by John Barth
In 1965, the critic Leslie Fiedler, whom I’d met when he visited Penn State, persuaded me to join him in the English Department of the newly-upgraded State University of New York at Buffalo. I accepted—among other reasons because a full professorship with considerable salary increase, lighter teaching load, and other amenities, plus the shift from rural Pennsylvania to a more urban environ, we hoped might salvage what had become an unfortunately ever-more-strained and distanced marital connection.
It didn’t, but my seven years on the shores of Lake Erie were otherwise fruitful indeed. In the lively, rather avant-garde atmosphere of “High Sixties” Buffalo, I published Lost in the Funhouse (subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice: fourteen previously-published pieces rearranged into a “series”) in 1968, and in 1972 the novella-triad Chimera, a reorchestration of the myths of Perseus (Perseid), Bellerophon (Bellerophoniad—a pun on his being, in my version, not a bona fide mythic hero but rather a “perfect imitation” of one), and Scheherazade’s kid sister Dunyazade (Dunyazadiad). In Buffalo too I found among my new colleagues the ablest musician-friends I’d ever played jazz with: Ira Cohen, the Provost of Social Sciences, had played tenor sax with Glenn Miller’s Army band and after Miller’s death with his successor, Tex Beneke, and after VJ-Day had put his horn away and switched to chamber-music clarinet, but with the encouragement of pianist, bassist, trumpeter, trombonist, and drummer, in one semester he moved with us from 1940s big-band swing to the late-’60s “cool jazz” style of our current favorites: Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck.
But while Author’s work was going well (Chimera won that year’s National Book Award, and I was rewarded with an endowed professorship whose perks included every third semester off with pay—a blessing for us scribblers), his marriage wasn’t: It ended in divorce in 1969, just as the last of our children was preparing for college. To help with alimony and child-support expenses (including three college tuitions) I took as many speaking/reading engagements as I could manage and launched into a large and complex new writing-project, the novel LETTERS: a 20th-century reorchestration of the 18th-century epistolary novel genre that would take me seven years to complete.
One of those reading-gigs fetched me in February 1969 from an all-but-snowed-in Buffalo to a ditto New England, to do a reading at Boston College. The flight was delayed, the reading late, but intrepid Bostonians turned out in gratifying number—including (so I learned at the post-reading audience reception, when she came up to say hello) a former star student in my Penn State Humanities class: in fact, that university’s official 100,000th graduate, a distinction earned by her having achieved the highest academic average in the school’s 100-plus-year history. Sharp, lively, and lovely, she was currently teaching in a local junior high school, she informed me, having known since elementary-school days that teaching was her destined vocation; after Penn State she’d done graduate work at the University of Chicago, and now here she was, having got word of my reading in the local press and trudged through the snow to say hi to her former prof. Our eager reminiscences about PSU days being properly constrained by my obligation to chat with other attendees, when my host informed me that it was time for him and me to step into a nearby elevator to attend a faculty reception upstairs, I reluctantly bade her au revoir—and was delighted when she asked, “May I come along?”
For details of what followed, see my essay “Teacher” in Further Fridays:2 Enough here to report that by the end of that spring semester she and I had reconnected sufficiently for her to visit me at Lake Chautauqua (my post-marital residence, near Buffalo) and I her in Boston, spend the next summer together at the lake cottage, and marry in her Philadelphia hometown in December of 1970. The following semester, on leave from SUNY/Buffalo, I took a visiting professorship at Boston U.; we then returned to Chautauqua and Buffalo, where she tried teaching at an independent girls’ school (Buffalo Seminary), which she expected not to like—all of her previous experience having been in good public schools—but discovered that she loved. She had a chance to hear her hubby play jazz with his SUNY/Buff colleagues and enjoyed that, too—but we both felt that this new chapter in our life deserved a new venue (I was weary of those heroic lake-effect upstate-New-York winters, and for all its pluses, Buffalo was no Boston), and so when an offer came to return to my alma mater in Baltimore on even more attractive terms than my current ones, we checked out the job possibilities for her down there. Though a bit wary of life below the Mason-Dixon line, she discovered St. Timothy’s, another independent girls’ high school just north of town, and was so taken with it—and the fact that Baltimore was, after all, just South enough for tennis nets to be left up all winter—that we happily shifted thereto at summer’s end, bought our first house together, and began what after forty years remains a much-blessed union indeed: my moral compass, my editor of first resort, hiking/biking/sailing/snorkeling/kayaking partner, planner of all our meals, travels, and activities, and dedicatee of every Barth-book published since—my “arranger,” my sine qua non Shelly.
