by John Barth
No doubt I’m improving this story a bit, but I swear I’m not making it up wholesale. The standard device of satire is supposed to be exaggeration, yet time and again I found myself having to tone down the historical facts of everyday life in the early colonies in order to make them plausible even in a satirical farce. Who would believe, for instance, that a boatload of mere rogues and renegades could sail up the river one fine afternoon while the provincial assembly was in session, bar the door of the assembly building with the members inside, and make off with the sterling silver Great Seal of Maryland? Well, something very like that happened—but at this remove, don’t ask me for the details. “History,” says Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I, too, found it dreamish—more and more so as I left the history-textbooks and consulted the original documents—but I often woke up chuckling, and rolling my freshly-opened eyes.
IN THIS VEIN, by way of conclusion I might as well confess—acknowledge, insist, whatever—that some of the farthest-out bits of everyday colonial life in my version of The Sot-Weed Factor—bits that nearly all reviewers took for granted had been invented out of the whole cloth—happen to be literal transcriptions of (reported) historical fact. The infamous eggplant-aphrodisiac recipe, for example, that I thoughtfully provided Captain John Smith with for his defloration of the impregnable Pocahontas, you will find in a work entitled Untrodden Fields in Anthropology, by one Dr. Jacobus X, privately printed by the American Anthropological Society in 1934 or thereabouts. Doctor X was a 19th-century French army surgeon and amateur anthropologist who, during his service in sundry outposts of empire, developed what you might call a Phallic Index for men of various ethnicities, and who collected from his native informants such esoterica as that inflammatory African eggplant concoction, whose ingredients, preparation, and mode d’emploi I faithfully plagiarized in the novel, although I cannot vouch for its efficacy.
It is also true, however—as the earlier-mentioned (now late) poet Robert Graves acknowledged about his novelistic forays into classical Roman history—that a fictionist, working by hunch and feel, may invent period tidbits that historians subsequently discover to be factual. That happened with certain details of Graves’s I, Claudius, to the author’s delight, and I’ve known the same pleasure, though not in The Sot-Weed Factor. In another novel of mine, having to do with everyday life not in colonial America but in the household of Sindbad the Sailor, I needed a medieval Arabic slang term for the female genitals. My usually reliable supplier of naughty medieval Arabic is Scheherazade, but it happens that while her 1001 Nights abounds in slang terms for the male sexual equipment, I could find none for the female. Inasmuch as both Arabs and Persians of the period were intimate with the desert, I made an educated guess that the term wahat, one of several Arabic words meaning “oasis,” might just serve my purpose, and so deployed it (the word oasis itself, you’ll be excited to hear, is a Latin derivative from the same Egyptian root that wahat derives from; the two terms are etymological cousins). You will understand my subsequent joy upon reading an Arab-born British reviewer’s sniffy observation (in the London Times, I believe it was), that while I had misspelled the Arabic slang term for the male sexual organ (I had not; it’s a matter of transliteration and of dialect), I had got right the term for its female counterpart!
TWO CHEERS FOR the facts of history! say I, including the history of everyday life in early-colonial Maryland and Virginia. And three cheers for human narrative imagination, which ought properly to respect those facts, but which—when narrative push comes to dramaturgical shove—need not be bound by them like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver hog-tied by the Lilliputians. “Black Bill” Claiborne let it be: Damn the torpedoes, and on with the story!
Further Questions?
First delivered in the spring of 1998 as the University of Michigan’s annual Hopwood Lecture (in conjunction with their awarding to some promising U.M. student the Hopwood Prize in creative writing), this essay was published later that year in the Michigan Quarterly Review and subsequently collected with sundry others in The Writing Life: Hopwood Lectures, Fifth Series,1 edited and introduced by Nicholas Delbanco, himself an accomplished novelist and professor at the university.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU begins one of his lectures by saying, “You have invited me; you have engaged to pay me; and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.”
My resolve here is the same as Thoreau’s. The better to implement it, I’m going to serve me up to you by asking myself and replying seriously to a number of altogether unexciting questions—the first of which, reasonably enough, is “Why bother to do that?”
