by John Barth
But—second—there is nothing to be inferred from this state of affairs, beyond the gospel truth that many are called but few are chosen, and that, as Cardinal Newman remarked, in effect, no matter how you slice it, the few can never mean the many. Surely that circumstance doesn’t make our enterprise futile, any more than the odds against grace invalidate the practice of religion. If anything, it validates us; we can say (again with Newman) that since we’ve no way of knowing which of our parishioners God has elected, we pray for all of them. In fact, at the end of each semester’s work I like to pass on to my apprentice writers Samuel Beckett’s favorite quotation from St. Augustine. Referring to the thieves who were crucified along with Jesus, Augustine writes, “Do not despair; one thief was saved. Do not presume; one thief was damned.” The advice applies both to our students vis-à-vis their literary aspirations and to us vis-à-vis our students—though in neither case are the odds anything like as good as fifty-fifty.
Having acknowledged this state of affairs, I find myself believing that the right response to it—on the part of those who preside over even our “advanced” studio courses, not to mention the less advanced ones—is a particular concern to appraise the manuscripts in hand in terms of the existing corpus of literature; to analyze imperfect solutions of particular “executive problems,” as Cleanth Brooks calls them, by comparison to perfect, or at least successful, solutions of similar problems. This is one of the obvious ways to turn a practicum course in fiction-writing into an adjunct to general literary study; it might be small consolation to students with more ambition than ability, but it’s some justification for our ministering to them, if it’s done right.
Clearly it is not very helpful to say to a student “Kafka did this same sort of thing, but a lot more brilliantly.” The student knows that already.† And comparison to the great can be a put-down even in its more generous forms: Wilfred Sheed reports Edmund Wilson’s habit, in conversation, of prefacing a criticism with something like “Now see here, Sheed, this is where you and Tolstoy go wrong…” On the other hand, it can surely be illuminating, and may even be consoling, to be reminded that the problems of narrative strategy we wrestle with as apprentices have been famously wrestled with by our distinguished predecessors, and not always perfectly successfully.
I believe this kind of historical perspective is especially enlightening when brought to bear on very innovative work. It is not to put a young writer down that we show him that his edible or self-destructing or do-it-yourself narrative has venerable antecedents in the history of avant-gardism. It is to give him spiritual ancestors and comrades on the one hand, and on the other to conserve his imaginative energy; to spare him from forever reinventing the wheel.
So much for what goes without saying. As for what doesn’t, perhaps it could be left unsaid. But I’ll lay on the table two unrelated observations that I’m regularly put in mind of in the classroom.
One has to do with the meretriciousness of most radical formal innovation in fiction—in all the arts, I’m sure. My observation is that most of the “traditionalist” fiction I read in typescript is fairly forgettable too, compared to real literary accomplishment. The most gifted seminar I’ve presided over to date at Buffalo, with neither encouragement nor discouragement from me, turned itself into a seminar in Alternatives to the Line and Page: action fiction, three-dimensional fiction, fiction for tape and live voice, wordless fiction. Most of what its members produced I have forgotten, but several of the experiments were extraordinarily successful. Though sometimes unmarketable for technical reasons, they were in fact genuine alternatives to the line and the page. The best ones managed even to be moving. A year later, virtually the same group was back to pages, lines, sentences, even characters and linear plots, with about the same percentage of hits and misses—but, I observed, with a livelier sense of their medium than they had before their excursion to its perimeters. A roomful of determined young traditionalists, on the other hand, who neither know nor care about those perimeters, can be depressing to preside over. Youth should be more adventurous. I had rather apply snaffle and bit than spur and crop.
The other observation—picking up on Wallace Stegner’s Third Truth, that teaching any art becomes progressively more difficult as one moves on from the rudiments—has to do with the hierarchy of problems in fiction-writing workshops. My experience has been that the first gifts a gifted novice shows are usually a way with the language, as if it were his ally instead of his adversary, or at worst a friendly adversary; a flair for observing and rendering detail; and (less regularly) a sense of the fictive potential in people and situations. To put it another way, he has an inchoate authenticity of eye and voice; real steam in the boilers; real monkeys on the back; a Weltanschauung in utero, which those who’ve been there, students and teachers alike, usually recognize right off. On the other hand, the last thing we usually learn is the Aristotelian business of what constitutes a whole dramatic action and the most strategic ordering of its parts. I find that the good apprentice writers in my own advanced seminars will themselves make most of the critical points I’ll have noted to make about one another’s diction, detail, management of narrative viewpoint, characterization, and the manipulation of images. What I find myself addressing, perhaps more and more as I move through my own apprenticeship, are such things as the motivation and foreshadowing and pacing of main actions; the dramatical-moral voltages of characters—all that goes by the name of dramaturgy, a way with story as distinguished from a way with words, whether in relatively traditionalist fiction like John Updike’s or William Styron’s, or in less traditionalist fiction like Italo Calvino’s or Gabriel García Márquez’s. Because I myself am in love with stories at least as much as with language, it is in this area, dramaturgy, that I find myself most often in the role of adversary, coach, and instructor with my students past the novice level. And, other things equal, it is the writers who begin with or arrive at good dramaturgical sense whom I’m most optimistic about when their schooldays are done. Among them, I’d bet that the statistics of eventual publication are considerably less chastening.
