the minnesota review n.s. 58-60 (2003)

Clifford Siskin

Michael Sprinker

Shortly after moving to Glasgow last fall, I received the following e-mail from one of Michael's graduate students:

Even now I cannot come to terms with the deep irony and absurdity surrounding Michael's death. It is just totally unfair that a decent and respectable professor like him should die so young while people far less worthy sit in their comfort chairs, earn big salaries, and do nothing but pursue self interest. In my paper [she went on], I was trying to tell Michael that irony is a very limited political project and that laughter is more of a problem in itself rather than a way of criticizing modern problems, but I was struck wordless to see how in this case irony is so much the descriptive truth in an age in which neither Truth nor Justice exists. As I see people use laughter to replace the uneasy and embarrassing absence of Truth and Justice, I find it so hard to find a proper way to mourn for his death.

I didn't have a proper answer for this student back then, and I still don't have one now. Thanks to Michael, however, I at least had something to write back to this student, for she happened to be the very one who occasioned Michael's very last e-mail to me—the e-mail I cited at our memorial gathering last September: "I am in a benevolent mood toward students," wrote Michael, "in whose redemptive capacity I continue to believe." Whatever the excruciating ironies surrounding Michael’s death, that was the good and informing irony of his career; that through sheer force of will and talent he could take institutions like Stony Brook and make them into the tools to realize that belief.

That effort was the primary context for my own friendship with Michael. But there were also other universities, humanities institutes, the world of publishing, MLGs, poker games. Michael was always working the System, but the System assumed many forms. That's why many of us here are strangers to each other. Michael was and is our only link—a link that does give us something to share, for Michael's personality and professional conduct were startlingly consistent across all contexts. All of us have had that strange experience of feeling a certain pleasure in being told that we were "wrong"—in watching eyebrows being raised at neighboring tables as Michael's voice rose. And of having ourselves and our work taken seriously—that is, taken the way we hoped it would be when we first entered the academy.

This shared knowledge, however, is primarily about how Michael affected our lives. What each of us knows about his, however, is far less uniform, so I'd like to start the Conference by materializing its object in the way he would have—with some facts: dates and numbers with which we can begin to construct a history. By themselves, the dates tell one cold fact about the life: it was short. Born in Elgin, Illinois in 1950, Michael never made it out of his forties. In conjunction with some other numbers, however, another word besides "short" comes to mind—a word to which Michael gave his own ironic twist. A fellow poker player once asked him, recalls Dick Ohmann, how he was doing. Michael said "I'm dying." "We all are," said the player. "Yes," replied Michael, and then characteristically stripped that humanistic platitude bare, “"but I'm doing it faster."

Michael was fast, as anyone who slipped into platitudes, played squash, drove the autobahn, wrote an e-mail, turned in a dissertation chapter, got on his nerves, or asked for help, quickly discovered. He was always right there, right away, for you or against you. Whatever else attracted people to Michael, there was this one mesmerizing fact—he didn't screw around—he got things done, meticulously done. This was so compelling and so refreshing not only because it's so rare, but because in Michael's case it wasn't a neurosis; it was an intellectual position he occupied, a political commitment he made. Michael was committed in thought and in practice to the value of labor. He did not think of being a professor as some lifelong act of self-fashioning, but as a job—an everyday job that was valuable because the labor was productive: it helped students to realize their redemptive capacity. And wherever he was, Michael always found the people who shared the pleasure of that work: from Daniel Fineman, as a graduate student at Princeton, to Roman de la Campa, at Stony Brook—forgive me for leaving out so many names in between; each of us knows where and when we rolled up our sleeves. Michael's life was working hard at his job, and, when the cancer came to claim that life, it became part of his job to fight it.

He won—a Pyrrhic victory because of his weakened heart—but Michael, as usual, finished the job: his body was cancer-free when he died. Even in that fight, he found the right comrade, Dr. Stefan Madajewicz; their conversations mixed communism and cancer into a new discipline—a kind of political oncology. The triumph over cancer was a heroic act, but to grasp what was truly astonishing about it, you have to switch genres from the epic to the Virgilian georgic, the kind of writing that describes work. As much as he enjoyed the thought, and occasionally the act, of punching out certain people, Michael's life was a life not of glorious violence but of unrelenting labor—of linking, like Virgil's descriptions of bee-keeping in the empire, daily toil to political ends. Those ends, in turn, pull the genre back from the suffocating pain of individual tragedy to the larger picture, from the self to the social.

