by John Barth
And that sort of authorial self-recognition informs—most touchingly, by my lights—the final item in this little anthology of en pas-sants . In the only conversation I ever had with Robert Frost, who visited us at Penn State on a wintry spring day some 40 years ago, the old poet invited us to ask him anything we cared to: He was too deaf to hear our questions anyhow, he said, but he would answer something . I don’t recall what my question was, but I remember clearly Frost’s reply: that every spring for as long as he could remember, he would notice that the oak trees up his way still had a few forlorn brown leaves hanging on from the previous autumn. The sight of those weatherbeaten remnants, he declared, never failed to suggest to him the tatters of a blown-out sail on a ship limping into harbor after storms, and his professional intuition never failed to tell him that there was in that simile not merely a poem, but a Robert Frost poem—a Robert Frost poem that, alas, the poet of that name had yet to figure out. Nor did he ever, to my knowledge, although there is passing mention of oak leaves in several of his verses.
As might be expected, one supposes—given that all trees are oak trees (except pine trees).
The Inkstained Thumb
From Rules of Thumb (subtitled 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction-Writing Fixations), compiled by Michael Martone and Susan Neville.1
THUMB-RULE #1 FOR aspiring writers, it goes without saying, is Be Wary of Writers’ Rules of Thumb. Anton Chekhov liked the smell of rotting apples in his writing desk. Edna Ferber advised nothing more interesting on that desk’s far side than a blank wall. Ernest Hemingway and Scheherazade, for different reasons, inclined to close their day’s (or night’s) output in mid-story, even in mid-sentence. I myself advise no more than that you merely perpend such advisements and predilections, including mine to follow, en route to discovering by hunch, feel, trial, and error what best floats your particular boat. Too many rules of thumb can make a chap all thumbs.
That said, I report that for this writer at least, regularity is as helpful with the Muse as with the bowels: a comparison to be taken just so far and no farther. Go to your worktable at the same time daily, establish your Personal Prep Routine, and you’re likely to find that just as making breakfast (to change analogies) may sharpen your appetite, so some established little ritual of muse-invocation may get your creative juices flowing. I myself—after the breakfast afore-alluded-to with wife and newspaper, followed by that toilette likewise alluded to and a ten-minute routine of stretching exercises picked up half a century ago from an RCAF training manual—refill my thermal coffee mug and disappear into my Scriptorium no later than half past eight every weekday morning. It has separate workspaces for Creation, Production, and Business; ignoring the third of those (appointments calendar, file drawers, check registers and accounting ledgers, telephone, clock, and calculator, all relegated to Later), I pause at the second just long enough to boot up and then promptly anesthetize my more-or-less-trusty Macintosh, which will remain in Standby mode unless this morning’s work is to be the revision and editing of an already first-drafted text—for me, the most enjoyable stage of writing, because it feels agreeably creative, but is so much easier than invention and composition. Turning then to the sanctum sanctorum, the worktable consecrated to Composition, I do the following routine preps, the musely equivalent of those earlier RCAF exercises:
1) Insert a set of Mack’s earplugs from supply in worktable drawer: a habit carried over from that same half-century ago, when my now middle-aged children were high-energy tots and their father was an overworked, underpaid young college instructor obliged to snatch the odd hour of writing-time at a little desk in the bedroom. By the time the nest was empty and my work-area a more commodious and quiet Personal Space, the earplug habit was as fixed as Chekhov’s requisite rotting apples. My muse sings only through ambient silence—her song not always clearly distinguishable, I confess, from the tinnitus familiar to many of us oldsters.
2) Ears plugged, slide selfward the worn, stained, and battered three-ring looseleaf binder procured during Freshman Orientation Week at Johns Hopkins in 1947, in which has been first-drafted every page of my fiction since those green undergraduate days. It’s as weathered now as its owner, who however counts on its continuing to hang together for at least as long as he does.
