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Review by Roger Miller
In 1992, at the age of 41, Don J. Snyder experienced something that tens of millions of Americans have experienced down through the years. He lost a good job and, despite a mighty search, couldn't land another anything near like it.
The difference between Snyder and most of his fellow jobless Americans of the last century or so is that the job he lost was an upper-middle-class, white-collar professional job, not a blue-collar laboring one. The difference between now and all those decades before is that a lot more such white-collar jobs are being lost, and so we are beginning to wonder what is happening to America.
Or, as Snyder says at the beginning of The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found, "disillusionment is spreading into the middle class, not because the disillusionment is rising but because people like me are finally falling. Falling hard."
Snyder taught English at Colgate University, a position with high income and sumptuous perquisites. He was a respected teacher and had published three books. He and his wife, Colleen, had three children under the age of 10, and Colleen was expecting their fourth. It was a very good job -- and life -- indeed. And then Snyder was told that he wouldn't be given tenure. What followed this shock was a free-fall of emotions -- disbelief, anger, overconfidence, defiance. And a similar free-fall of domestic circumstances -- selling the house, moving back to their native Maine, living on savings, living on food stamps, going through what amounted to a nervous breakdown.
Because, despite his excellent credentials, he couldn't get another academic position. This intellectual who had worked hard to pull himself out of his working class origins and who had been accustomed to turning down jobs as he moved along in his career was rejected by 90 colleges and universities.
This was hard. It is hard to read. But the core of the book is Snyder's attempt to deal not only with where he was, but where he came from. Because his feelings are so resolute, it is impossible to resist quoting him extensively:
"I'd had things my own way for so long that when this happened I spent most of two years feeling sorry for myself and looking for somebody to blame . . . I took solace from news reports about how hard life had become in America, until I realized that life had always been hard for a lot of people, people I thought I was better than, and that the only thing that had changed was that bad things were finally starting to happen to people like me who had it so good for so long."
He and his family could not have gotten through what they did without his fiercely loving wife, whose attitudes he constantly compares favorably with his own: "I had . . . never complied with her efforts to get me to live in the present tense, the way small children do, rather than how I had always lived, inside my vast intentions and vague ideas."
The book all but comes down to a conflict of philosophies. His: "I deserve better than this." Hers: "I think you look down on people who just do regular jobs so they can pay their way."
Eventually, economic necessity (and disgust with his own self-pity) drove Snyder to take a laboring job, and then another. Today he works as a caretaker and house painter in Scarborough, Maine.
This is an extraordinarily good account of a life gone smash. Those who have been through anything like it will know the sense of hopelessness that overwhelmed him and the cold fear that gripped his vitals. Those who have not should read it at least to know what a society without economic safety nets can do even to families presumably best equipped to deal with crisis (though demonstrating that is not his avowed intention).
Personally, I think he is mistaken to put all of the blame for what happened on himself. I also think he is over-hard on himself for having wanted to escape his hardscrabble heritage. After all, he had certain abilities and there was nothing wrong with wanting to put them to use. Perhaps he misused them, as he believes, and if so, that was wrong, as it was wrong to look down upon those he left behind.
But obviously he was made for different, though not necessarily better, things. Else we would not have had from him this admirable book, wrought from such painful circumstances.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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