Why Do Intellectuals Fall in Love?

IT USUALLY HAPPENS sometime in second grade when you see your teacher squeezing the Chatmin or checking the price on a pound of Purdue chicken; the shocking notton that Miss Teachingbody lives outside the classroom Later on, sometime before your first rendez-vous with the dermatologist, you realize that your parents don't always just read before they doze off. Somehow, though, the two notions never coalesce into the equally plausible notion that maybe Miss Teachingbody, too, does more than maybe loss her red inked papers aside and draw up the comforter before counting the sheep. Popular mythology lingers too long on the realization we can't imagine out parents of teachers making love; truth is, in out casinos of life, love is our baccarat table, to be sought by all but afforded only by the most beautiful people. "The error is common," writes author Alison Furie "since in the popular mind--and especially in the media--the idea of sex is linked with the idea of beauty."

No wonder literature, broadly conceived to include even Harlequin novels replete with cover couples in various modes of disrobing, so obsessed with the glamour of the most exclusive gaming tables, never pauses to take in the amours of the teacher on the 3 day 2 night junket playing the dollar slot machines Boring.

Read Foreign Affairs now, don't wait for the vidco: it is not the stuff of which mini series are made. The sibling affairs here are delightfully foreign: not because they sprout in London but because they involve the separate affairs of Professor Vinnie Miner, an authority on English children rhymes, and Assistant Professor Fred Furner, who is in pursuit of tenure via the works of eighteenth century English poet John Gay.

You realize at once Vinnie Miner hides a jackpot full of eccentricity behind her vencer of conventionalism. She studies literature, but the literature of children's rhymes: she does not degrade herself with snide retorts to her academic detractors, but she imagines them torturously consumed by progressive pneumonia: she lives alone without visible regret, but she imagines a dirty dog Fido, or Self-Pity, as her constant companion. And now Vinnie, ahem, Professor Vinnie Miner, who wouldn't even lower herself to see the musical Oklahoma, finds herself making love to a hoky sanitation engineer from Fulsa.

And Fred Furner--"a handsome, athletic-looking young man, the type that directors employ to battle carnivorous vegetables"-- finds himself matter-of-factly in love with BBC star Lady Rosemary Radley. The British Museum, his research on Poet Gay, his semi-estranged photographer wife back home, none of this can check his ecstatic infatuation. Never minding that he must soon return to teach summer school and never noticing "her assumption of a teasing impulsive intimacy which yet holds its victims at arm's length," Turner succumbs, willingly.

And so do we Stripping away the deceptive dew of formulate novel writing--the exotic foreign city, the glamourous actress, the handsome young hero-- and Foreign Affairs seems like anything but an easy gamble Lurie spares as none of the foibles and failing of the Professors of Love, but makes us love them anyway. She succeeds not by resting on the certain appeal of the glamorous life, but, like her academic friends, in spite of glamour.

The profs aren't as perfect as their students might fashion them to be. More than once, Vinnie wants to tell her new love that, despite his protestations to the contrary, she really isn't very nice. They meet on a transatlantic flight, in fact, not because of Vinnie's natural charm but despite her best efforts, so typical of the tenured academic set, to put him off. She would deny him even a glance at her newspaper, were she not unfamiliar with the proper form of that particular snub. And the more physical manifestations of love-well. Vinnie still finds it pleasant but bittersweet, the principal male organ still seems "infected: sore, red, puffy."

For his part, Fred shares what Vinnie calls "the assumption of very good-looking persons that as they pass through life they are entitled to take-and to leave--whatever they choose when they choose." His love life follows the path most easily navigated. On leave in London, he forgets the wife at home and romances a British lady. When the leave ends, he switches partners without having to change mindsets.

Lurie's London backdrop betrays Lurie's critical love. This is not a James novel with wealthy Americans darting about wide-eyed in full-dress infatuation. Lurie shows us the procession of the Druids on Parliament Hill but does not spare us their absurdity, the anachronistic spectacles under their ancient hoods, their clearly modern British faces. But neither can Lurie mask her love for Vinnie's adopted city, flaws and all.

Hidden in all of this, embedded and often engulfing her narrative, Lurie reveals her own love of writing, an old-fashioned and well-honed gift for the clever phrase and the apt insight. "To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York State Lottery. He could hurt you: He could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill concealed, embarrassed distate. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept even totally incompetent." So says Vinnie Miner.

For added delight, Lurie serves her romantic comedy with a mix of entertaining minor characters. There's Fred's wife and her photo exhibition of the male organs Vinnie finds so distasteful, a Cockney housekeeper philosopher, and Edwin Frances, the "homosexual who likes to dress up in his hostess's clothes."

A Cornell Professor herself, Alison Lurie has made Foreign Affairs one of the best works of recent modern fiction. It is as uncommon treat, as refreshing as a good avocado and watercress soup-- and at least twice as eccentric.