3) Open that “serviceable old thing” (as W. H. Auden fondly addressed his aging body) either to the Page in Progress or to the blank Next Thing, and take from its nestling-place among the gently rusting triple rings the somewhat less venerable but by me equally venerated Parker pen bought 40-plus years ago in “Mr. Pumblechook’s Premises” in Rochester, England, in honor of the great Boz. Uncap and fill that instrument with its daily draught of Permanent Jet Black Quink, and then....
Well, that depends. Like Hemingway & Co. aforementioned, I try to end each morn’s first-drafting while the going’s good, with maybe a brief penciled or ballpointed note of what’s to follow (the Parker is reserved strictly for Composition, not for notes, correspondence, and suchlike mundanities). If today’s session involves work in progress, then reviewing and editing the print-out of yesterday’s installment usually suffices to reorient the imagination and pump the creative adrenaline enough for me to resume first-draft penmanship—which a couple of hours later I’ll break off in mid-whatever, date in parentheses (with ballpoint pickup-note appended), and type into the waiting word processor for ease of subsequent revision, already editing the draft as I transcribe it. If, on the other hand, what awaited me back there at 8:30 was the between-projects three-hole ruled blank page, it’s a whole ’nother story, so to speak: one in which I’m likely to have recapped and renestled that refilled Parker, taken up Papermate and clipboard instead, and scratched hopeful preliminary notes toward . . . who knows what? Maybe a mini-essay on writerly Rules of Thumb?
Most prose-writers nowadays in every genre—perhaps most poets , even—dispense altogether with the venerable, to them perhaps obsolete medium of longhand and compose directly on the PC. For all I know, maybe even their preliminary note-making is done on laptop or Palm Pilot. If so, so be it: As aforedeclared, whatever floats the old boat. For Yours Truly, however, the equation of narrative “flow” with the literal flow of ink onto paper, of the fountain pen with the Fount of Inspiration, holds as firmly as my right hand holds that maroon-and-brushed-silver Parker 51: a rule of (sometimes inkstained) thumb.
Future Imperfect
In the spring of 2008, for what it described as an upcoming Political Issue, the journal Tin City invited responses from a number of people to the following questions: 1) What is your greatest fear for the future? And 2) What is your greatest hope for the future? After due consideration, I replied (tongue at least partly in cheek) as follows:
1) My chiefest fear for the future is that, like past futures, it will become the present.
2) My main hope for the future is that when presently it becomes the present, and anon the past, the worst its relieved survivors in some future present will be able to say of it will be that although they had feared the worst, as now-past futures go it could have been worse.
I.
From The Art of the Word,1 an anthology of essays by various scholars, critics, translators, novelists, poets, memoirists, essayists, editors, and others about some word that they find particularly fascinating, intriguing, poignant, irksome, whatever. . . .
SLIMMEST OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE pronouns and yet most self-assertive, even self-important, the nominative-case first-person-singular I (identical in most type-fonts to the Roman numeral, as if to declare “I am Number One!”) is always upper-case, unlike the more self-effacing Spanish yo, Italian io, French je, and German ich, for example, capitalized only when beginning a sentence, or even the English me, my, and mine—suggesting that in our tongue the self that is acted upon, or that merely possesses things, is less self-possessed than the self that takes action or possession.
The skinny thing’s antecedent, its user’s self, is at once obvious—self-evident, let’s say—
and teasingly elusive. “Myself”: whose self is that? Who or what is the “self” that’s conscious of self-consciousness, even of being conscious of self-consciousness, et cetera ad infinitum? The “I” who asks that not-unreasonable question—who tries to peer behind that so-slender vertical letter—finds him-/herself caught in the classic philosophical quandary of the Retreating Subject, the infinite regress of facing mirrors. Gnothi seauton, “Know thyself,” advises the Delphic oracle: an incompletable project, sometimes vertiginous, in extreme cases even paralyzing, and commonly productive of unpleasant news. Professional storytellers like . . . myself . . . may incline to the “neurophilosopher” Daniel C. Dennett’s definition of the Self as one’s “center of narrative gravity”2 (always allowing for the famous fictive device of the Unreliable Narrator). Not a bad idea, in “my” opinion, to sneak a peek from time to time in those funhouse mirrors. Having done so, however, better to turn away and ask, not “Who am I?”, but “Who are you? Who are we, and they? What is this, and that, and that?”—and get on with the story.
