my sort of life inevitably overlaps with autobiography, with autoethnography and, even, with mystory. Greene’s sort of life could be described as a disguised novel but mine is not so aspirational. It is, I suppose, partially confessional although I have concealed most of my sins except those apparent in my sometimes quirky style of academic writing. Perhaps it is too anecdotal and story-like for some and not sufficiently theoretical for many (see Burgess, 1993). But I console myself here with Eudora Welty’s comment that we don’t just store our experience like archivists but rather story it for ourselves and for others. My sort of life itself is, nevertheless, a narrative based on my own reflections as well as a rereading of other texts inflicted on others during my career as well as on my own scrappy notebooks. My sort of life is also a narrative about my progress, or lack of it, as an academic writer.

A Sort of Academic Life: Phase 1— Scrabbling In the early 1960s, the only interesting job I could get with my poor degree was teaching English and Liberal Studies in a new, small college of further education near Liverpool. Colleges of further education are often compared with American community colleges but while there are overlaps between them the big difference is that the U.K. colleges are mainly adolescent institutions while community colleges have an adult orientation and, indeed, are regarded as part of the U.S. higher education system (see Badley, 1988). I was mainly expected to teach English to business studies students, engineers, police cadets, typists, even General Certificate of Education (GCE) O and A level students. Feeling a failure because I was not working in a university,


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Badley and learning a lot about my own inadequacies and ignorance, I actually learned a bit about English literature. I learned a lot more about teaching or, rather, about co-learning, and I may even have learned a little about writing. I spent a lot of my time scrabbling or scratching or groping about in order to collect resources for teaching and writing projects which I usually failed to complete. In effect, scrabbling stimulated my critical thinking about educational matters. Scrabbling may be a messy process but it encourages aspiring writers to structure the messiness that confronts us by developing working titles for our inquiries and by writing clear research questions. Often research questions emerge from a literature review, itself a form of scrabbling and critical reading (see Badley, 2011). At least, I was beginning to concentrate not just on the sourcing and deployment of material but also on the craft of teaching and the craft of writing (see Hughes, 2010). These scrabbling efforts encouraged me not only to reflect on my own learning and teaching but also to enroll on two postgraduate courses in educational studies. So scrabbling as critical reading was not simply personal resource gathering but was, as well, an active process of engagement and conversation with other members of the academic tribe. Scrabbling was a way of seeing writing as dialogical, open, questioning, skeptical, and Socratic (see Winter & Badley, 2007). It is a critical, interpretative, and persuasive process rather than an attempt to prove that any one reading of a text is the right one. When we read other texts, we do so in order to collect concepts, ideas, suggestions, and values which may be useful for us as writers. Indeed Derrida suggests that deconstruction should encourage us to establish new themes and make new connections between ideas. This is reading or scrabbling in order to understand. Admittedly, deconstructing and scrabbling sound frivolous and negative. Together they might even sound like a tedious struggle but they may also be interpreted constructively as leading to a positive process of scribbling which itself is a form of writing power (see Derrida, 1979). The contentious metaphorical process of scrabbling merges with another contentious actual and metaphorical process, that of scribbling. My particular sort of academic life entered a new and relatively productive phase.

A Sort of Academic Life: Phase 2— Scribbling I became an inveterate scribbler3 even though the term is often used to demean writers as frivolous and substandard. For me, though, scribbling is an important activity in the production of text, a valuable metaphor for setting concepts, ideas, values, and words down in order to be worked on later. Getting the words down and then reflecting on them is a form of creative thinking that can be done anywhere and