The following e-mail is what I'll call the puckish georgic—a favorite of Michael's. He sent me this example the day that the graduate students decided to sit-in to protest the withdrawal of offers to Modhumita Roy and others:

I didn't encourage—or even hint at—this, honest. I guess some of my students are taking this Brecht business rather seriously. I keep telling them that Brecht was interested in provoking his audiences to action—and now look, they take me seriously. Pity I didn't tell them to protest the bombing of Yugoslavia.

That sense of georgic scale—of the need to look beyond the personal—never left him, even in the darkest moments. That's why he pulled himself out of bed to meet me at the Printer's Devil to discuss Ira Livingston's tenure, the skin under his eyes turning black from lack of oxygen as we prepared for a meeting with the Provost. He barely made it to intensive care the next day—the lymphocytes that ate the cancer had turned, like so many University presidents, on the body they were supposed to protect—but he got up that night because he simply wanted to go ahead, as he always did, and get it done. We’re here today because Michael Sprinker, in some way or other, got it done for all of us. He didn’t have much time; he was a very fast worker.

Only three years after graduation from Northwestern in 1972, Michael had a Ph.D. from Princeton, and, a mere five years after that, a book on Hopkins and nine articles earned him tenure from Oregon State University. The venues already ranged from Victorian Newsletter and Studies in Romanticism to Diacritics and boundary 2, and the subjects from Meredith and Ruskin to Foucault and Derrida. Although he mocked my anglophone tendencies unmercifully, a trip to Britain in 1983 proved to be a career turning point. There he became friends with Mike Davis and got to know the folks at the New Left Review and Verso. Before the decade was out, he was not only co-editing the minnesota review and managing The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, but also working through Verso with Davis on The Haymarket Series and with Ann Kaplan on Post-Modern Occasions. In 1989 he added one more series, Literature, Culture, Theory with Dick Macksey through Cambridge, and, as the 90s began, he joined the Editorial Committee of NLR. On most vitas, these would be career-making entries, but the singular difference in Michael's case was that the careers that were made belonged to others. "I was always astonished," recalls Andrew Ross, "at how someone like Mike, who could have been doing a hundred other things with his valuable time, would care so much about someone else's prose and ideas to fix them in such an exhaustive way."

That's not to say that Michael neglected his own scholarship. He joined Stony Brook in 1984, after returning from the year in Britain, and by the time I arrived four years later, had already, with characteristic speed, become a full professor at the age of thirty-eight, published his signature monograph on Imaginary Relations, co-founded the Humanities Institute, planned the landmark conference on Althusser, and totally revivified the Graduate Program in English. This is not merely an impression or simply my judgment: between 1990 and 1994, to put the numbers on the table, Michael directed sixteen completed dissertations, more than twice the number of the next most productive professor; in addition, his students earned half of the total number of job offers during that period—including posts at Stanford, Tufts, Missouri, and Florida—while producing, to that point, six books published by major university presses. When he shifted his departmental home to Comparative Studies at mid decade, the students there followed suit, with Michael playing a key role in the development of their graduate program.

By 1990, Michael had held a wide range of fellowships and grants from the NEH, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, the ACLS, and the Humanities Centers at Wesleyan and Oregon. In 1991, I remember telling him to drive safely as he headed out for another stint, this one at the University of California Institute at Irvine, but there was already a hitchhiker on board. Michael was diagnosed with multiple myeloma that Thanksgiving, a fitting irony for someone who despised traditional holidays.

Given a life expectancy of two years, one would think that Michael would have slowed down. However, his publication rate actually increased during the illness; twenty-five of Michael's fifty articles were published during just those last nine years, as were fourteen reviews, four edited collections, and the monograph on Proust. Even a bone marrow transplant in 1996 did not slow him down, although it carried ideological as well as medical risks. The sister whose marrow was the match was and is a born again Christian; Michael's Marxism somehow survived the transplant, but his allergy to cats, happily, did not.

What did survive everything was his relationship with Modhumita Roy. In Modhumita, Michael met his match in every sense of that phrase. She was the one person who through sheer force of will and love could bring Michael again and again and again back up to speed and, when necessary, face him down. As much as I was in awe of Michael's own resources, I knew that he never would have come as close to his fiftieth birthday as he did without her strength and her attention. So did he.

I loved Michael for many things, perhaps most of all for the clarity of his desires. If you've read any of Michael's work, you know what he wanted: an end to what his student called the "embarrassing absence of Truth and Justice"—that, and one other thing. "Presents are not only not required," he wrote in an e-mail announcing his official union with Modhumita, "they are positively discouraged. The gift of your company is all we desire." However briefly, Michael gave that gift to each of us; I've never been in finer company.

Clifford Siskin is the A. C. Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Focusing on the history of writing, his major publications include The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford, 1997) and The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830 (Johns Hopkins, 1999).