When he finished the song, you wrote, There is no ‘Svani River.’ The rivers of Svanetia are the Ingur and the Nahkra and the Tskhenis Tskali.
He explained that he’d just been making a kind of pun on a famous song by Stephen Collins Foster. Did you know Foster, America’s greatest troubadour? No? Well, he was a native of this city and had lived most of his life here. I. intended to do a little research on Foster while he was in this city, for a possible future novel. Supposedly the university’s campus contained a building, the Stephen Foster Memorial, that was the only museum and archive devoted to an American composer. Foster wrote wonderful, nostalgic, sometimes overly sentimental, but always folk-inspired songs, like “Beautiful Dreamer,” “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” and the aforesung “Swanee River,” or “Old Folks at Home,” as its proper title was. (There really is, I. told you, a Suwannee River in Florida, and a Sewanee College and Review in Tennessee.) “When he was only thirteen,” I. said, and your ears perked up, “the age when most boys are just learning to play with their little flutes, he wrote his ‘Tioga Waltz’ for an ensemble of flutes!” But like so many creative geniuses, Foster drank too much, and he died of it at the age of thirty-seven.
“All de world am sad and dreary,” he repeated.
You wrote a card, We drink too much. We must go to murphybed.
“Sure. Yours or mine?” I. asked, lighting up.
You wrote, You for yours and I for mine.
He read it and smiled and pointed to one of the pronouns, I. “This is me,” he said.
You wrote, You are very tired man, very sad man, and you must get sleep so you can be good teacher, and teach all your students, including me, how to learn to write. You read this over and crossed out, blacked out, the including me. And you helped him up and to the door.
Again, in your sleep that night, you entered your old familiar dream of climbing and descending an endless sequence of steps, stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance always eluded you.
The next day, bright and early, you counted up your remaining money. You had little left, just enough; the new term’s first paychecks would be received on the fifteenth, just a few days off. You could afford to buy some things, and you took a bus downtown to buy the following: an inexpensive wig of long artificial hair, not in Chaucer’s berye or even in a tasteful auburn, but in a rather garish and flaming red; a lipstick to match, that is, equally reddish orange; some rouge; and a pair of dark sunglasses. And at your request, Loretta was all too happy to let you help yourself to her vast collection of costume jewelry, boxes and boxes of it; it took you nearly an hour to pick out what you needed, the wildest items to match the wild hair, and then one of Loretta’s somewhat outmoded but still brazen dresses, shorter than any you’d ever worn; and one of Loretta’s old hats that she hadn’t worn for years, a broad-brimmed thing like a parasol that would completely shade your face. “Evie, you’re not gonna wear that stuff to class?!” Loretta said.
“No,” you said, telling your first little lie. You were going to wear that stuff to class, but not to your classes. For your classes, you had made up your mind what to wear, and you would wear it: your dzhinsy, which so many women wore for all occasions in this city. You would wear your blue dzhinsy beneath the white laboratory coat that Marilyn the secretary had given you, with your name embroidered in script on the breast pocket: E.V. Dadeshkeliani. And on your head your bright Paisley scarf that had brought you good luck on the day you got the job.
Your first classes went, as we say in this country, without a hitch. No sweat. A piece of cake. Section Two of Intro Bot met a little too early in the morning for you, but you needed an excuse to have to get to murphybed earlier. Giving them their first assignments and a small pep talk on the joys of botany, you did not commit, as far as you knew, any major gaffes in the use of the English language. They seemed to understand what you were saying, and you apologized sweetly to them for your inability to speak more fluently. “I am just arrived in this country,” you said, “and, like you, I have much to learn.”