The downside of that move, if any, was that among my new colleagues I found no replacement for my Buffalo jazz-pals. After a year or so I sold my drum-set and, encouraged by my new sister-in-law, began playing baroque and Elizabethan recorder duets with her, a pleasure that we still enjoy. As a wordsmith, I take a special satisfaction both in the differences between the two media—the feelings and ideas that music can express more eloquently than words, and vice-versa—and the pleasures both of solo performance with pen and word-processor and of ensemble (anyhow duet) performance on the recorder. As for “arranging,” I feel blessed to have enjoyed it for so many years and to be doing it still, changes changed, at my desk: My forthcoming novel, for example—Every Third Thought—is among other things a reorchestration both of Shakespeare’s Tempest and of characters from my 2008 story-series The Development.
Q: Shall we take it from the edge? Page one, page two....
The End? On Writing No Further Fiction, Probably
First published in the British journal Granta, February 2012.
IN 2011 AND 2012, two new products of this pen—a novel entitled Every Third Thought and this Final Fridays essay-collection—are scheduled for publication by Counterpoint Press, a non-“trade” publisher in California. Both were completed in 2009, my 80th year of life and 53rd as a publishing writer. At the time of their composition, I didn’t think of them as my last books, only as the latest: my seventeenth volume of fiction and third of non-fiction, respectively. But in the year-and-then-some since, although I’ve still gone to my workroom every weekday morning for the hours between breakfast and lunch, as I’ve done for decades, and re-enacted my muse-inviting ritual, I find that I’ve written . . . nothing.
That room is divided into three distinct areas: Composition (one side of a large work-table, reserved for longhand first drafts of fiction on Mondays through Thursdays and nonfiction on Fridays, with supply drawers and adjacent reference-book shelves), Production (computer hutch with desktop word processor and printer for subsequent drafts and revision), and Business (other side of worktable, with desk calendar and office files). As for the ritual: Prep-Step One is to seat myself at the Composition table, set down my refilled thermal mug of breakfast coffee, and insert the wax earplugs that I got in the habit of using back in the 1950s, when my three children (now in their fifties) were rambunctious toddlers, and that became so associated with my sentence-making that even as an empty-nester in a quiet house I continue to feel the need for them. Step Two is to open the stained and battered three-ring loose-leaf binder, now 63 years old and held precariously together with strapping tape, that I bought during my freshman orientation-week at Johns Hopkins in 1947 and in which I penned all my undergraduate and grad-school class notes, professorial lecture-drafts during my decades in academia, and first drafts of the entire corpus of my fiction and non-fiction. Step Three is to unclip from that binder’s middle ring the British Parker 51 fountain pen bought duri
ng my maiden tour of Europe in 1963/64 (in a Volkswagen camper with those same three then-small children and their mother) at a Rochester stationer’s alleged to be the original of Mister Pumblechook’s Premises in Dickens’s Great Expectations: the pen with which I have penned every subsequent sentence, including this one. (Its predecessor, an also much-valued Schaeffer that saw me through college and my first three published novels, was inadvertently cracked in my shirt pocket a few weeks earlier when I leaned against a battlement in “Hamlet’s castle” in Elsinore—Danish Helsingor, near Copenhagen, the northernmost stop of that makeshift Grand Tour—in order to get a better view of Sweden across the water.) I recharge the venerable Parker with jet-black Quink, wipe its well-worn tip with a bit of tissue, fix its cap onto its butt, and proceed to Step Four....
Which in happier days meant reviewing and editing either the print-outs of yesterday’s first-draft pages (left off when the going was good and thus more readily resumed) or work-notes toward some project in gestation, to be followed by Step Five: re-inspiration and the composition of new sentences, paragraphs, and pages. Of late, however, Step Four has consisted of staring vainly, pen in hand, at blank ruled pages, or exchanging fountain pen for note-taking ballpoint and perusing for possible suggestions either my spiral-bound Work Notebook #5 (2008–) or my little black six-ring loose-leaf personal notebook/diary, to little avail. That latter—The Black Book of not so bright (or sunny) observations & reflections, its title page declares, on which also are the rubber-stamped addresses of its serial residences over the past forty years—has only a few blank leaves remaining, and no room for more. And the workroom’s bookshelves, reserved for one copy of each edition and translation of every book, magazine article, and anthology contribution that I’ve published, are already crowded beyond their capacity, with new editions lying horizontally across older ones and jammed into crannies between bookcase and wall.
That almost-exhausted notebook-space; those overflowing shelves—are they trying to tell me something? I plug my ears; strain not to listen. Like most fiction-writers of my acquaintance (perhaps especially those who mainly write novels rather than short stories), I’m accustomed to a well-filling interval of some weeks or even months between book-length projects: an interval not to be confused with “Writer’s Block.” Indeed, I’ve learned to look forward to that bit of a respite from sentence-making after a new book has left the shop—bulky typescript both snail-mailed and e-mailed to agent and thence to publisher—and to busily making notes toward the Next One while final-copyediting and galley-proofing its predecessor. This time, however . . .
Well.
