The Friday Book

by John Barth

  LEARNING

  I came back crack-crowned down the flyway to find that I’d lost my tidewater girlfriend and won a scholarship I’d forgotten I had competed for, to the Johns Hopkins University. Well, now.

  One was expected to select a major; I hadn’t thought about it. Career counseling in our high school consisted of a ten-minute conversation with the phys ed teacher some time before graduation. Girls were counseled to be nurses, teachers, secretaries; boys, the farmers excepted but myself included, business administrators. As I’d been going to be a distinguished arranger, I’d dismissed that counsel. Now I shopped through the Hopkins arts and sciences catalogue, ruled out the sciences, and shrugged my shoulders at such academic majors as literature, history, philosophy, economics. A new department called Writing, Speech, and Drama listed a major in journalism; I put down Journalism and took the bus to Baltimore to become a distinguished journalist, understanding only vaguely that journalism meant newspaper work, which I had no interest in. I think I thought it meant, like, free-lancing and, uh, keeping a journal. In a week I found that the Hopkins journalism major (we no longer offer it) was a hasty improvisation consisting of a guest-lecture course by a Baltimore Sun editor and a general curriculum in the arts and sciences, including the department’s offerings in the writing of fiction and poetry. No matter: That same week I found musicians to job with for the next many seasons and settled into the task of surviving my freshman year in a serious university for which nothing since kindergarten had prepared me. (My parents had sent their children—at some sacrifice in those Depression years—to Cambridge’s only kindergarten, a private, one-room affair which we loved at the time and which I see in retrospect to have been quite good. Miss Ridah Collins’s Kindergarten was no playschool: we were taught reading and writing there. All my schooling between it and Johns Hopkins was a more or less benign blank of which I remember next to nothing.)

  What the aristocrats take for granted, Anton Chekhov wrote to his brother, we pay for with our youth. What my better educated Hopkins classmates took for granted—especially the good-private-schooled ones—I paid for with my underclass years, at least. They had heard already about the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rest; I was lost in the dark ages. They were as it were discussing the architecture while I was trying to find the men’s room. Everything was news.

  The university was small, the faculty distinguished; all of them taught us undergraduates as well as their graduate students. While looking for the men’s room I found the aesthetician and historian of ideas George Boas, the philologist Leo Spitzer, the poets Pedro Salinas and Elliott Coleman, and many another inspired, inspiring teacher: never condescending, nowise palsy, utterly serious, impersonal, good humored, intellectually generous. Splendid role models every one, who can seldom have had in their hands such unformed Silly Putty as my then mind. They were nice about it, if they noticed at all; it was their way, and I approve it, not to talk to us through Homer and Dante and Cervantes and Proust and Joyce, but to talk through us to those great ones, with whom they were at home.

  I also found and happily lost myself in the library, a book-filer in the stacks of the Classics Department and William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, and set about the impossible task of Catching Up. No happier happenstance could have happened to me: not just the physical fact of those canyons of ancient narrative—which I managed somehow to find more inspiring than intimidating, and which it excites me still to prowl through—but the particular discoveries upon my cart of Burton’s annotated Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Petronius’s Satyricon, the Panchatantra, Urquhart’s (misfiled) Rabelais, the eleventh-century Sanskrit Ocean of Story. Tales within tales within tales, told for the sake of their mere marvelousness. My literary education was, excuse me, à la carte: much better for a writer, maybe, than any curricular table d’hôte. I was permanently impressed with the size of literature and its wild variety; likewise, as I explored the larger geography of the stacks, with the variety of temperaments, histories, and circumstances from which came the literature I came to love. Book-filing made me a critical pluralist for life.

  Finally, still looking for that men’s room, I found my way into an elementary fiction-writing class presided over not by one of the gray eminences but by a gentle marine combat veteran, Poe scholar, and Faulkner fan who permitted us to call him Bob; whose Southern tongue charmed “write” into “rot,” our department into Rotting Speech and Drama. Bob’s course was a whole year long and repeatable; one simply turned in a story every two weeks. I wrote a story for Bob every two weeks for two years, starting from absolute scratch, trying everything and doing it all wrong over and over and over again. D’s, C’s, the odd B, C’s, D’s, through the first of those years at least. Perhaps if Bob had been a professional rotter himself, I’d have been intimidated (perhaps not; perhaps I’d have learned more, sooner, about the craft of rotting). But he was by his own confession a scholar pressed into service by a shorthanded department, and he was an excellent teacher for one who had everything to learn.

  By the beginning of my junior year I was writing not much better—at best I’d climbed from absolute to relative scratch—but I had by then taken on some freight of literature both curricularly and off the cart. In particular I had discovered Faulkner, Scheherazade, Joyce, Cervantes, and Kafka, and a thing had happened curiously different from what had happened at Juilliard. I was beating my head against a wall, but not breaking my crown; I was toiling uphill with much slippage and misstep, but not quite falling. Almost imperceptibly I had found my vocation, even in that term’s religious sense. That I was still doing everything wrong (whereas at Juilliard I’d done some things right) scarcely mattered. As unequivocally as I’d realized I was not a genuine apprentice distinguished musician, I realized I was going to—well, not be a distinguished writer, maybe; that adjective was losing its importance; but devote my life to the practice of literature.