at any time. I have been scribbling comments, ideas, and quotations down in a series of notebooks ever since I started teaching and trying to write. And, at least, during my two part-time postgraduate courses in the 1960s I was forced to set my scribbles in some kind of order. For my first course, I had to produce essays and a short dissertation. I considered them to be scribbles rather than polished texts. They were often started and completed overnight in order to meet next day’s deadline. I always felt bored at the prospect of writing them but occasionally, once I got into the challenge and the subject matter, I experienced flickers of interest. Perhaps, I thought, if I had started them earlier and considered the process of writing more carefully I might have come up with better stuff and might actually have enjoyed the overall process. Unfortunately, I had yet to reach that happy (or so it seemed) phase. So my scribbling was rushed and the outcome predictably bad, passing the examination test but failing to satisfy. Nevertheless, I did scribble and not only in notebooks. I produced my inadequate essays and then in the second of my postgraduate courses (for a master’s degree) I began to take writing more seriously. During the nine exams I sat I determined to prepare more thoroughly and structure my answers more carefully. This policy worked until the last question in the final exam. It was on Dewey and I was a Deweyan as was the professor. I decided to write as if I were Dewey. I wasn’t so much a method actor as a method writer. But at least what I worked with were words and ideas from Dewey’s own texts. Perhaps what I scribbled down was pastiche. Besides, I thought I’d done enough so far to get a comfortable pass. I did. And at a postcourse party the professor told me (I have witnesses) that my essay on Dewey was the best he had ever read—success at last. However, for any writer, even a poor academic writer, “success is always temporary, success is only delayed failure” (Greene, 1971-1972, p. 156).

A Sort of Academic Life: Phase 3— Doing Nothing In order to progress, writers have to move on from private scribbling to the more exacting process of scribing (proper writing) in attempts to produce readable, public texts (see Badley, 2011). After my temporary success as John Dewey I failed to move on from scribbling to scribing. I suffered from a severe dose of writer’s block. I scribbled continuously but failed to produce anything publishable. Working in a college of further education and then in a polytechnic in the 1960s and 1970s, I was under no direct requirement to publish. Nevertheless, I wanted to write. I had plenty to say about the education of students and the quality of our educational institutions but I never organized my ideas and thoughts into the kind of public texts which would satisfy either me or the editors of journals.


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I used all the specious reasons I could find for not writing. After all, I was not expected to write. Nobody wanted me to write or ever encourage me to write. I was employed to teach, wasn’t I? Writing was a diversion, an act of selfindulgence. I didn’t have the time, did I? But finding time is “a destructive way of thinking about writing.” We should allot time to write, make a schedule and stick to it and not adopt a wasteful binge writing strategy (see Silvia, 2007, pp. 11-18). Indeed, I now tell students “the only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis” (Zinsser, 2006, p. 49, italics added). I now know that “writers are people who write. If you need a place to begin, begin there . . . you apply ass to chair” (Rhodes, 1995, p. 3). You don’t even need a chair— Hemingway, with a bad ass, a bad back and a bad head, often wrote standing up. Furthermore, I used the I need more argument: more analysis, more data, more material. Yes, we should prepare adequately, scrabble well, and scribble well. These processes allow for both planning and freedom and even serendipity. I scribble anywhere—in libraries, coffee bars, pubs, buses, trains, planes, and, especially, in boring meetings when others might think you are noting down their brilliant contributions. But I never resorted to the “I can only write well when I’m inspired claim.” Waiting for inspiration is a bit like waiting for Godot—she, he, or it might never come. So, instead of waiting, we should get on with the job by learning and regularly practicing the craft of writing (see Palumbo, 2000). It is only amateurs who look for inspiration while professionals just get up and go to work (see Roth, 2006). So there I was with a thesis to write. I claimed other excuses for doing nothing. I had a new job with new responsibilities which required more preparation and scrabbling about. I was just married so I had a wife to attend to. We changed from a flat to a house which needed decorating. The house had a garden which needed tending. Then came the pram in the hall for my son. Next, my daughter was born—in South America so that my wife could be near her family. We spent 4 months out there. My son contracted a serious illness. I allowed myself to become blocked for 5 years. I was stuck, failing to hunt the roaches (especially huge in South America!): Suddenly I felt like I didn’t know anything. All my confidence withered. I became hyper-critical. For every sentence I wrote, I’d think of all the reasons someone would find fault with what I said . . . I would be a failure. (Ely, Vinz, Downing, & Anzul, 1997, p. 12)

I tried various unblocking strategies including scribbling possible beginnings and endings. At least I learned to stop beating myself up about my failures. I now write not despite of my previous writer’s block but because of it (see Palumbo,

2000). I have also been lucky to have critical friends who give me constructive feedback and some who act as bull-shit detectors. So, with a little help from my friends, I managed to finish that thesis. I submitted it to my supervisor who thought it was all right. After a second reading, he put it forward for a distinction and found, to his surprise, that the external examiner agreed.