Well? A writer-friend from Kansas who knows about water-wells informs me of the important distinction between dry wells and “gurglers,” which may cease producing for a time but eventually resume; he encourages me to believe that I’m still a Gurgler. I hope that’s the case—but if in fact my well turns out to be dry, I remind myself that as we’ve aged, my wife and I have been obliged to put other much-enjoyed pleasures behind us: snow- and water-skiing, tennis, sailboat-cruising on the Chesapeake, and yes, even vigorous youthful sex (but certainly not love and intimacy, and as someone once wisely observed, “Sex goes, memory goes, but the memory of sex—that never goes”). If my vocation—my “calling”!—has joined that sigh-and-smile list of Once Upon a Times, its memory will be a fond one indeed.
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, maybe write a little piece about . . . not writing?
II.
TRIBUTES AND MEMORIA
Introduction to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
Although it’s neither my first memorial tribute to Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) nor my last,1 what follows—written at the request of Donald’s brother Frederick (himself an accomplished novelist, editor of The Mississippi Review, and alumnus of the Hopkins Writing Seminars) to introduce a posthumously published collection of Don’s nonfiction2—is the one I think best suited to open this “Tributes and Memoria” section of Final Fridays.
“HOW COME YOU write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?”
“Well,” DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”
“But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester. . . .”
“That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping: Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”
Although I count myself among my late comrade’s most appreciative fans—invariably delighted, over the too-few decades of his career, by his short stories, his novels, his infrequent but soundly-argued essays into aesthetics, and his miscellaneous nonfiction pieces (not to mention his live conversation, as above)—I normally see The New Yorker, in which so much of his writing was first published, only in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I have therefore grown used to DB-ing in happy binges once every few years, when a new collection of the wondrous stuff appears (originally from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; anon from Putnam; later from Harper and Row; finally from Random House) and I set other reading aside to go straight through it, savoring the wit, the bite, the exactitude and flair, inspired whimsy, aw-shucks urbanity, irreal realism and real irreality, wired tersitude, and suchlike Barthelmanic pleasures.
Finally, it says up in that parenthetical list of his publishers. The adverb constricts my spirit; I feel again what I felt when word came of Donald’s illness and death in 1989, at age merely-58, in the fullness of his life and happy artistry: my maiden experience of survivor-guilt, for we were virtual coevals often assigned to the same team (or angel-choir or Hell-pit) by critics friendly and not, who require such categories—Fabulist, Postmodernist, what have they. We ourselves, and the shifting roster of our team-/choir-/pit-mates,3 were perhaps more impressed by our differences than by any similarities, but there was most certainly fellow-feeling among us—and was I to go on breathing air, enjoying health and wine and food, work and play and love and language, and Donald not? Go on spinning out my sometimes hefty fabrications (which, alphabetically cheek-by-jowl to his on bookshelves, he professed to fear might topple onto and crush their stage-right neighbor), and Donald not his sparer ones, that we both knew to be in no such danger?
Well. One adds the next sentence to its predecessors, and over the ensuing years, as bound volumes of mine have continued to forth-come together with those of his other team-/choir-/pit-mates, it has been some balm to see (impossibly posthumous!) Donald’s appearing as before, right along with them, as if by some benign necromancy: first his comic-elegaic Arthurian novel The King (1990); then The Teachings of Don B. (1992), a rich miscellany eloquently foreworded by T-/C-/P-mate Thomas Pynchon; now Not-Knowing; and still to come, a collection of hitherto unpublished and/or uncollected short stories.
Benign it is, but no necromancy. We owe these last fruits not only to Donald’s far-ranging muse, but to the dedication of his literary executors and the editorial enterprise of Professor Kim Herzinger of the University of Southern Mississippi. Thanks to that dedication and enterprise, we shall have the print-part of our fellow whole, or all but whole. Never enough, and too soon cut off—like Carver, like Calvino, all at their peak—but what a feast it is!
ITS COURSE IN hand displays most directly the high intelligence behind the author’s audacious, irrepressible fancy. The complementary opening essays, “After Joyce” and “Not-Knowing” (that title-piece was for years required reading in the aforementioned
graduate fiction-writing seminar at Johns Hopkins); the assorted reviews and pungent “comments” on literature, film, and politics; the pieces “On Art,” never far from the center of Donald’s concerns; the seven flat-out interviews (edited after the fact by the interviewee)—again and again I find myself once again nodding yes, yes to their insights, obiter dicta, and mini-manifestoes, delivered with unfailing tact and zing. See, e.g., “Not-Knowing”’s jim-dandy cadenza upon the rendering of “Melancholy Baby” on jazz “banjolele”: as astute (and hilarious) a statement as I know of about the place of “aboutness” in art.4 Bravo, maestro banjolelist: Encore!
Here is a booksworth of encores, to be followed by one more: the story-volume yet to come, a final serving of the high literary art for which that high intelligence existed.
And then?
Then there it is, alas, and for encores we will go back and back again to the feast whereof these are end-courses: back to Come Back, Dr. Caligari, to Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, to Snow White and City Life and the rest. Permanent pleasures of American “Postmodernist” writing, they are. Permanent literary pleasures period.