The Latinist: A Novel

by Mark Prins

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A contemporary reimagining of the Daphne and Apollo myth, The Latinist is a page-turning exploration of power, ambition, and the intertwining of love and obsession.

Tessa Templeton has thrived at Oxford University under the tutelage and praise of esteemed classics professor Christopher Eccles. And now, his support is the one thing she can rely on: her job search has yielded nothing, and her devotion to her work has just cost her her boyfriend, Ben. Yet shortly before her thesis defense, Tessa learns that Chris has sabotaged her career—and realizes their relationship is not at all what she believed.

Driven by what he mistakes as love for Tessa, Chris has ensured that no other institution will offer her a position, keeping her at Oxford with him. His tactics grow more invasive as he determines to prove he has her best interests at heart. Meanwhile, Tessa scrambles to undo the damage—and in the process makes a startling discovery about an obscure second-century Latin poet that could launch her into academic stardom, finally freeing her from Chris’s influence.

A contemporary reimagining of the Daphne and Apollo myth, The Latinist is a page-turning exploration of power, ambition, and the intertwining of love and obsession.

 

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Release date: January 4, 2022

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Print pages: 335

Sample

CHRISTOPHER ECCLES’S OFFICE AT WESTFALING College loomed over the cloisters where Tessa sometimes held tutorials, when the weather suited, and now as she listened to her student read from her paper on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the recurring theme of gods exploiting mortals, a cigarette butt dropped into the quadrangle a few feet from them, where it lay in the grass, used and smoking. Chris despised all constraints on his smoking habit, but this was the first Tessa had seen him use the quadrangle grass as an ashtray. Fines were imposed for dropping butts onto the footpath, let alone onto the quadrangle, let alone for smoking indoors, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the red nub between Chris’s fingers, the tip crackling as he stole one last illicit drag before ejecting it through his casement window.

“Entitlement in the Roman imagination was therefore conceptualized in these hierarchies of god, demigod, and mortal,” Florence continued, her face buried in her pages, “and in so doing acts of entitlement of many sorts were justified as ‘the natural order of things.’ ” Florence glanced at Tessa. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Does this all sound like rubbish? Is it too abstract?” She hadn’t seen the aerial cigarette.

“Did you read the criticism?” Tessa said, without taking her eye off the little plume that twirled into the warm March air. “The question for you may be, is Ovid reinforcing these ideologies or exposing them for what they—”

“Is that a butt on the quadrangle?” Florence interrupted.

Tessa paused. She resented having to manufacture some excuse for her mentor, distinguished head of classics at Westfaling, littering on the inviolable sanctuary of an Oxford quad.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Florence. “Talk about breach of etiquette.” She set her pages down and stood.

“Where are you going?” Tessa asked.

“To throw it in the bin,” said Florence.

“That’s not your responsibility,” Tessa said. It seemed essential that Florence not play maid to Chris’s tobacco leavings, though Tessa was otherwise torn about how to proceed. “That’s not your responsibility at all,” she repeated, and remembered staring at the woolen sock fastened around the smoke alarm in Chris’s office. “Pleading the Fifth,” he’d said. He often sprinkled his speech with Americanisms in her presence. It was one of their running gags. “You’re a knob,” she’d responded.

Florence hovered in the shadow of the cloister, uncertain. “If Max sees that, he’s going to go mental,” she said. Max was the porter. Florence stepped out and squinted into the sun, inspecting the windows of Staircase 7, then crossed back into the cloister, smiling with the joy of seeing an adult, an authority figure, breaking a rule. “Chris’s window is open,” she whispered. “Should we tell Max?”

For a moment, Tessa envied Florence the worldview in which Max held authority over Chris. “What’s the natural order of things?” Tessa asked.

“Pardon?”

“You mentioned god, demigod, mortal …”

“God, demigod, mortal, animals, plants, rocks.”

“And do you think there might be an Oxford hierarchy?”

Florence stared at the smoldering butt.

“Max can’t do anything,” Tessa continued. “The best he can do is pick it up and hope the rector doesn’t notice, because it’ll be his fault if he does.”

“Can I go and get it now?” Florence said.

“Just leave it,” Tessa responded. “We haven’t even gotten to Apollo and Daphne. Compressing two thousand years of critical response into a five-minute chat is only possible if you have five minutes to attempt it.”