“In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night . . .”
Although it was first published before the three preceding essays, I’m placing this meditation on story-openers here so that its “dark and stormy night” will be followed by “The Morning After.”
“HAPPY FAMILIES ARE all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I don’t particularly agree with that famous kick-off proposition of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but I’ll carry it to my grave, along with a clutch of other jim-dandy story-openers.
A first sentence’s job is to draw its reader into the sentences that follow it—while at the same time, in the case of fiction, maybe establishing the tale’s tone and narrative viewpoint, introducing one or more of its characters, and supplying preliminary hints of setting, situation, and impending action. Some do their job so well that they remain in our memory long after we’ve forgotten most of the words that came after, even in a novel that may have changed our lives, or at least deeply engaged our minds and spirits in the way great literature can. A Tale of Two Cities, in this reader’s opinion, is neither the best nor the worst of Dickens’s novels, but it’s the only one whose opening—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”—has stayed with me. Likewise the so-casual “Call me Ishmael” that opens Melville’s Moby-Dick (the first time I met the novelist Ishmael Reed, he smiled and said, “Call me Mister Reed”), and García Márquez’s time-straddling fanfare to One Hundred Years of Solitude—“Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—and a dozen more, from the bibliophilic beagle Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night” in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip (a cliché opening by the 19th-century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which the poor mutt never gets beyond) to the slyly soporific first words of Marcel Proust’s multivolume Remembrance of Things Past: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”
“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure,” that last one reads in the original, and the poet/translator Richard Howard thought it sufficiently important to preserve that opening’s word-order, even at some slight cost to its sense, that he amended Scott-Moncrieff’s earlier translation to read “Time was when I went to bed early,” so that Volume One of Proust’s epic about Time begins (as it will end) with that key word—and then, seven volumes later, outflanks its subject by having “Marcel,” at the saga’s close, set about to write the time-intensive tale that we’ve finally finished reading: a story about a storyteller’s preparing himself to tell the story that we’ve just been exhaustively told.
If that sounds too clever by half—too vertiginously “metafictive” or proto-Postmodern—it has some distinguished and comparably dizzying antecedents, none more offhandedly cunning than the opening of “Scheherazade’s” Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah, or The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. English translations from the anonymous compiler’s 13th-century Persian vary considerably, but my two favorites—Sir Richard Burton’s freewheeling and footnote-rich 1888 version, and Mardrus and Mathers’s more rigorous one a half-century later—both begin by declaring (in effect, and much less directly), “Praise be to Allah, who has passed on to us the tales called The Thousand Nights and a Night, among which is . . . [the story of Scheherazade’s telling her nightly postcoital tales to wean the cuckolded King from his serial-murderous revenge].” A double-take opener indeed: The book in our hands, whose introduction we’ve embarked upon, is not Scheherazade’s book, but a book about Scheherazade’s book, which will wind up multivolumes later (17 in Burton’s edition, a modest four in M&M’s) with the welcome news that King Shahryar relents, lifts his nearly three-year-old entertain-me-or-die ultimatum, marries Scheherazade (who has by that time delivered him three male heirs as well as a kilonightsworth of stories), and commands her to tell them all over again to the royal scribes—thus accounting not directly for the book we’re finally at the close of, but for the book that that book is about: “And this is all that has come down to us concerning the origins of this book.”1
Allah willing, Amen!