A Sort of Academic Life: Phase 4— Scribing and Scrubbing So, another partial success but I knew by then that any writer can fall victim to the braggart’s excuse: “knowing the unreality of his success he shouts to keep his courage up” (Greene, 1971-1972, p. 156). I shouted for a short time about my achievement but failed to turn what I had scribbled into anything publishable even though a few colleagues told me that I should publish. The thesis was finally completed in 1975 and then I spent another 7 lean years when I did nothing about my writing. I had become disheartened about my failures and disillusioned about my job and wanted another. Eventually I was appointed to a new post in 1978 which required moving away from my home town of Liverpool to the unknown (and strange) location of Essex. It was not a job I particularly wanted but, at least, it was a promotion. Thus, more dislocation for the family, more house-hunting, more decorating, more settling in to new academic responsibilities and tasks. Worse, the work demanded more meetings and more travel as the new institution I had moved to had two main campuses (and later on even more including one 50 miles away). I became even more unwilling to write anything other than numerous directly job-related proposals and reports. It was all tedious. In the winter of 1978/1979, I caught an illness which changed my life. It began with a streptococcal infection which then attacked my kidneys. I knew I was in trouble when the consultant told me that my case was “interesting.” After a biopsy—a not too pleasant experience—I was diagnosed with a disease called Focal Segmental Glomerular Sclerosis (FSGS). This meant, in the charming terminology of the time, that I had End Stage Renal Failure (ESRF)— another failure. My kidneys, being sclerotic, would gradually cease to function. I would then need dialysis and eventually a transplant. This is not the sort of news I wanted to hear at the age of 38. I made a number of decisions. I would keep working and living as well as possible and try to make my job as interesting as I could. I would extend my role as an academic developer. I was active at local, regional, and national levels. I became more interested in study abroad and international education which were, of course, other ways of escape. I traveled to international conferences on academic development and international education. I organized study visits


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Badley for students and staff. Finally, I started writing and publishing about all these experiences. I even had a Joycean epiphany: The realization that I should let others decide whether the junk I wrote was worth publishing. I had plenty to write about and now I would find my own writing slots. Despite my sclerotic future, I took some comfort from the advice that “we ought to have the vitality of the Victorians who never hesitated to publish the bad as well as the good” (Greene, 1980, p. 138). However, in my circumstances, vitality was not always available. So, I moved from my mainly scrabbling and scribbling phases into the more productive scribing (writing) and scrubbing (editing) phases of my sort of academic writer’s life. I became more unashamedly (first) personal and even political in my writing. I try to address what I am doing as a postacademic writer.4 It is also agonistic in that I struggle like Samson (another Samsa?) in Samson Agonistes against my own metaphorical demons and actual or supposed enemies and opponents. My personal stance as an academic and as a writer is formed from a number of changing and overlapping tendencies. These include an atheistical tendency, a humanist tendency and a pragmatist tendency. I have tendencies, inclinations and leanings rather than fixed positions so my stance is never completely firm or stable. Does that make me unreliable and wobbly? I don’t belong to any dogma or faction or party or sect. I have adopted my tendencies not because they are the only way or the truth. I am, like William James, “a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness.” In addition, with James, I think that “what is THE truth?” is no real question at all as the “whole notion of THE truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural . . . ” (see James, 1907/2004, pp. 94-106). I’m also with those pragmatists who argue that being free to talk to others (community, company) about what seems to be true is more important than what is in fact true. If we take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself (see Rorty, 1989). So to put it in grandiose terms, I’m a Rortyan freedom fighter and a Deweyan democrat if you want to know and are interested. My atheistical, democratic, humanistic, and pragmatist tendencies affect the way I write about anything and, especially, anything which even looks a touch metaphysical. Hence, I am skeptical about all such fine abstractions and “solving words” as “Absolute,” “Energy,” “God,” “Matter,” “Reality,” “Reason,” “Truth,” and so on (see James, 1907/2004, p. 25). Anyone with similar tendencies to mine should “treat nothing as a quasi-divinity and everything— language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance” (see Rorty, 1989, p. 22). Indeed, I share Rorty’s master idea that we should take responsibility for ourselves rather than acknowledge some alien authority. The only authority in inquiry (or in life generally) that Rorty accepted was that of human consensus. He maintained that

