by John Barth
In short, many of the economic ills that make your commencement a less promiseful one than mine was twenty-two years ago are apparently the result of a “stagflation” perhaps not so much uncontrollable as ill-controlled (that is to say, controlled to the benefit of interests other than yours and mine and the people’s generally); and the want of effective controls seems clearly owing to our government’s accession to pressures from big business and big labor, in that order; and this accession in turn, so my reading of the situation tells me, is finally not really an accession so much as a fulfillment of function on the part of a federal government that is, in Henry Steele Commager’s phrase, chiefly the political arm of corporate America. And Commager doesn’t mean just Republicans, either. On the part of historians and political scientists of the stature of Henry Steele Commager and Andrew Hacker, for example, this assessment simply can’t be dismissed as liberal paranoia; Hacker for one has been eloquently cognizant and critical of the liberal bias in much academic historiography. But the analyses of interlocking directorates in corporate America, and of the systematic quid pro quo between these interests and the political officials they subsidize, make conclusions like Dr. Commager’s all but inescapable, even to skeptical sensibilities like my own.
What I’m saying is that the principal villain seems to be our old friend Self-Serving Corporate Capitalism, and I hope you graduates will have the good sense to despise it intelligently for its large share in the frustration of your economic and political lives, the poisoning of your air, food, and water, the famous cheapening of the quality of life in America, and the corruption of our governmental institutions and officials. That government itself is merely the accomplice to these crimes—but since political office is a public trust and large business corporations are merely trusts, we may properly judge the accomplice in this case more guilty than the originator of the crime. This is what I mean by despising intelligently. Large corporations aren’t really as blameless for their actions as natural forces like fire or flood, as is sometimes said; their decisions to pollute, adulterate, despoil, defraud, and exploit the public interest for the profit of their stockholders are human decisions, morally accountable despite their limited legal liability. But they’re like natural forces in that, they having been organized to make cars or shoes or whatever not for people, but for money, to expect them to take the public interest into account more than it is finally profitable for them to do so is as naïve as expecting the fire itself to care what or whom it burns.
The choice therefore is either to find a less dangerous substitute for fire—that is, to nationalize any corporate interests large enough to be dangerous or even deleterious to our lives, as many of the world’s people have done—or else, if we want to keep the fire (and I myself certainly prefer life in this country to life in the large socialist countries), then we ought to find a much more reliable stove, and better firemen, or our goose may be cooked and our house’s days numbered. To throw out the Republicans and throw in the Democrats won’t help the Class of ’77 as long as the same complex of corporate interests has still to be satisfied.
Then is it realistic at all to imagine so reforming our institutions that our public servants truly serve the public first instead of themselves and their subsidizers? Can we really hope to police the police, and the police who police the police? All of my reading, my experience, my reflections and intuitions, incline me to the tragic view of human institutions, including political systems. I’m not naïve enough to believe that our government is much more or less corrupt or inefficient in serving the interests of the governed than are the governments of other capitalist countries. I happen very much to wish, personally, that large areas of our manufacturing, transportation, utilities, health services, and other major industries were publically owned, as most of our educational system is, to serve their customers rather than their stockholders; but one isn’t naïve either about the corruptions, inefficiencies, self-serving bureaucracies, and more or less brutal stifling of criticism in very socialist states. As for those countries which are neither capitalist democracies nor socialist republics—well, never mind. I wouldn’t be permitted to make a commencement speech like this in Poland or Cuba, Algeria or Turkey, much of Latin America, most of Africa, all of Russia or China, or North or South Vietnam, for example. In North America and Western Europe (excluding Portugal, Spain, and Greece these days) I’m permitted to make it—just as I’m permitted to practice my two professions—because the interests and institutions I’m criticizing, who run these countries and govern so many aspects of our lives for their profit, are too secure in their power to take much notice of such criticism. I prefer that condition to being silenced, as a man might prefer impotency to actual emasculation, and I am impatient with radicals who equate the two. But it’s irritating to be expected to be grateful for having been tolerated because rendered powerless.