Papers crinkled in Florence’s fingers as she looked for her place in the essay. Other students passed blithely along the footpath. The last strand of smoke floated out of view. Tessa hadn’t mentioned it to Chris last night, but it was their argument yesterday that had precipitated her breakup with Ben. And then waking up in Chris’s house this morning—mistake. She had slept on Chris’s couch before—there was at least precedent—but now that Diana had left him, it was a bit different.

The staircase door squealed and Chris himself stepped out onto the footpath, moving briskly away from Tessa and Florence. “When Ovid’s gods encounter mortals,” Florence continued, not looking up from the last page of her paper, “they’re likely to maim or kill them, or transform them into an inanimate or speechless entity, for arbitrary and self-serving reasons …” Another cigarette appeared in Chris’s hands and then the small flame and more smoke swirling around him. As he turned the corner of the quadrangle toward the Porter’s Lodge, he noticed Tessa and Florence on the bench in the cloisters and stopped, hovering for a moment, before turning to face them head-on. He approached slowly, looking at Tessa, inspecting her.

“It’s you,” he said.

Florence stopped reading.

“That it is,” said Tessa. He would not usually interrupt a class. With anyone else she would have been duly annoyed and curt, but for Chris she made an exception.

“May I borrow your mobile?” Chris said. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t a bit of an emergency. I’ve left mine at home.”

“You can try,” said Tessa. “I think it’s nearly dead.” She reached into her bag and handed him her phone. “By the way, Chris …” Tessa nodded at the butt in the quadrangle grass.

His head swiveled in the direction of the cigarette but returned instantly to her phone. “Oh yes, right, of course. One mustn’t ash on the lawn. Finest lawn in Oxford and therefore the world. What’s your code?” he said.

Typical Chris, what’s your code? She didn’t even tell Ben her code. Tessa reached for the phone and entered her password, wondering what Chris would need to make a call for so urgently. His mother was sick, she knew. “I don’t know how far you’ll get,” she said. “It’s at one percent.”

“You can use mine, Professor Eccles,” said Florence. “I’ve only just charged it.”

Chris turned, as if he hadn’t heard her.

“Anyway—” Tessa said, but Chris pivoted back again.

He had told her, the night before, that everything would sort itself out just fine, her applications, Ben, her life, and his words had comforted her. Now his face looked sallow and damp. He must have drunk even more than she. His shirt reeked of cigarettes, even from several feet away.

“Is everything all right?” Tessa asked.

“No,” he said. “Mum’s not well. Looks like it’s dead.” He returned Tessa’s phone.

“You can still use mine,” said Florence.

But he was already back on Staircase 7.

“He seems a bit out of sorts,” said Florence. “And he didn’t even pick up the cigarette.”

He did seem out of sorts, but Tessa had other things on her mind.

At eleven, Tessa wrapped up Florence’s tutorial with compliments on her paper and a recommendation that she look at Callisto, Semele, and Io if she was interested in expanding it into one of the mandatory long essays in her next year. “And I’d be remiss if I didn’t make you aware of a conference, here, just before break ends. If you find yourself bored of Dorset or just craving your tutor’s thoughts on a minor author, you should come.”

“Marius, right?” Florence asked. “I saw the conference proceedings. ‘Minor Poets and … ?’ ”

Tessa thought for a moment: the conference had some convoluted title that she was embarrassed not to remember. “ ‘Minor Poets and Pseudepigrapha: New Advances’?”

“ ‘Approaches’?”

“ ‘Approaches to Old Problems …’ ”

“ ‘In Noncanonical Texts,’ ” Florence finished.

“I’m doing a great job of advertising,” Tessa said.

Florence handed over the translation she’d been assigned. “I suppose I could tag along.”