You stayed on the campus after class, ate a light supper at a grill nearby, returned to your office, and changed into your “costume,” taking a full hour to put on your makeup, especially the cheeks and lips. You were as excited as you’d been the very first day of school when the bus had taken you to the collective school in Mestia. You were as excited as the day you’d started at the university in Tbilisi. You were far more excited than you’d been this very morning getting ready for your own classes. And as on those previous school-starting occasions, part of your pleasure had been in getting the equipment you needed: your clean, fresh spiral-bound notebook; a packet of fresh three-by-five index cards (pink); a yellow highlighter; and the required texts (which fortunately the bookstore had let you charge to your faculty account), three paperbacks and a hardbound: Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction; William S. Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; Wallace and Mary Stegner, eds., Great American Short Stories; and a thumb-indexed Crowell Roget’s International Thesaurus.
You tucked your books and notebook in your arm and stood for a moment in front of the mirror in your departmental office. The mirror lied totally, for the young woman facing you was your first and finest fictional creation: your broad-brimmed floppy hat, your dark sunglasses (it was nighttime now, and only celebrities wore sunglasses at night…or people with eye problems), your makeup, atrociously overdone: a heavy application of a lipstick too brightly reddish orange and circles of rouge so unblended you looked like a clown, and all over you Loretta’s loudest costume jewelry: cackling bracelets and jangling earrings and clacking necklace, and, best of all, your hair, a cascade of red flames that billowed out from under your hat and spilled down your shoulders.
If only Bolshakov could see you now. But, indeed, if he did see you now, he would not know you at all. Or, if he knew you, it would confirm the falsehood he’d spent three years trying to get you to believe: that your whole world is your own fabrication.
Chapter fifteen
I swear I had nothing to do with the coincidence that English 101/801, Narrative Writing, met in the Scottish Room of the Cathedral of Learning. I have “arranged” many things for your life in America, dear Kat, but not that. And I doubt that Anangka concerned herself with it. And I’m sure that I. himself had no choice in the matter; it’s where he was assigned to meet the class, and he probably wouldn’t have chosen it if given a choice: The room was too large, and too long, and too formal, and he had to stand up there beneath that elaborate blackboard covered by oak folding doors that he didn’t know how to open and was too drunk to cope with, doors carved with the names of great Scots: Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Nabokov adored; James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer; David Livingstone, the African explorer whom Stanley presumed to find; and Sir Henry Raeburn the portraitist, all of them surmounted by the canny Scottish proverb GIF YE DID AS YE SOULD YE MIGHT HAIF AS YE WOULD, which you could almost make out from your seat in the rear of the room, although you could not then “translate” it, and you still can’t.
I floated in the vicinity of the single window at the rear of the room, over your shoulder, which was blazoned (the window, not your shoulder) with the arms of the Montrose clan, a red rose on a silver field; and from there I observed you and your professor both, and I thought how appropriate it was that you were disguised from him in this room. According to Scottish history, King James v of Scotland (1512–1542) loved to mingle with his people disguised as a peasant. You would have loved the man; he was “erected” king at the age of his first erection, twelve; and his last erection, at the age of only twenty-nine, produced his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. Once while he was riding around the countryside disguised as a peasant he was attacked by brigands, and an aide beat them off and washed his wounds; a lineal male descendant
of that aide was Reginald Fairlie, the architect of this Scottish Room.
The professor, who was wearing not a jacket and tie but one of his grungy sport shirts, had clearly soused himself to prepare for facing this large group of night students, forty mostly older men and women who had worked at wages during the day and were now indulging a dream: to learn from somebody, even this drunk, deaf, unknown visiting novelist with a Bodark accent, how to put words on paper creatively. You shared that dream, and if your assessment of the instructor was more charitable than theirs, it was only because you knew some of his reasons for being drunk, disheveled, and defeated.