* Now means 1973. By 1984 there were above 300.
† Leslie Fiedler told me once that whenever a student asks him “How can I become a much better writer?” he’s tempted to answer, “Be born again.” Setting aside the fact that now and then a person truly is reborn, such candid advisement is not very useful advice.
Doing the Numbers
A FOOTNOTE TO THE FOREGOING
“THE STATISTICS of eventual publication…” Ten years of presiding over the Johns Hopkins fictioneers prompt this 1983 footnote to the foregoing.
At the State University of New York at Buffalo, our graduate-student apprentice writers were regular English Department Ph.D. candidates who happened to write fiction as well, but were admitted to the graduate program primarily on their academic qualifications. In consequence, the level of critical articulateness in the room was generally higher than the level of raw fictive talent. Most of those students are now professors. A few have published the odd short story; none has yet become an established professional writer.
The same applies to the alumni of that excellent Aesthetics of Literature doctoral program aforementioned, presided over at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s by a poet, a philosopher, and a philologist: Elliott Coleman, George Boas, and Leo Spitzer, respectively. Its intellectual standards were so high, and literary scholarship was made so appealing by those three excellent gentlemen and their colleagues, that with but a few exceptions all the graduates of that program are now scholar-critics whose occasional fiction or verse is a graceful second string to their bow. Those of us who wound up being writers who also teach, more than teachers who also write, were either never admitted to that program or, like myself, dropped out of it because we felt ourselves distinctly in the wrong métier and out of our intellectual depth.
For me it was a familiar feeling, the same I’d experienced years before at Juilliard. As I’d recogniz
ed then that my musical ability was real but small, I recognized later (with some disappointment, but not much) that my ability for abstract thinking and rigorous critical analysis was likewise not of pre-professional caliber. I shrugged my shoulders and got on with novelizing, writing the odd essay or lecture in the same spirit as I played jazz, for serious diversion.
Among our graduate-student apprentices at Hopkins, as among those at Iowa, Stanford, and other writing programs both good and competitive, the statistics of eventual, substantial literary publication are by no means so discouraging as those aforecited, for the obvious reason that the writers are selected in the first place mainly for their apparent promise as writers. Their academic qualifications we take seriously, even unto their scores on the Graduate Record Examination: My opinion is that writers who elect to serve a part of their apprenticeship in a good university rather than elsewhere should be not seriously out of place in that university. But such bonuses as through-the-roof GRE scores, glowing testimonials from well-known professors, and impressive academic transcripts from good colleges serve mainly as tie-breakers and recommendations for teaching assistantships. The Ivy League has sent us a number of our best TAs, but most of our strongest writers have come to us from colleges not famous for their academic excellence. A powerful writing sample sweeps nearly everything else aside, and a few of our subsequently most successful fiction alumni (Frederick Barthelme and Mary Robison, for example) we accepted into the program more despite their academic backgrounds than on their account. Such applicants are obviously artists-in-the-making, who will be at least as good for the university as the university will be for them.
But even with our ablest apprentices, I like early on to Do the Numbers. There exist currently in our republic, I tell them, worse than 300 degree-granting programs in creative writing, according to the bulletin of an organization called Associated Writing Programs. Let us suppose that, on the average, each of these turns out twenty certified, diplomatized Writers every year (the Hopkins program, a small one, turns out nearly twice that number if one counts both BAs and MAs, but since many of our MAs hold BAs in creative writing from elsewhere—indeed, some hold MAs or MFAs from elsewhere, a circumstance we elect to ignore—I adjust the average downwards to compensate). That comes conservatively to 5,000 officially anointed new U.S. writers per annum. Let us suppose that half of these are poets, playwrights, or screenwriters by chief election and half are fiction-writers—my rough impression from having visited a good many such operations. We now have 2,500 newly ordained fictionists each spring.
Next we shall estimate the productive lifetime of American professional writers of fiction—those who join the Authors Guild or PEN, for example—to average… three decades, would you say? From about age 30 to about age 60, balancing against each other the many curtailed and the not a few extended careers? Such a writer may then expect that during his professional lifetime his national culture will be the richer for 75,000 newly consecrated competitors in his medium—and that only on the assumption that the popularity of writing programs in America unaccountably levels off this year from its enormous growth since 1945, though the fact is that the shrunken academic job market since 1973 in the traditional liberal arts has boosted rather than dampened the demand for creative-writing degrees. In paradoxical truth, an MFA in Writing may find academic employment more readily than a Ph.D. in English. Not economic recession, not declining literacy, failing bookstores, the usurpation of the kingdom of narrative by movies and television—nothing quenches the American thirst for courses in creative writing. In day school, night school, high school, college, graduate school, correspondence school, summer school, prison school; in writers’ colonies and conferences and camps and cruises, it is scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble.