The hopefulest thing about the classes of 1970 through ’73 is that they’ve had the lively chance, at least, unlike most of their predecessors in America, to add to their formal education a considerable informal education in political reality, from the tumultuous events on our campuses since 1967. I think I pity the campuses—and the students, professors, and administrators—who were spared all that: the takeovers and disruptions and strikes, the trashings, the tear gas, the obscenities and vulgarities and head-crackings and groin-kickings of ’67, ’68, ’69, and ’70. Thank heaven their intensity has diminished, as the more flagrant symptoms of the malaise that inspired them have passed into sore history. The best thing they accomplished, along with a few worthwhile minor academic reforms and a little extra pressure on the D.C. death-freaks, was a slight raising of the political consciousness of an unprecedented number of young people not directly involved in the fields of history, sociology, or political science: I mean our next generation of lawyers, doctors, and especially teachers. You graduating seniors have had the chance, whether you availed yourselves of it or not, to learn how many areas of our lives have a real political dimension that most of you, and many of us who’ve been your teachers, had been innocent of—and that’s an innocence well lost.
You’ve also had the chance, whether you availed yourselves of it or not, to discover that while you don’t have the most power on campus, you have a good deal more power, when you organize to use it, than either you or we had believed before the middle 1960s, and that’s much more of a good lesson than not. The paradox is that in the society into which you’re now graduating, you will have much less power over your lives in many respects than you had on campus, whereas you should have much more. Whether you—but now that you is we —whether we can do anything to change that is far from certain; what is certain is that in the condition of political innocence one is doubly manipulable: not only robbed, but trained to applaud and salute the robbers. If you’ve lost that political innocence, as I hope many of you have, you’ll very likely still be robbed, but at least you won’t mistake highway robbery for voluntary donation. Perhaps you’ll even holler for the cops, and when you find then that cops and robbers aren’t as distinguishable in fact as they are in some fiction, perhaps there’ll be enough of you—of us—to commence beyond mere intelligent despisal and the delivery of liberal commencement addresses.
I hope so.
Writer’s Choice
BACK to the writing desk.
Rust Hills, the off-and-on fiction editor of Esquire magazine, assembled in 1974 a short-story anthology called Writer’s Choice [New York: David McKay, 1974]: one of those collections in which the authors are asked to choose which of their stories is to represent them and briefly to explain their choice. Wise readers understand that such anthologies occur more than once in a writer’s career; frequently enough, in fact, that the real ground of his selection may be to recover some not so representative, less often anthologized piece. In this case, however, the choice was straightforward.
For my first ten years as a publishing writer, I found the short story an uncongenial,
constipative genre, and did not work in it. But at about age thirty-five, having written a pair of short novels and a pair of very long ones, I commenced what was to turn out to be a seven-year investigation of alternatives to long printed narratives. The issue was another pair of books: Lost in the Funhouse (1968), a series of fourteen short fictions for print, tape, and live voice; and Chimera (1972), a triptych of novellas. My interest in electronic tape was a passing one, but my conversion to the shorter forms was so complete that I have come to find it almost impossible to read any new fiction whose pages outnumber my years. If I am in fact just now writing another full-fledged novel, it is out of a kind of perversity, so quixotic does that enterprise seem to me at this hour of the world. But Quixote is where we novelists came in.
The story “Lost in the Funhouse” was written for print, and occurs midway through the series of which it is the title story. I meant it to look backward—at the narrator Ambrose’s earlier youth, at the earlier “Ambrose” stories in the series, and at some classical manners and concerns of the realist-illusionist short story, long may it wave—and also “forward,” to some less conventional narrative manners and concerns as well as to some future, more mythic avatars of the narrator. Finally, I meant it to be accessible, entertaining, perhaps moving, for I have no use for merely formalist tours de force, and the place and time—tidewater Maryland, World War Twotime—are pungent in my memory. In short, my choice, like the story itself, is partly sentimental.