He began by pointing to the oil painting over the nonfunctional fireplace. “That’s Bobby Burns, isn’t it? Yup. Probably a copy of the original by Alexander Nasmyth. How do I know this stuff? This is my first time in this room. I’m as new here as you are. Newer, if you’ve ever had a class here before. I know that’s a Nasmyth because I’m an art historian by profession. It’s what I ought to be teaching instead of this. I write novels for a hobby, you might say. I’ve never made any money at it. I’m not going to teach you how to make money, writing.” He paused, waiting to see if this would elicit any response. “Nobody wants to leave? You’ve resigned yourselves to the possibility that you’ll never get rich from writing anything? Okay, then, let’s begin.”
You wished you had sat a little closer, to better hear what was to follow, but you couldn’t risk being too close to him in the bright lights of the room. You took notes in your fresh new spiral-bound notebook. Writing, he said, is an art, not a science, and he wasn’t going to mess around with “scientific” concepts like plot, characterization, tension, conflict, and especially that hideous thing called POV for “point of view,” with such resulting diagnoses as POV shift. Breaking the act of writing down into such components would be like breaking the act of lovemaking down into suggestion, maneuver, foreplay, penetration, optimal thrusts, climax, and post coital tristesse: The lovemaker so conscious of what he is doing or trying to do is not going to be doing anything worthwhile, let alone pleasurable.
“Art has nothing to do with ‘reality,’” he said, and paused, and then said, “I see several people not troubling to write that down. Write it down!” He went on to point out that Nabokov, one of the greatest of novelists, said that “reality” should always have quotation marks around it because there is no such thing, and with the first two fingers of each hand wiggling in the air, I. made the quote-marks that would often separate “reality” from art. You underlined your recording of this in your notebook twice. How Bolshakov would have hated that!
“If we avoid ‘reality,’ what have we got left?” he demanded. “If we were musical composers, we would have notes, tones, tunes with which to express our deepest feelings. If we were painters, we would have pigments, hues, lines, and shades. But we are writers, and all we have are words. Words are our salvation and our delight. Let me give you a gift of four words.”
It was then that he had trouble with the reality of the blackboard, trying to open the oak doors covering it. It took him a while, and finally a student who must have been in this room before leapt up and assisted him, and they got the doors open, revealing the blackboard, upon which some previous teacher had left a hodgepodge of algebraic formulae. I. erased this, then replaced it with block letters:
EXTRAVAGANCE
OUTRAGE
EXAGGERATION
OFFENSE
He proceeded to take each word and explicate it: that extravagance means, literally, “wandering beyond,” and that the art of fiction lies in wandering beyond the conventional into the original and the outrageous; that outrage is closely related to the French outré, “deviating from what is usual or proper,” and that good fiction is always eccentric. How does one deviate into wandering beyond? By heaping, by piling word upon word: exaggeration means literally “piling up,” but art often involves magnifying beyond the truth, distorting “reality” into a new truth, often at the risk of offending: Offense comes from the Latin for “to strike against.” The good fictionist must always strike against something, if that something is only convention, putative “reality,” bourgeois morality, philistine taste.
You covered pages of your notebook. “Now, are there any questions?” he asked. “If you have any questions, you’ll have to write them down, because I can’t hear you.” He waited a long time, long enough for them to write, but only two questions were presented to him: Do we have any tests? and WHAT are we supposed to write?
No, he answered, there would be no tests, and as for what you were “supposed” to write, he said, “I’m afraid you’ll never hear me say to you, ‘I want you to—’ or, ‘I would like for you to—’ with the idea that you will be doing ‘assignments’ to my specifications, prescriptions, or liking. The task of truly creative writing is always purely voluntary. Forcing your writing to conform to what you think is expected of you is foredooming it to mediocrity. Your greatest ‘assignment’ is to develop the ability to assign yourself.” He paused and waited, and then asked, “Are there any other questions?”
One question was passed to him: But what do you want us to DO?
“Okay, I want you to read a few things. For next week, and I’m sure you know we meet only once a week, each Thursday night, please read the first story in the Stegner anthology, ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ by Washington Irving.” There were some audible groans in the class, and I. said, “You were hoping, perhaps, for John Irving instead?” Several students nodded their heads. “Well, the Washington Irving story is sufficiently filled with extravagances, outrages, exaggerations, and offenses.”