  In retrospect I am impressed at the strength and depth of my then conviction, especially in the face of what I was composing. The work I did even two and three years later, in the graduate-level workshops (we were all reading Finnegans Wake then and had changed the department’s name from Rotting Speech and Drama to Writhing, Screech, and Trauma), would not admit me today to the Hopkins seminar I preside over, some of whose members are already publishing their homework. By the time I left Baltimore in 1953 to begin a long circumstantial self-exile from home waters, I had begun to find my general subject matter, but it took me two years beyond that—of imitating Faulkner, imitating Joyce, imitating Boccaccio imitating the Arabian Nights —to get a bona fide handle on it: to book Ulysses and Scheherazade aboard a tidewater showboat with Yours Truly doubling at the helm and the steam calliope, arranging language no longer for the Others but for others.

  TEACHING

  All of us writhers, screechers, and traumers took for granted that we’d do something else for a living while we practiced our vocation. I make that clear to my students today, at our first meeting, though it would doubtless go without saying: that even the gifted apprentice novelists among them had better plan their economic lives the way poets have had to do since the Romantic period.

  I myself chose teaching, by a kind of passionate default or heartfelt lack of alternatives: Though demanding, it was less abusive and exhausting of my resources than the other things I’d tried—manual labor, office work—and the hours, pay, and future seemed better for a family man, which I had become, than those of a small-time pick-up musician. One last late afternoon in Baltimore, a like-minded friend and I discussed how we might honorably spend our professional academic lives while doing with our left hands the thing that mattered to us most. Ben decided he would spend his answering all rhetorical questions: If someone should ask, with a bored smile, “Who’s to say, after all, what’s Real and what isn’t?” he’d say “Check with me” and run the questioner rigorously through the history of metaphysics. I decided I’d spend mine saying all the thi
ngs that go without saying: staring first principles and basic distinctions out of countenance; facing them down, for my students’ benefit and my own, until they confess new information. What is literature? What is fiction? What is a story?

  One of those things is that some things a writer dislikes (at least wouldn’t have chosen) may nevertheless be good for him, as a writer. I am an inert sort who, left to himself, might never have exited the womb—I was as comfortable there as in turbid-tidal-tepid Langford Creek, off the Chester River, off Chesapeake Bay, where I live now, and, unlike most folks, I had company—though it is doubtless better for me, as a writer, that I was obliged to do so (a full hour and a quarter after my primo sister). I had as leave stayed on in Baltimore, but the exigencies of the academic job market took me north of Mason’s and Dixon’s for twenty years: first to Penn State, where I learned to love the vast multifariousness and rough democracy of big American state universities, and got so thirsty for open water that I cleared my throat and published my first three books, all set in Maryland; then to SUNY/Buffalo, where I published the next three and learned to like cities again and to savor (especially in the noisy late 1960s) another sort of border state: the visible boundary of our troubled republic and the comforting sight of great Canada across the river, where the geese come from: haven for dispossessed Americans in every upheaval since the States united. I had rather been back at Penn State (where I had rather been back at Johns Hopkins [where I had rather been back in the womb]), but as a writer I’m glad to have sniffed tear gas and to have heard—if only like Odysseus tied to the mast—the siren songs of Marshall McLuhan and my friend Leslie Fiedler.

  It goes without saying that what the original sirens sang to that canny other sailor must have been something like “You can’t go home again,” and that that song ain’t so very far from wrong. As with Heraclitus’s man standing by the river, into the same which he cannot step twice, it isn’t only the Home that changes, but the You, too, and so you can’t and can.

  I did, sort of, some years back. The tidewater I returned to was not, 30,000 tide-turns later, the tidewater I’d left, nor was the leaver the returner, though to protect the innocent no names had been changed. If between twins as they get older less and less goes without saying, in a good marriage between a man and a woman or a writer and his place so much more every season goes without saying that should I grow as old and wise as Sophocles I’ll never get it all said. But I intend to try.

  * It may be that in fact as many as 70 percent of us are. See e.g., the chapter “The Vanished Twin,” in Kay Cassill’s Twins: Nature’s Amazing Mystery (New York: Atheneum, 1982).

  How to Make a Universe

  THE REST of these Friday-pieces are arranged more or less in the order of fheir composition, presentation, or publication.

  The semi-expatriate American writer Gore Vidal has denigrated American universities as “a branch of show business.” Most non-American writers I’ve met, whatever they think of our universities in general, are either politely amused by or openly contemptuous of our “creative writing” programs—virtually nonexistent outside the U.S.A., as they were inside the U.S.A. before World War II. The raw numbers involved in that quixotic enterprise certainly invite some skepticism: See my Friday-piece “Doing the Numbers,” farther on in this book.

  But I share neither of these attitudes and do not admire the judgment of those who do. One of the considerable pleasures, for this writer, of working full-time in various American universities has been the opportunity to hear other writers—foreign, domestic, “academic,” nonacademic, anti-academic, even anti-rational—perform and talk about their inventions, as well as lecture upon other matters, well or badly, but seldom unrevealingly.