there is no such thing as Reality for us to get right and, indeed, that we cannot get Reality right because we cannot claim to represent the world as it really is. Rorty, in effect, abandoned the discourse of objectivity and worked instead toward human consensus, to expanding human solidarity (see Brandom, 2000). That’s my stand too. My tendencies make me severely critical about the way in which higher education has been driven firmly toward neoliberalism. This ugly growth since the 1970s has provided the major context for my sort of academic life. I used my inaugural lecture to argue that we academics should fight against, or at least subvert, managerialism. I characterized it as undermining the old culture of collegiality in its “attempt to reshape universities to the needs of a late capitalist and corporate society” and its increasing use of “detailed methods of financial and managerial control, using concepts quite alien to education” (Williams, 1970, in Badley, 1996, p. 55). Managerialism coerced higher education away from a light management style identified as “minimal-civil servantish” and “consensual” toward “an institutional integrity organised now around managerial routines rather than rooted in an academic culture” (Scott, 1995, in Badley, 1996, p. 55). I don’t object to universities becoming more businesslike. I do object to their becoming businesses, modeled on private-sector organizations which, according to the neoliberal ideology, would always be purified by the disciplines of the marketplace (see Badley, 1996). I want academics to resist crude intrusive managerialism which seeks to impose on universities a form of accountability often based on hard insensitive and spurious performance indicators of quality featuring strategy, structure, and systems. Instead, we should be adopting a management approach based on softer factors such as skills, style, staff, and shared values (based on Pascale & Athos, 1981, in Badley, 1996). These values should include such democratic principles as academic freedom, democracy, equality, and, even, fraternity. Universities in the United Kingdom have been especially infected by numerous external quality assessment devices supposedly measuring teaching quality and research, devices to ensure that higher education is of “approved quality.” These devices push higher education more and more toward a much more explicit role in meeting the managerial demands of the state. Collegiate institutions that are dominated by the managerial culture with its tendency to reduce teachers to mere instructors have become repressive and uninspired places in which to work (see Badley, 1996). I believe that academics should challenge the worst aspects of managerialism by continuously reminding ourselves and others that universities are first and foremost educational institutions whose core business is not business or vocationalism but the education of students. The teacher–student relationship is not about the delivery of knowledge packages or products but


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the continuous development of critically reflective citizens and learners. In addition, we as teachers and researchers are required, as part of a commitment to democratic accountability, to become continuous critics of our own beliefs, values, and educational practices (see Badley, 1996). I later argued that we will only save the planet itself when we develop practical alternatives to currently dominant, neoliberal, overcompetitive, and environmentally destructive policies and practices. In an educational context specifically this would entail, for old-fashioned liberals like me, replacing neoliberal human capital ideology with a more democratic, humanist, and pragmatist approach. This would involve moving away from a mainly economic and technicist model of higher education toward one which promotes active global citizenship which would reject the worst aspects of competitive globalization but promote a utopian cooperative globalization. It would also seek to counter the current pernicious effects of the intensely competitive contract culture which has used commercial agendas to subvert and colonize academic research. One bitter consequence of this colonization has been “a progressive disenchantment” with (my sort of) academic life (see Badley, 2003, p. 484; Willmott, 2003, p. 139).

A Sort of Academic Life: Phase 5—A Frivolous Approach? It has taken me a whole career to create my own approach to academic writing. At first, like many academics, I often wrote more like a jargon-spouting robot rather than as a human being with a story to tell. I wrote my turgid stuff because I thought that was the way to satisfy the referees and editors who act as the gatekeepers of our “discourse communities.” Perhaps I succumbed, as many of us still do, to “the wooliness and pretentiousness of ‘classy’ writing” (see Becker, 1986, p. 164). Perhaps editors of journals, publishers, organizers of research assessment exercises, even senior members of universities actually demand such bad writing in resistance to the plain style advocated by other writers. For example, “Orwell believed that the pressure to disguise political realities led officials and their supporters to write in a way that disguised rather than communicated” (see Becker, 1986, pp. 164-166). Over the years, while inclining more and more toward atheism, humanism, and pragmatism, I began to develop my own more frivolous approach to academic writing (Badley, 2011). This was part of an attempt to brush off the cafard that crawled about me, to escape the long despair of doing nothing well, the strong distaste for the texts I struggled to produce. Aware and pleased that “to be frivolous is to be human” (Byatt, 2009), I eventually created a model of writing focusing on four metaphors and processes: scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing. I justified my use