Western Wind, Eastern Shore
A FOREWORD
THAT novel-in-progress afore referred to was LETTERS, an enormous and intricate project that occupied most of my forties. Seven novels in one, really, it took about seven years to complete. The axis of its action corresponds to the axis of the War of 1812 (with which, among other things, it deals: my personal favorite among American wars) and, as it happens, the axis of my life: a line from tidewater Maryland through Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes and the Niagara Frontier.
The autobiographical element in my fiction is slight; more often the relation works the other way around, the fiction turning out to be banal prophecy, perhaps even a contributing cause of what its author later winds up doing. I came back to Maryland partly because my lapsed hero Bellerophon (in Chimera) had already fallen from Olympus into the Dorchester County marshes, and because while in Boston I had begun the novel LETTERS, much of which is set in the neighborhood of Chesapeake Bay.
I had taught myself how to sail on Lake Chautauqua, the thumb of New York’s Finger Lakes; now we bought a small cruising sailboat, and in the spring of 1974 began exploring the literal as well as the figurative geography of the Chesapeake—an enterprise still far from finished. In connection with that enterprise I met an expert sailor-photographer, Robert de Gast, who invited me to circumnavigate the Delmarva Peninsula with him—a month’s voyage—and write a text to accompany the book of photographs he had in mind. The LETTERS project would not permit so long a holiday, but I made the voyage with him in my imagination while Shelly and I, aboard our Cobweb II, improved our skills with modest weekend cruises on the Choptank River. And I was pleased to write this foreword to de Cast’s book—the subtitle of which is A Sailing Cruise Around the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia —when The Johns Hopkins Press published it in 1975.
Robert de Gast is a Dutch-born photographer, writer, and sailor who free-lances out of Baltimore and sails out of Annapolis, the Marblehead of Chesapeake Bay. In May 1974, he did a simple, delightful thing which no one seems to have thought of doing before, at least for the record: Mostly alone, mostly under sail, he circumnavigated the Delmarva Peninsula, that shrimp-shaped entity (comprised of Virginia’s Accomack and Northampton counties, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and nearly the entire state of Delaware) which swims north toward Pennsylvania with its feet in the Chesapeake and the Atlantic on its back. Up from the Bay Bridge, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, down Delaware Bay he sailed, poking into rivers, creeks and by-ways on his way; then inside the skinny barrier islands along Delmarva’s Atlantic shore (a route almost virgin to the cruising sailor), around Cape Charles, and up Pocomoke and Tangier sounds to his starting place, duly nosing into the Pocomoke River, the Little and Great Choptanks, the Tred Avon, the Wye, the Miles—most of the major estuaries and a few of the major creeks, big as rivers themselves, of the inexhaustible Eastern Shore.
Bertrand Russell observed, about coastlines generally, that their length can be measured only by ignoring enough actuality: coves, points, rocks, grains of sand. De Gast found this wistfully true of his twenty-four-day circuit of Delmarva: The whole period would not have done justice to the Choptank alone, not to mention the Wye, the Chester, the Sassafras. But he rediscovered the improbable Smyrna and the cypressed, tuckahoed, magical Pocomoke…
Any competent, imaginative sailor with a shoal-draft boat and three weeks on his hands might do as much—must surely long to, once he reads this book. What Robert de Gast brought to the voyage (in addition to his delicate eye and lens, which need another paragraph) was the knowledgeability that makes his earlier photo-essays, The Oystermen of the Chesapeake and The Lighthouses of the Chesapeake, as delightful to those who know his subject intimately as to those who don’t. Having mastered English second, he hears its tidewater dialect perhaps more accurately than we who grew up with it in our ears. He has done the requisite regional-historical homework; wears it lightly; invokes it aptly and unsentimentally. This voyager, like this voyage, is quiet, able, self-effacing.
