Personal Landscapes

Catherine Savage Brosman ’55 embraces contradiction. A professor emerita of French at Tulane University and an accomplished poet and critic, she is perfectly at home in Paris’s Latin Quarter, enjoying both her lunch and the loose but vivid connection with the crowds strolling past her table.

But if you dig a little beneath Brosman’s Francophile veneer, you’d learn that she has an enduring love of the deserts of West Texas where she grew up, and that she’d rather be there, eating enchiladas. Or hamburgers, which Texans have the good taste never to besmirch with mayonnaise. A formidable intellectual with powerfully down-to-earth tastes, Brosman explores the dichotomy of these personal landscapes and the effects they have had on her in her recent collection of essays, Finding Higher Ground (University of Nevada Press, 2003).

Brosman contradicts in other ways as well. That is, she speaks against many of the trends, intellectual and otherwise, that make up contemporary society. She expresses views here that perhaps did not endear her to the French department, as when she recalls attending a conference “at which three black-shirted, black-trousered, black-cravated French expatriate intellectuals, all remunerated generously by the state university system of California, held forth for our benefit on the evils—not just inadequacies—of the American liberal arts curriculum. . . .” She also digs in her heels against affirmative action, and applauded the Hopwood Decision, which banned the use of race in college admissions. “When favoritism is ended and individual responsibility and performance resume their rightful place, we will be better off, and, on the broad scale, get along much better.”

But Brosman is somewhat less interested in opining on the state of the world than in looking at her own life and the places where she’s lived and analyzing the effects those various places have had on her. Generally speaking, the mountains of Colorado and the deserts of West Texas, where she spent her childhood and adolescence, seem to have had the strongest impact. Brosman is nothing if not a rugged individualist and a bit of a loner, as befits a child of the desert. She takes pride in thinking for herself, and she resists pigeonholing of any kind. A raccoon-coat wearing, probably drunken Westerner of the nouveau category—loud, garish, and thoroughly subject to the herd mentality—finds this out to his discomfort when he tries to chat Brosman up at Aspen’s Sneaker Ball—an event that brings out the town’s abundant glitterati but that, not surprisingly, Brosman finds less than golden, as we read in her amusing take on the subject.

Brosman surveys the mindless, low-grade decadence of the Aspen elite with nearly equal degrees of sorrow and anger. She isn’t misty-eyed about the Indians who once ruled the West. “Those displaced people were . . . cruel, as well as extremely primitive; we should not romanticize them.” But still she laments that the descendants of those Westerners who destroyed the Indians’ “valuable traditions” should be such shallow twits. “O Brave New World! Was it for the Sneaker Ball . . . that the buffalo died?”

Brosman’s most compelling essay comes near the end. In “Images of Paris,” she walks the streets of that great city and remembers her years there just after earning her Rice MA, when she was a young woman enjoying the intellectual and cultural life of the day. Camus had just won the Nobel Prize, and café society meant intellectuals such as Sartre, rather than the oafs of Aspen. But, ever tough-minded, Brosman does not idealize the Paris of her youth, finding the city much improved today in its cleanliness and increased politeness.

But if Brosman finds herself drawn to places far from the New Orleans she calls home, why doesn’t she pack her bags and move, especially now that she’s taken early retirement? When friends ask her that very question, Brosman replies with her typical embrace of the harder way. “It is better, I think, to leave unrealized at least one founding dream, to miss and yearn for something. . . . Mesas shine most brilliantly from afar. In my mind, they glow now, at first dawn.”

—David Theis