of these apparently frivolous metaphors by arguing that they could also be offered for the serious purpose of helping me order my own experience as well as demystify academic writing for others. I was not the only postgraduate student or new teacher to feel daunted by the demands and strictures of academic writing. Would that I had developed my model in the 1960s and 1970s when I most needed it for we are all scrabblers and scribblers who need support in order to become more effective academic scribes. My eventual endorsing of frivolity was not just a way of freeing myself and others from some of the stricter conventions of academic writing. It was also a way of becoming a sort of postacademic writer as well as a way helping me come to terms with failure. It was part of my attempt to overcome the long despair of doing nothing well, the cockroach that I needed to hunt before I could write with some confidence. This confidence was undermined when I was told that my kidneys were failing at such a rate that I would need, first, dialysis, and then, with luck, a transplant. I started dialysis of three 4- to 5-hr sessions in 1998 while I was still a full-time academic and professor. I used the time during each session to scrabble and scribble my way to writing papers so that I could continue to publish and to attend national and international conferences. Nevertheless, with a great deal of help from my wife, Jane, I managed to deliver papers in such countries as Austria, Finland, Germany, and Spain which have reciprocal arrangements with the United Kingdom. Eventually, I became less able to dialyze and work at the same time so I took early retirement and took on part-time roles as a professor emeritus. One of my successes during the 5 years I was on dialysis was the completion of a PhD by Published Works. I had become a patient trustee of Kidney Research UK in 2002, but by then, dialysis was not working too well and I desperately needed a renal transplant. Fortunately my sister Joan decided I could have one of hers. The transplant took place in Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, in December 2003. Despite difficulties at the beginning, and occasionally now, the graft has been a great success. And I’ve probably had my best ever 10 years as a teacher and as a writer with enough work with PhD students and academic staff to keep me busy and plenty of publications to keep me interested. So I have now entered the final phase of my sort of academic life.

Phase 6—A Different Sort of Postacademic Life? Although I never had a “horror of becoming involved in teaching,” I could see that it was a sort of professional trap into which one could easily slip (Greene, 1971-1972, p. 112). More often than not, I trapped myself by failing to turn my


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Badley own scrabbling and scribbling into publishable articles. Now, well into partial retirement, I luxuriate in a privileged postacademic sort of life where I write what I want and how I want. I send the scribed and scrubbed stuff off to editors to see whether they consider it publishable. If they do, then, all is well and good. If they don’t but have suggestions for improvement, then I will do my best to change what I have already done. I have decided—via another epiphany—that failure, like a crawling cockroach failing to achieve anything or get anywhere, need not always be regarded as irredeemably

gloomy. Some failures may even be fun or glorious. Even if we continue to fail in our crawling, scrawling, writing (and several writers believe that all their texts are failures),5 we can still, like Beckett, try to “fail better.” There’s always hope of improvement, still the hope of further human contact, of the “possibility of company,” through better and better failures. In old age, work, as writing, could be our company. For writing is trying to use our actual experience of life and our vicarious experience of reading to help us connect, to create company with others, a virtual, even global, collegiality.