Pleased, Tessa wished Florence a good vacation—today was the last Thursday before the Easter holiday. As Florence ambled off into the sunny late morning, Tessa spent a moment looking at the butt and nub of the filter lying in the short grass. She had walked directly from Chris’s house to the tutorial, had not even had time to change. The vodka and tonics from last night throbbed, though she blamed her headache on Ben. She honestly could have killed him for his timing. Her dissertation defense was next week. She’d had only one Skype interview and no callbacks for jobs next year. The butt seemed portentous, but she struggled to put her finger on why. It seemed to speak, maybe, to the grim truth lurking beneath her spring day—that after six years of crushing dedication to this life of the mind, on the cusp of officially receiving her doctorate, twelve of the universities she’d applied to had gone radio silent on her candidacy, with the exception only of Westfaling, which had coughed up a contingent faculty position, making it a baker’s dozen of failure that she had not imagined possible in light of her work, her monograph under consideration at Oxford University Press, her first paper being accepted by Classical Journal of America(she’d finally been able to add forthcoming to her CV), and a recommendation letter from a titan in the field, Chris, that could be nothing other than glowing.

Tessa’s future had only ever looked so uncertain in the year after her father died, nearly eight years prior. Tessa remembered him as a brilliant asshole with a short temper who would consume the Lancet from underneath a broad bucket cap on the few occasions he obliged the family with his presence at Neptune Beach, his pale legs stretched under a fat umbrella. He got away with absenteeism and open mockery of Tessa’s philology habit (“we should use Latin instead of anesthesia”) because Sheryl was also a doctor and Claire aspiring-to-be. Tessa had just been accepted to Cornell and the University of Florida, her safety, when they were blindsided by his diagnosis. For eighteen years she’d dreamed of escaping Florida, but suddenly Cornell was very far away and very expensive. She’d been made to see how selfish such a departure would be, with Dean terminal and Sheryl overwhelmed by work. Inscribed in these hushed conversations was the belief that Tessa’s passion was less valid than, say, Claire’s: she was signing a lease in Ann Arbor, and her future in medicine needed to be shielded.

After Dean died it struck Tessa that she might not have the personal or emotional resources left to launch her own life. She was twenty, she’d spent the last two years ferrying Dean to appointments, crushing his pain pills, providing companionship for his frazzled spirit, watching him die, watching him watch himself die. Her mother and sister’s tears at the funeral had felt like personal insults, each orb a sort of acid on the fiber of her being, as she sat in dour, disciplined silence. Her grades were so-so, her personal life nil, her sister soon to be credited as first author on a published paper (she’d been able to tell Dean just before he passed), and the chalky scalp through his flossy hair, the translucent skin, the way he’d compelled everything in his life around achievement and then not quite achieved, the way he’d never fully appreciated her and yet she’d been his loving daughter, his docile helper, the witness of his most vulnerable seconds, his mother, essentially, it was all devastating.

That year, she translated vast swaths of the Aeneid in a twenty-four-hour Waffle House off the highway between Gainesville and Jacksonville—she had not yet moved onto campus, and the prospect of home terrified her. When he was alive, Dean had cultivated basically nothing inside or outside the house, and the very sameness of the before/after visited an inarticulable pain on Tessa, the solution of which lay in the smothered hash browns and bottomless coffee mug at the truck-stop Waffle House off 301, the kind anonymity of its eternal, synthetic daylight, and Virgil’s twelve-book origin myth of the Roman Empire. She had lost any sense that her life after graduation might involve Virgil or Ovid in any formal way—Dean had murmured something about law school, at one point—and so these hours spent writing felt like a refusal of the very notion that she had a future. The thing reaped from those nights was a paper on piety and its relation to the master narrative, which Chris had seen and on the spot arranged a fellowship to whisk its author away from whatever American backwater it inhabited—until Tessa arrived, he had never heard of Jacksonville, or so he maintained.

A life had ensued. In Oxford, she had pursued her passion doggedly, without apology, through her relationship with Ben and even the death of Ben’s father, whose funeral last month had coincided with a more or less crucial paper she was delivering in Edinburgh for the Association for Classical Studies. Ben’s hand in hers when he asked her to stay had felt like the last thread tethering her to earth, but she had gone, and now Ben had gone, too.

She had thought he had forgiven her, but in fact he had been lying in wait. Last night, she had arrived late to make dinner. Ben had one more day before he left for the North Sea, and he had cooked the previous two nights. He had taken a proprietary stand about that night, which Tessa learned soon after arriving at her flat, breathless and sweating under her cardigan. She had been arguing with Chris about a request for a footnote in her forthcoming paper. One reader’s report insisted that she acknowledge Apollo’s “love” for Daphne wasn’t always interpreted as being ironic. This was a minor point in her paper, but one on which she didn’t feel she could budge.