A question was passed to him: But don’t you want us to write anything?
“Sure,” said I., “write something.”
But what? Can we write a poem or a story or a novel or what? Can we write science fiction? Detective stories? Can we write true confessions?
“‘True confession’? No, you don’t ever want to write anything autobiographical. Fiction based on yourself is poison. Get it out of your system. I’ll have more to say on this subject next week. Good night.”
Nobody got up. Several students wrote on slips of paper and passed them down front to the teacher. “I can see you’re disappointed that I’ve kept you for much less than the full three-hour period. And all of these questions ask the same thing in different ways: What do I want you to write? Okay, if you must have an assignment to get you started, let me suggest that you write your obituary. Write it as it might appear on the front page of the New York Times forty years from now…or on the back page of your hometown newspaper the day after tomorrow. This will be your last chance to write about yourself, so make it good, fill it with extravagances, outrages, exaggerations, and offenses, let it all hang out, and get it out of your system. Class dismissed.”
Chapter sixteen
Because you folded up the murphybed each morning upon arising, you couldn’t hide your books beneath it, as Kenny hid his Playboys. And you certainly couldn’t leave them on the bookshelves, shoulder to shoulder with I.’s novels. You had thought of leaving them in your office, where you kept the wig and hat and other articles of the “costume,” but then you wouldn’t have been able to consult your books in the middle of the night if you needed to. So you hid the books in your closet, beneath your folded grungy coat, which you would keep forever for sentimental reasons (you now wore a nice new one). And this first night, as soon as you got rid of I. (he dropped by to ask, “Well, how did your first day go?” and to invite you to his apartment for drinks, but you said you had much, much work to do—which was true), you started on your homework: reading “Rip Van Winkle” very thoroughly and making copious marginal observations about its exaggerations and outrages, pausing to look up certain words in your dictionary: posthumous, henpecked, termagant, virago, etc., etc. You were fascinated with the Kaatskill Mountains and their being haunted by strange beings. You identified with Rip and reflected upon your incarceration in Russia as akin to
his long sleep. And the strange figure with the keg of liquor who put Rip to sleep was unquestionably Bolshakov with his syringes. You wondered: If you were finally able to return to Svanetia, after even five years, let alone twenty, would you know the place? Your homesickness brought tears to your eyes and a profound depression came upon you, but you ignored it and went on with your work, reading and rereading until you knew almost by heart the seven points of Strunk’s and White’s Elementary Rules of Usage, and then Wayne Booth’s first chapter, on Telling and Showing, wherein he debunks the myth that the good writer should always do the latter rather than the former. You made notes to obtain, on your next trip to Hillman, two of the books that Booth discusses, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
You could scarcely wait to get to Hillman, and you went there the next morning, right after your mycology class, which had some good students in it. You surprised yourself during your first mycology lecture, speaking in English of the concepts you knew by heart in Russian as well as Georgian, although your mind kept wandering: You were thinking constantly of your obituary. You found yourself prematurely introducing into your mycology lecture your reflections upon the mortality of mushrooms. It is of course an essential characteristic of their being that they endure upon this earth such a short span, just long enough to fulfill their intended destinies, but you had usually not taken your students deeply into the ephemerality of fungi until late in the semester, when they had been prepared for it by appreciating the sensational aspects of the brief but spectacular life span of the fungi.
At the Hillman, you ran into Dr. Elmore, on his way to his private carrel, and you attempted unsuccessfully to get him to hear your polite answer to his polite question “How’s school?” then you began to load your arms with books: In addition to the Boccaccio and the Flaubert, you got several volumes on Scotland and Northern Ireland. When you had more books than you thought you could carry home, you realized you had more than you could safely hide at home, and you determined then to do much of your work in your office.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 10