A craving for company Crawling and falling again Aha! The crawl. What an addition to company were he but to hear the crawl. The fall. The crawl resumed. Aha! The crawling creator. Crawls and falls. Why crawl at all? Give up all. Have done with all. With bootless crawl and figments comfortless. But if on occasion so disheartened it is seldom for long. For little by little as he lies the craving for company revives. In which to escape from his own. After Beckett (1989/2009)6 I was never as despairing or as gloomy as Greene or feeling as alone as Beckett. I never played Russian roulette on the common at Berkhamstead. Nor did I ever seek escape from boredom by going on “an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia” or to face danger in Mexico during the religious persecution there or to a leper colony in the Congo. And nor did I face ambush and worse during the Mau-Mau insurrection in Kenya or the emergency in Malaya or the French war in Vietnam (see Greene, 1971-1972). I have

usually been content to face the frustrations of my own lesser desperation throughout the tedium of my work as a humble academic and struggling writer. Occasional, temporary, success is all most of us ever get. I do, at least intermittently, still get to brush away the roaches of boredom and failure through the odd bit of partially successful postacademic writing. And I want to keep going, still assembling my own autography or sort of academic life-story, still going, somehow, on.

On. Say on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Ever tried. Ever failed, No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Plod on as one. Know no more. See no more. Say no more. After Beckett (1989/2009)7 However, what still worries me about my sort of academic life and my adoption of a frivolous, yet serious, sort of academic writing is that they may both be regarded as totally

flippant failures. This view is summed up in a frivolous yet serious criticism of contemporary art, a criticism which might well be applied to much contemporary academic writing:


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Nothing could illustrate better my thesis that much contemporary art is supported by an immense scaffolding of discourse without which it would simply collapse and be indistinguishable from rubbish.

Lodge (2008, p. 123) Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

“Failure is all of a sudden quite trendy. Glossy feature articles everywhere from the New York Times to the Harvard Business Review instruct us that we must fail in order to succeed. Cheerfully quoting the words of Samuel Beckett (theatre’s deathless muse of failure)—‘Fail again. Fail better’—they proclaim that we must learn from our failures, becoming stronger, more resilient in the process . . . But the fact is that despite failure’s recent modishness, we’ve been failing for a long time. Failure saturates our lives, shapes our experience and delineates the contours of our institutions. And mostly (as Beckett well knew), it feels like shit” (from O’Gorman & Werry, 2012, p. 1). Trendy at my age? An epitaph for Kafka’s writing including “Metamorphosis” could be Beckett’s “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (see Constantine, 2002) “An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts” (Juvenal, Satires). Guilty as charged. My working definition of postacademic writing is that it is writing which is both academic and accessible. It is academic in the sense that it seriously addresses key issues in each particular discourse community. It is accessible in that it can also be read and understood by members of more general communities. Most academic and postacademic writing is the edited (scrubbed) scribblings of students, researchers, and teachers as they try to express their approaches, constructions, thoughts, and suggestions for action to specific discourse, as well as more general, communities. I believe that academic writing is (and should be) changing or evolving or growing into a more effective and useful postacademic phase. I should make clear that what I mean by “post-academic” writing may be better entitled “post-academicist” writing. The point is that the excesses of academic writing are academicist in the sense that there is often an overadherence to formal rules and traditions and words. Such academic or academicist texts often appear abstract, cold, conventional, logical, orthodox, scholastic (rather than scholarly), and strictly theoretical. Apart from Graham Greene, one recent “failure” includes John Banville: “I hate them all (my books). They embarrass me because they’re all failures. We’re aiming for perfection

and never attain it. It’s become a cliché but, as Beckett wrote, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’” And, of course, Kafka berates himself for not writing to the limits of his abilities, for “his failure to assert himself as a writer; thus his cowardice . . . he fails to write; or he writes and the writing is a failure.” Indeed his writing is both affliction and the means to escape from affliction (see Constantine, 2002, pp. 11-12 and Note 2 above, my emphasis). 6. “A craving for company” is an “assembly,” a sort of a poem mainly collected, gathered, and shaped from Beckett’s own words in his “Company” (1980/2009; Beckett, 2009). It doesn’t quite meet Coleridge’s distinction between “prose”— “words in their best order”—and “poetry”—“the best words in the best order” but at least I have tried even if I have failed again. 7. I have tried again and no doubt failed again with another “assembly,” this time from Beckett’s “Worstward Ho” (1983/2009; Beckett, 2009). I have a longer version just in case anyone’s interested. But have I failed better or worse?

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Author Biography Graham Francis Badley, PhD, is emeritus professor of Academic Development, Research Support Unit, Anglia Ruskin University. He has special interests in learning and teaching issues, links between research and teaching, and with academics and postgraduates as effective writers.