  Writing well and reading or discussing well are separate talents. Some of those who contemn “the writer in the university” have also maintained that the best writers are not likely to be good performers of their work, much less good discussers of it, even if they are willing to field questions from students and apprentice writers about their own productions. This opinion—most often held by writers ill at ease with live audiences or defensive for one reason or another about the general academic-intellectual enterprise of higher education—is as untrue as is its opposite: There is simply no correlation either way between the two (or among the three) competencies.

  My own pleasure for the past twenty years or so has been to visit overnight, on the average of once a month during the academic year, some campus other than home base. Such a visit normally entails an informal seminar with students of literature and (if the college offers fiction-writing courses) with apprentice writers, as well as a public lecture or an hour’s reading from work in progress. These annual nine or ten overnighters help pay the rent and interfere in no way with my responsibilities to either my muse or my students. On the contrary: They provide me with a change of scenery, an inside look at every sort of academic institution and writing program from the Ivy League to Southwest Succotash Vo-Tech (it is a rule of thumb, with many exceptional fingers, that the prestige of a college correlates inversely with its lecture fees), and an outside look at most of our republic. The sovereign states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as of this writing, are the only ones in which I have yet to set lectorial foot. These flying junkets also alarm my wife, whose faith in gravity exceeds her confidence in aerodynamics; and they oblige me to meet and talk and listen to many more strangers than I otherwise would. Nine times out of ten I enjoy the excursion. American colleges and their students and faculties, especially the less distinguished ones, are so unalike except in their democracy that but for the lower class of criminals I think few segments of our society are unrepresented there (many offer extension courses for convicts). Certainly the poor, the dull, the ignorant, the mad, the merely cranky, the inarticulate, the illogical, the illiterate, and the unlettered have their campus contingents, as do their contraries.

  Except for a 1979 swing through German and Austrian universities with William Gass, John Hawkes, and our spouses—a sort of postmodernist road show—I have never done a campus “tour,” and I am not tempted to do one. Fewer than one overnight per month would defamiliarize the material and leave me vulnerable to platform jitters, which I never normally suffer; more would make me feel in show business indeed, and as a former musician I fear I’d come to like the feeling. Anyhow I enjoy staying home.

  So: Once a month times ten months times twice ten gives a couple hundred lecture-readings per twenty years, a number I regard as neither large nor small. Those readings have taught me some differences between fiction for the eye and fiction for the ear and have sharpened my appreciation of both the oral and the printed narrative traditions. More important, they have relieved the essential solitariness of writing and have given me the chance to hear how my stories and opinions play in the provinces as well as in the academic capitals.

  One wintry white interval between two periods of my life, I lived alone in a summer cottage on Chautauqua Lake, in far western New York—deserted in that deep-snow season—and commuted up the terminal stretch of the New York State Thruway to my classes at SUNY/Buffalo. The temporary solitude was not disagreeable, and I was shown that the second loneliest job in the world is that of the single ticket-taker in the Westfield toll plaza, that minor last exit on the great Thruway. Second loneliest, because even he or she, in that moment when your fingers hold one end of the Thruway ticket and his/hers hold the other, enjoys a simulacrum of direct human contact.

  But the writer’s sentences are written into the void. Even when all three hundred passengers on an A-300 Airbus are reading the same bestseller-of-the-moment, its author’s transaction with them is individual, mediated, solitary, anesthetic. A spooky art, writing, when you think about it.

  A writer needn’t think about it, or may well simply shrug his shoulders if he does. In any case, it can be refreshing—for one who enjoys college students and their teachers and their schools; who after thirty-five year
s of professoring is still mildly excited by blackboards and mortarboards and the strains of Gaudeamus Igitur —once a month to put by for a day his practice of the Solitary Virtue, fly off to an off-campus campus, and share his fabrications with a live audience instead of a merely living one.

  Among the first places ever to invite me to do that was Hiram College, a pleasant, small mainly-liberal-arts campus in the town of Hiram, in the pleasant-small-college-abounding state of Ohio. Hiram College was principally philanthropized by Hoover vacuum-sweeper money and maintains a benevolent connection with a Protestant denomination called The Disciples of Christ, the Hoover heirs being of that persuasion. On December 1, 1960, when I was thirty years old and had published my first three novels—The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and The Sot-Weed Factor —I was invited by a friend on the Hiram faculty to fly out from Penn State, where I then taught, and address one of the college’s periodic faculty-student convocations. I had given a few readings here and there from my fiction, but this was my first proper public lecture. Gentle present editing disguises neither its brashness nor its naïvety, but I continue to believe the main things it says.

  Everybody knows that nowadays many of our American poets and writers and some of our painters and composers of “serious” music work in our colleges and universities. People who concern themselves with the state of the arts occasionally worry whether this is a good thing. Can great art come from a person who works decent hours for a decent wage and owns an automobile and supports a family? Aren’t artist types supposed to stay up all night, grow beards, take lovers, get cirrhosis of the liver, and in general astonish the bourgeoisie?