“I’m so sorry,” she’d called from the hallway, where she could smell marinara sauce and hear water boiling. “It was Chris—we got into an argument.” In the kitchen, which doubled as living room and dining room, Ben had treated her to an ambiguous stare from his post at the counter. She kissed him on the cheek and continued talking as she changed in the bedroom.

“He took issue—he really latched on to this point about the ‘amor’ in the Daphne Apollo sequence being ironic or not. Because I wrote about ‘love’ used in an ironic sense, so Apollo is this great archer who saves the world from Python, and he challenges Cupid to an archery match and Cupid shoots him with an arrow, which inflames him with desire for Daphne, whom he then chases with such rapey persistence that she begs her father to transform her into something basically that Apollo can’t fuck, and she turns into a laurel tree.” Tessa ducked under the sloped garret ceiling, shouting over the sound of boiling water. “There’s a great statue in Rome by Bernini of Apollo’s hand latched around Daphne’s torso as her skin transforms into bark and leaves sprout from her fingers. And remember what the laurel tree is? Literally a metonymy for trophy. There’s even a moment earlier in Book I where they’re having an archery contest and don’t know what to give as trophies because the laurel tree doesn’t exist yet. Anyway, Apollo’s ‘love’ for Daphne is pretty clearly meant in an ironic sense. Like, look where his love gets Daphne. And meanwhile Apollo gets to keep being Apollo, no consequences.”

She crossed back into the kitchen and approached Ben. The block of Parmesan was nearly gone; he seemed primarily intent on demolishing it. “Think we have enough there?” she said.

“This is all about a footnote?” he responded.

“Well, yes, in a way.”

He kept grating.

“Are you just going to keep doing that? Are you upset with me about something?”

“Christ. I’m making dinner again because you didn’t turn up—”

“I apologized for that.”

“And you’re banging on about a single footnote.”

Tessa focused on letting the anger go. Leave it at Westfaling.

“What do you expect?” Ben had continued. “Y’all right, love? Shall I do you a plate? I leave tomorrow, we don’t even have time for a fight.”

“Then why are you starting one?” she’d snapped.

Now Tessa pinched the white filter tip of the cigarette butt between her fingers and disposed of it, still warm, in the nearby bin. She continued on to Staircase 7, where she had spent most of the past two years, with her first teaching responsibilities under Chris’s tutelage, and trekked past Chris’s door, which was closed, up to the office that she shared with Annie, the history and geography postdoc. She turned the key and left the door open. Annie’s leather jacket was tossed over the ottoman like some felled animal. There were two umbrellas shunted between the wall and the oak desk that they shared. The room smelled vaguely of rain, even as light arced through the casement windows. She unpacked her laptop, wondering if Ben had sent her a message since last night. Maybe he had forgotten something. Besides her. She went to her email. She scanned over a message from Apple informing her that her backup was complete, and after observing that there was no email from University College London, Brasenose College, St. Andrews, Case Western, UCLA, or any of the other institutions that held her once-promising future in their palms, she opened the missive from the Hotmail account that looked like a phishing scam.

You may want to reconsider asking Christopher Eccles for a recommendation letter in the future.

Underneath was a thumbnail of a picture. She immediately became aware of the open door at her back. She closed it, then clicked the thumbnail. It was an image of a letter from Chris on Westfaling stationery. She read the letter twice.

To Whom It May Concern,

I have known Tessa Templeton since 2006, when she began her Master’s of Studies in Greek and Latin Languages under my supervision. Though our collaboration was minimal in her first year at Oxford, I have heard that she acquitted herself well in her Research Methods seminar class, and her score in the spring examinations, known here as Advancements Exams, was above average.

Tessa has made strides from a rocky beginning to her doctorate. Like many candidates new to the independent work habits required of professional scholarship, she has difficulty applying herself consistently to research and drafting, and we met more regularly in her first year than is normal with the students I supervise. Sometimes, she is hindered by a tendency to be argumentative, which is not always accompanied by the appropriate rigour. Over the three years that I advised her, however, and with encouragement, I’ve witnessed an improvement in her work ethic, and more confidence managing her own time, culminating in what I suspect will be a successful confirmation of her doctoral status this spring.

