Just three months after leaving Notre Dame, John's academic life quickly became more intense and more demanding. Myers recalls Joe Duffy warning his students that they would find graduate school a unique experience: many a student going through the motions could become depressed by the amount of work required, the relatively uninspiring nature of much of it, and the pain of having to get along on very little money. As one of John's professors informed a class, "you're not here to enjoy English literature; you're here to learn about it." John "worked his butt off" during his first years as a student in Chicago - not only as graduate students but also as adults whose only requirements were to somehow survive their courses and do their work.
| This is the first time I have been able to stop to write a coherent letter since I got yours. I just finished my second quarter at the Aristotelian Utopia, and if things fall rightly, I will be taking the M.A. final in June. |
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John Bellairs
in a letter to Charles Bowen, Spring 1960 |
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As time passed, however, fellow graduate student John Drew recalls that he, Bellairs, and numerous others in their circle of acquaintances developed strong reservations about the graduate program.
"It all seemed rather Gradgrindian and none of us wanted to go on to do a Ph.D. No doubt the faculty would have regarded us as ill-disciplined amateurs, mere dilettantes, and no doubt they would have been right. Much as we hated them for their joylessness, they did teach us to read more closely."
Bowen recalls exchanging a series of letters with John on how much difference there really was between undergraduate and graduate study in the same subject. "That English department was the defender of the Aristotelian school of literary criticism, created in the 1920s and based on the principles enunciated in Aristotle's Poetics. Although the faculty at Chicago was alone in espousing this method, they included some brilliant and very self-confident critics who did not hesitate to condemn what they saw as the errors and excesses of other schools. I would be extremely surprised if they did not encourage their students to take the same position." Bellairs may have been inspired himself when he churned out a few literary criticisms while in Minnesota, articles Bowen think sound suspiciously like possible rewritings of essays written for class.
As far as individual classes, Bellairs took a course on the eighteenth-century English novel; in a letter to Charles Bowen, Bellairs regaled some of the amusingly absurd episodes he encountered and Bowen can almost quote from memory John's description of one novel: an aristocratic villain lures the innocent heroine into a bagnio, plies her with 'soporific macaroons,' and has his will with her. "The resulting child, John told me, is later made legitimate by Act of Parliament. Perhaps you can find someone who didn't abandon the study of English literature as early as I did and can identify this work."
Somewhere in his coursework Bellairs had to deal with learning a foreign language. Myers notes that John satisfied the requirement by teaching himself enough French from a book - not from a college course and not with audio recordings. On his application for Indiana University, Bellairs writes he reads Latin, Classical Greek and French; his University of Chicago career placement booklet says he reads only French and Latin. Nowhere however does it indicate that he spoke any language fluently.
Bernard Markwell recalls that Bellairs took Professor Sirluck's seminar on Milton one semester and "wrote a witty last minute paper on Lucca Signorelli's frescos in the Orvieto Cathedral being an influence on Paradise Lost.” It goes without saying there wasn't any influence and Markwell identifies the essay as being “full of nonsensical wit, a kind of dry run for St. Fidgeta." We're told he received only an A in class.
From his coursework Bellairs discovered a plethora of obscure authors and little-known literary works that he would later incorporate into his novels. Some of these allusions are seen through characters Roderick Random Childermass (Roderick Random, the title character of Tobias Smollett’s novel), Jonathan Barnavelt (named for the famous Dutch statesmen memorialized in an English play), and Anthony Monday, who shares a similarly-spelled name with the English dramatist.
The requirements for the Master of Arts degree in Literature took nine months (three quarters) and included passing a comprehensive examination based on a list of 90 book-length works. Marilyn Fitschen says that John spent the summer preparing for and taking the exam, allowing him to complete his coursework by June 1960. He was awarded his degree at the September commencement and immediately afterwards began teaching part-time in Gary, Indiana.