He is seldom to be seen, for example, in the photographs which illuminate his text; neither is his shapely Olin Stephens sloop, Slick Ca’m. Nor are any human beings at all. These were among the first of a series of tactful artistic decisions—and surely the hardest for a sailor who loves his boat and a photographer who relishes people—following upon what I take to have been his working premise: that having essayed the oystermen and the lighthouses of the Eastern Shore, he would bring home this time, from this voyage, the place itself.
Properly therefore he works in black and white; that is, in infinite shades of gray. To the eye, the Eastern Shore is strictly, beautifully monotonous, especially those endless lowlands which, as a Netherlander himself, de Gast responds to with particular sensitivity. To Dutchmen, Eastern Shoremen, and shoal-draft sailors, the boundary between land and sea is never prominent and always negotiable; their world, as Gertrude Stein remarked of the Spanish landscape, has few things in it, and so each thing exists with peculiar substantiveness. It is a world of such ubiquitous horizontality—sand bars, mud flats, the 360° horizon itself—that any verticals in it are more or less startling, interesting, even important, ipso facto: a mast; a piling; a heron’s legs; loblolly pine trunks; the separate reeds of spartina grass. Even the surface of the water (everywhere, everywhere!) is prevailingly “slick calm,” at least in the pictures: Days One, Six, and Nineteen, when the seas got too vertical for photography, properly belong to the open-water passages of the voyage and text, not to the essence of either.
Mirrored in that calm, and in the tranquil lens and log of Robert de Gast, every low landfall is a Rorschach image: imposing nothing, evoking whatever the viewer, or voyager, brings to it. The skipper of Slick Ca’m brought more than most tidewater travelers, and more than any photographer so far, to his charming one-way round trip: neither a sea saga nor a soul-search nor a cruising guide nor a travelogue nor a coffee-table picture book, but a calm circumspection of the Eastern Shore.
The Spirit of Place
ANOTHER SYMPOSIUM: this one at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks on the vernal equinox of 1975, in connection with a series of readings there by visiting poets and fictionists. I was attracted because the Dakotas were terra incognita to me; because my fellow symposiasts included at least two writers whom I enjoy listening to as well as reading: William H. Gass and Ishmael Reed; and because the topic—“The Spirit of Place”—spoke to my concerns in the LETTERS novel, still a-building.
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sp; While on the Chesapeake we were fitted out and ready to launch a new sailing season, grimy snowbanks still sat about the flat Dakotas. I read from LETTERS; Ishmael Reed read from Flight to Canada, his novel then in progress, and took off afterwards from Grand Forks to Manitoba to check out the territory. Most moving of all was Bill Gass’s reading, on location, of the chapter “We Do Not Live the Right Life” from his novel-even-now-still-in-the-works, The Tunnel, with its astonishing descriptions of Dakota’s astonishing weather, and of the great prairie there outside our windows. One could ask for no better demonstration of the truth that when a place is central to a good writer’s imagination, it is because that place has become a metaphor for larger concerns.
Reviewing my symposium remarks, I see that I was fumbling toward a notion of “postmodernism” set forth more fully in a later Friday-piece called “The Literature of Replenishment.”
Ernest Hemingway remarked that every writer owes it to the place of his birth either to immortalize it or to destroy it. He himself did neither for Oak Park, Illinois (I believe he made the remark apropos of Thomas Wolfe). It is an idle remark anyhow, as is every generalization beginning with the words “Every writer…”
A good writer may be inspired in part by the locus genii of the place where he was born or raised: The “heart of the country” is near the heart of William Gass’s fiction, though he depends on place less literally than Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner did. His is a Dakota of the mind, an Ohio or Indiana of the heart. But at least as often, the writer’s place of origin may be of little or no significance to the work: We note in passing that Ishmael Reed escaped from Buffalo, New York, or that Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia and raised in Houston; but Reed’s “place” is wherever his hoodoo leads him—Harlem, New Orleans, Berkeley—and some of the best of Barthelme’s fiction takes place nowhere, not even in that Manhattan-of-the-nerve-ends where he lives.