I’m confident in Tessa’s willingness to apply herself, and I support her decision to pursue a career in the field. Please reach out to me by phone or by email per the below if you have any further questions about her qualifications.

Sincerely,

Professor Christopher Eccles

Westfaling College, Oxford University

•    •    •

THE FIRST TIME Tessa finished the letter, she laughed at the ingenuity of whoever had forged it, even if she dinged them for shoddy research of her CV (publicly available)—no mention of her first in the Advancement Exams, her O’Neill Fellowship, nor the Daphne and Apollo paper she’d delivered in Edinburgh, among other elisions. She awarded points for the syntax and vocabulary, which, she had to admit, were decent imitations of Chris’s own, for the Westfaling stationery, even for the use of Garamond, Chris’s chosen font for paper correspondence. A lineup of suspects appeared unbidden in her mind—Lucrezia Pagani, Liam Sinclaire-Stoudemire, Claire, her sister. Another indistinct figure—wait, that was Dean Templeton, her father, who seemed briefly more viable than anyone, so dedicated an opponent he had been to classical philology as a serious pursuit. Ben stood at the edge, skulking—but that was not possible. For one, he was digitally illiterate. But also, the timing would be in too poor taste, and though he loved a good prank, he was too bighearted to lob one through the interweb like a parting grenade.

Dangling from one of many pens in a mug on her desk was a key chain Ben had given her last spring in the shape of a meat tenderizer, meant to evoke not only the back rubs he lavished on her sometimes nightly, but also a gag he liked to make of wanting to eat her, that if he did not love her so much he would absolutely make a repast out of her lovely arms, that each back rub constituted not a selfless act of love but a preparation of her delicious self for when he would finally be unable to resist, that even though she thought she had seen him first, talked to him first at the Covered Market, he had in fact noticed her beforehand and discovered an appetite for blond American academics. It had been a little much, actually, to use as a key chain. The size of a thimble, it was a bit ponderous, resembling a double-sided hammer from one angle, and something entirely different from another. She’d made an unobtrusive home for it in the office, where it could baffle anyone keen enough to notice it in the first place. Only Chris had ever guessed.

“Something to do with Ben?”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Seems a bit creepy, though, no? Intimations of phallic violence.”

“True,” she’d said. But that would be so alien to Ben as to seem absurd. “Yes, of course, the reading had occurred to me.”

Had she not worried the balance of power in the relationship tilted, if anything, too far in her favor, perhaps she could have shared in Chris’s speculation. As it was, her heart contracted around the idiotic little emblem, and she tore her attention away only with a pang of sadness.

The one person she could feel sure did not write the letter was its putative author, Chris. Chris’s dedication to her career had been unflagging, at least since she’d switched her focus from Virgil to Ovid some years ago, after a challenging start to her time in Oxford. Since then, her work had blossomed, flowered, flourished, leafed, whatever you wanted to call it, in a way that had not only won her accolades (the forthcoming publication, the travel fellowship, presenting in Edinburgh on the same bill as Colm Feeney!), but also sharpened her understanding of herself, her beliefs about literature, her basic ordering of the cosmos and one’s place in it, none of which could have been achieved toiling in the intellectual space where he’d found her, those barren Virgilian fields, that carcass of reactionary scholarship she’d long since harvested beyond any vital use. Chris had rescued her, for lack of a better word, from that … her eyes alighted again on the screen … “rocky beginning to her doctorate.”

It wasn’t funny, Tessa concluded, and the thinnest blade of anger sliced through her thoughts. She needed to call Lucrezia anyway. She would congratulate her on her execution and explain how unfriendly her timing was given the slew of rejections and deafening silence from numerous institutions she would have considered step-downs just a few weeks prior. Not to mention her boyfriend of two years walking off without so much as a proper goodbye, a fucking exit interview, or something.