So, my friends: 74,999 new certified American writers of fiction in your productive lifetime, plus yourself. It will not do to point out, correctly, that most of these diplomates will never publish a word of their art outside of their campus literary magazines, and therefore will never compete with you for the by no means infinite attention of readers of fiction. All that that circumstance tells us is that the 41,000-odd new titles published by the 13,000-odd book-publishers in America counted by the R. R. Bowker Company in 1982 (to take one year as representative), of which the largest single category is fiction, were written mainly by authors not authorized to do so by our degree-granting writing programs. The numbers still stand: The ten or fifteen novels or story-collections published by our average American professional fiction-writer in his/her 30-year productive lifetime must compete for shelf space, review space, and readerly mind-space with maybe a quarter-million other new titles offered by American publishers alone over that period.
If, after all, the chief real product of all those writing programs is more readers rather than more writers, what a service they perform!
Well, but what is an aspiring young writer to do with these formidable, not to say appalling, numbers? My advice to my students is twofold.
First, be duly impressed. There is an enormous lot of competition for readerly attention out there, not only from those 74,999 (or however-many) other certified living American writers, but also from the thousands of non-American living writers and the tens and tens of thousands of your predecessors in the art of fiction. Why should anyone who owes you nothing (unlike your classmates in this room) read even a single page of yours, when there are so many other things to enjoy in the fiction way from the world’s authors living and dead, so many other things yet to read besides fiction, and so many other agreeable things to do besides read at all? “The writer’s first obligation,” said Henry James, “is to be interesting.” Very interesting.
Second, having been duly impressed by the numbers, forget them. Talent tends to cut through odds. Many are called and few are chosen, but those few are chosen, usually. Inasmuch as the few can never mean the many, you had as well relax and trust your muse, for there’s little you can do towards that final election except read everything and practice your ass off.
Just a touch of cockiness might come in handy, too. I confess to you, worthy apprentices, that if at your age the muse had not only revealed to me the depressing numbers I have just reviewed with you, but warned me further that my particular American literary generation was fated to produce, say, only three writers of merit, I would have said to myself (I would not now), Who needs the other two?
Intelligent Despisal
AN ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS
OF WESTERN MARYLAND COLLEGE, JUNE 1973
BY THE SPRING of 1973, Lyndon Johnson was out, Richard Nixon was in, and the economic buzzards of our Vietnam war, like its veterans, were coming home to roost. The new phenomenon of “stagflation” was challenging economists and exasperating the rest of us; government social programs and aid to universities were cut back; the job market for American college graduates was much shrunk—and my oldest child was graduating from college, with two younger ones not far behind her.
As academic parents tend to do during pregnancy and at graduation time, I caught myself that spring thinking in commencement-speech terms: What sort of world, et cetera? I should have liked to be invited to address my daughter’s graduating class at Connecticut College that year. As I wasn’t (Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut was), and as we were moving to Maryland anyhow, I was pleased to accept President Ralph John’s invitation to speak at the commencement ceremonies at Western Maryland College instead, a small liberal-arts college in Westminster. It was my maiden and I think final such address; my maiden and no doubt final venture also onto the thin ice of political-economic indignation. My impression was that it was generally well received by the students and faculty and politely so by the trustees; but it got me denounced in the Eastern Shore press as a flaming socialist whose return to the Free State of Maryland was to be regretted.
None of us knew that a few months later the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo would deliver the
coup de grace to the 1960s and render quaint my perturbation at 6 percent inflation and 7½ percent home mortgages, not to mention my invocation of that standard liberal bugaboo, rich and powerful General Motors… If most of the numbers and some of the stock-liberal sentiments are decidedly dated ten years later, Reaganomics has made the main line of my harangue more to the point in 1983 than it was in 1973. And to the tragic view of political institutions, I wholeheartedly renew my subscription.
Hello.
To those of you about to receive degrees, my congratulations on having completed your courses of study. We now pronounce you intellectually and culturally sophisticated, technically equipped, morally enlarged, spiritually matured, critically honed, politically subtled, and socioeconomically upward-mobile. You are now perfectly prepared to commence your graduate professional training or your vocational life, as the case may be: I assume that all of you in the former category have already won admission to first-rank graduate and professional schools, with lucrative fellowships to support you, and that all in the latter category have chosen from among the exciting and rewarding pursuits that our society holds out to the college-educated. In short, you’ve all found groovy jobs that pay a lot of money, and we can quit worrying about you.
My congratulations next to those of you in the audience whose privilege and delight it has been to finance this happy enterprise. Where I teach, and at the colleges my various children attend, that privilege and delight comes to about $20,000 per kid for the baccalaureate, counting tuition, support, materials, and transportation, and the bill goes up about ten percent per year. That’s a lot of delight. One of my Boston University students (who was paying his own way) informed me once, just before a lecture, that given the usual four-course load for eight semesters, the $20,000 figure comes to $625 a course; now that the classical fifteen-week semester has shrunk to more like thirteen weeks, for a course meeting three times a week it comes to $15.63 per lecture, or 31¢ a minute unless the professor talks overtime, in which case the rate goes down a bit.