Which terminal imperative may remind us that this kind of ingenious once-upon-a-timery has been a storyteller’s ploy from the beginning, so to speak. Whether or not the God of the Bible ever winked at the devoted audience of His own creation, His chronicler in the Book of Genesis sure did: What subtle, pre-proto-Postmodern chutzpah , to kick off the story of the world’s beginning with the Hebrew word Bereshith, “In the beginning . . .”—anticipating Proust’s merely Modernist “Time was” by nearly three millennia!2
But then, the bards of the classical Greek oral tradition, arguably coeval with Genesis if not with the world’s big-bang commencement, traditionally cleared their epic throats by saying, in effect, “Sing, O Muse, the tale that I’m here and now about to repeat: the one about [et cetera].” Which is not necessarily to say, “And while you’re at it, begin at the beginning, okay?” Better to hit the ground running in medias res: advice worth perpending still in Tale-Telling 101.3
A dozen-plus centuries later, at about the same time that the great Persian Anonymous was setting down the story of the story of Scheherezade’s stories, his or her fellow pre-Postmodernist Dante Alighieri, in exile from Florence, ratcheted up his countryman Horace’s advice by beginning his divinely comic epic not only in the middle of its narrator’s story instead of “In the beginning,” but with the very words Nel mezzo. “In the middle of our life’s road, I found myself lost in a Dark Wood”: a quietly bravura overture to a work whose form throughout will figure its three-in-one, unity-of-the-Trinity content, from the traditional division of the Hereafter into Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, through the allotment of (on average) 33 1/3 cantos to each of those departments, to the interlocking three-line stanzas’ terza rima versification. Three cheers, maestro!
Tough acts to follow. But a mere six centuries later, James Joyce completes the movement from Genesis’s “In the beginning” through Dante’s “In the middle” by beginning his dream-epic Finnegans Wake not with “The end” but with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”—which odd, lower-case opener (so we learn 627 dream-dark pages later, unless we’d heard the news already) is the completion of that cyclical opus’s unfinished closing sentence. In short, the author begins his story literally in the middle of its ending: a triple play at which Dante might have nodded approval, unless he’d nodded off. As a graduate student in the 1950s, I proposed in a Joyce seminar that the appropriate print-vehicle for Finnegans Wake would be not a conventionally bound book, but either a very long roller-towel or unnumbered pages fanning out from a central spindle, so that Beginning and Ending would literally conjoin.
Time was (excuse the expression) when some late-arriving epigones of the great Modernists
did indeed chafe at what they felt to be the passé bonds of conventional print technology and experimented with alternatives, not necessarily to the print-medium itself, but to its customary modes of presentation: One thinks of Marc Saporta’s 1962 novel-in-a-box Composition 1, its unnumbered and unbound pages packaged in any random “order” and thus sans any fixed opening sentence at all, or any other authorially-determined beginning, middle, or ending; likewise Daniel Spoerri’s unpaginated Anecdoted Typography of Chance, from 1966. That rebellious, “countercultural” decade was particularly rich (if that’s the right adjective) in this sort of post-Dadaist, pre-computer-era experimentation: Apprentice writing-workshoppers back then came up with such alternatives to conventional tale-telling as, e.g., a short story called “Serial,” its several sentences typed on separate paper strips like extended fortune-cookie fortunes, shaken up in an appropriately refigured “cereal” box and dumped into a bowl, to be fished out and read in random order, any one of them potentially the story’s opening sentence. After two or three such “serial” readings, one pieced together the tale’s simple plot; its suspense then became not “What happened?” but “In what order will its component actions be recounted this time around?” And it worked, sort of, to hear a line like “Three months later they found what remained of Lizzie in the marsh” now as the story’s opening, now as its ending, now as one mid-course complication—a bit like reassembling a familiar jigsaw puzzle or reconstructing a fossil skeleton from its scattered bones. One remembers too Spencer Holst’s “Pleasures of the Imagination: 64 Beginnings,” comprising just that: 64 more or less arresting openers like “The obese puppeteer washed the dishes in the dark,” with no stories attached.