Dredging her phone from her bag to dial Lucrezia, Tessa recalled it had died in Chris’s palm just an hour earlier. Laughter spilled from the open window as she plugged it in. Tessa suddenly doubted Lucrezia could mimic Chris’s written voice so effectively—Liam could have, probably, and thus she assumed their collusion. Plus the stationery. As Chris’s other doctorate student, Liam could easily have procured the materials and written the letter and even known about Tessa’s “rocky beginning.” But Liam, big loping Liam, or, as Tessa had once called him, hot-but-happily-hitched Liam, was as capable of shenanigans as a member of the Queen’s guard, at least with women he wasn’t married to, good old good-natured and good-naturedly-nostalgic-for-empire Liam. Somehow he invited hyphenation, perhaps because he had been the first hyphenated man Tessa had ever met—meaning not that he had taken his wife’s last name, but that he descended from actual nobility, culottes and all: Liam Sinclaire-Stoudemire. Tessa would feel the occasional pang of guilt at the sound of his heavy tread on Staircase 7, through Chris’s half-open door, she and Chris locked in argument about the metaphysics of a text or just shooting the shit, when she knew Liam struggled even to get Chris to read his emails. He would somewhat pathetically scuffle about outside to announce his presence, but Chris would press through fifteen, sometimes thirty minutes past the start of their meeting, pretending not to notice. Tessa would have felt worse had she not believed at her core that she was a better classicist who had made exponentially more sacrifices, and that Liam’s scholarship was crushingly unoriginal, even if he was a good person and didn’t deserve to be treated like an invisible child.

Tessa’s phone buzzed to life and she located Lucrezia’s number quickly, eager to put the mystery to rest. This was not how she wanted to be spending her day. She had a meeting with Chris at one-thirty and a paper to begin on Marius and her viva next week, for which she needed to allot ample time to fret over, if not prepare for.

Lucrezia answered after two rings. “Tessa!” Tessa loved how Lucrezia said her name, elongating the double consonant, as if it were a song: Tess-sa. “Dimmi.”

“You could have at least waited until April fool’s,” Tessa said.

A pickaxe fell rhythmically in the background. She could see Lucrezia at the Isola Sacra Necropolis baking in the sun along with the red bricks of the tombs. Tessa hadn’t yet been able to visit, due to an inability, on both sides, to find funds for a trip.

“Waited for what?” Lucrezia said. “To ask you again when you’re going to come?”

“You didn’t send the email?” Tessa said.

“No,” said Lucrezia. “What email? When are you going to fly down?”

“When is the funding going to appear?” Tessa asked, distracted.

“When you get that new travel fellowship.”

“Or you scrape together some pennies from your boss.”

“So many fragments, so many inscriptions, so much that’s probably Marius.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“So much lost to posterity …”

Tessa ended the call and peered again at the image on her screen. She pushed her hair back, feeling between her fingers something fuzzy, a linty batch of gray and lavender yarn from the upholstery of Chris’s couch. That she depended on him not only for midwifing her career, but also for mopping her up when her boyfriend disappeared, seemed perhaps extravagant, but in fact testified to the depths of their connection, both intellectual and personal. Take the meeting in which she had formally asked him for a recommendation letter, last October. A red-orange leaf had rustled through his cracked window just as she’d asked. “You’ll hardly need me,” he’d said, his eyes yielding hers in favor of the leaf—Chris was color-blind, though he could pick out reds. Usually Diana paired his olives with his grays, but he’d resembled, that day, a lump of clay in his forlorn monotone collared shirt and trousers. By then it had become clear that Diana had left him, and Tessa had asked if he was all right.

He hadn’t taken her meaning at first, or if he had, he’d chosen to elude her with a more or less pedantic display of his learnedness, treating her to the latest on Metamorphoses I 544–547, the disputed lines in which Daphne appeals for help to some permutation of father, mother earth, or both. “This young man, or woman,” he’d complained, brandishing a thin stack of pages for which, presumably, he was a blind referee. “I’m assuming they’re young. This youth completely ignores the errors in agreement between the surviving codices, even the Marcianus and Neapolitanus.”

Marcianus, a late eleventh century manuscript residing in Florence; Neapolitanus, a twelfth century in Naples. Tessa had arrived at Oxford with the notion that texts like the Iliad and Aeneid and Metamorphoseshad passed immaculately from composition to present day as if by time warp—she knew intellectually that their authors predated the printing press by well over a thousand years, but had not appreciated what fires and mice and mold could do to manuscripts in short supply already, ...