Well: The fact is that like many another American writer in the second half of the 20th century, I served my literary apprenticeship not in expatriate cafés or Depression-era boxcars or on the assorted battlegrounds of any of our several wars, but for better or worse in undergraduate and then in graduate school—majoring in, of all things, writing. Ernest Hemingway would disapprove; likewise, no doubt, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, and many another alumnus of the School of Hard Knocks. So did I, for that matter, now and then, for it was on such writers that I was raised. But except for a sculpting uncle of mine who attended the Maryland Institute’s College of Art shortly before dying in the First World War,2 I was the first of my immediate family ever to “go past high school,” as people where I come from used to say (my older brother’s educational trajectory was detoured by the Second World War), and on the whole I regard my apprenticeship in académe as both benevolent and beneficial indeed, although even at the time I understood that literature had managed nicely for several millennia without the benefit of creative-writing programs and would doubtless continue to struggle along if they should all disappear tomorrow. (“At the time” here means the late 1940s, when the then-new program at Johns Hopkins was only the second degree-granting writing program in our republic—second after Iowa’s. At last count the number exceeded 400, I believe,3 but I stand by my proposition.) I shall circle back, perhaps, to a hedged defense of this almost uniquely American, post-World War II phenomenon, the college creative-writing program, and of the concomitant phenomenon of poets and fictionists as professors. I bring the matter up now in order to launch the following reminiscence by way of reply to Question #1: “Why bother, et cetera?” It is an anecdote I’ve told elsewhere; kindly indulge its twice-telling:
My then-closest graduate-school-fellow-apprentice-writer-friend and I, as we were about to be duly diploma’d by our university as Masters of Arts, considered together one spring afternoon—no doubt over a couple of celebratory beers—what we might do to pay the rent until the golden shower of literary fame and fortune descended upon us like Zeus’s stuff on Danae. Having had some school-vacation experience of such alternatives as factory-, sales-, and office work as well as manual labor, we agreed by passionate default that college teaching looked to be the least abusive of our available options and potentially the richest in free time for writing. It had not escaped our notice that doctors, lawyers, administrators, and businessfolk, for example, tend to get busier as their careers advance, whereas the workloads of university professors in the humanities appeared to us to get progressively lighter and more flexible as they ascend the academic ranks. Never mind whether this perception was correct; my buddy and I were persuaded enough thereby to decide to become writer/teachers: Writers in the University. Inasmuch as we ourselves had been blessed with splendid professors of a great many disciplines and were the opposite of cynical about the teaching half of our prospective double careers, our next consideration was how we might spend our classroom time most fruitfully for our students-to-be and ourselves. My friend—who had a stronger intellectual string to his bow than I and a more solid background in literature, history, and philosophy—decided that he would devote his academic life to the answering of rhetorical questions. Should some smart-ass future s
tudent of his happen to ask blithely, for example, “Who’s to say, finally, Professor, what’s Real and what isn’t?” Ben vowed that he would tap himself on the chest, say “Check with me,” and lead that student rigorously through the history of metaphysics, from the pre-Socratics up to the current semester.
And I? Well, the Answering of All Rhetorical Questions is no easy act to follow—Wouldn’t you agree?—but it occurred to me to vow in my turn that I would spend my academic life saying over and over again All the Things That Go Without Saying; that (if I may paraphrase myself) I would stare first principles and basic distinctions out of countenance; face them down, for my students’ benefit and my own, until they confessed new information. What is literature? What is fiction? What is a story?
And so for the next many years I did, and indeed continue still to do, although the dialogue is more often with myself these emeritus days than with students. And I hope to return to at least the last of those examples (What is a story?) later in this talk. So that’s two things now to be perhaps returned to, the first being . . . I forget what, but trust that it will return to me. Meanwhile, having answered or at least responded to my opening question—“Why bother to attempt serious replies to banal questions? ”—I now proceed to a few of those questions themselves.
MY GIFTED GRADUATE-SCHOOL pal, alas, died young, leaving many rhetorical questions still unanswered. In faithful pursuit of our jointly-declared program, however, I’ve been writing fiction as well as professing it ever since, and publishing it for 40-plus years or 5,000-plus pages, whichever is longer4, and giving public readings from it, most often on college campuses, through at least 35 of those 40. More often than not, these reading-gigs include responding to questions from the audience afterward—something that for better or worse a writer doesn’t normally get to do with his or her readers.
As you might imagine, over the semesters at least a few of those questions come to be fairly expectable and not inherently exciting—Do you write your books with a pen or a pencil or what? Have any of your novels been made into movies? What effect, if any, has your university teaching had on your writing? Whether or not such routine questions—and my earnest responses themto—are interesting, it has interested me to see both the questions and the replies evolve somewhat over the decades. Taking them in order (I mean in order to get them out of our way):
1. The old question Do you write with a pen or a pencil or a typewriter or what? changed about a dozen years ago to typewriter or PC? (those were the innocent days when PC still meant “personal computer” instead of Political Correctness), and nowadays it seems to have become desktop or laptop?—as if that exhausts the imaginable options any more than does the classic “Your place or mine?” I have never understood the great pen-or-pencil question’s point, so to speak, in either its low-tech or its higher-tech versions, but I’m impressed by its frequency. Is the asker an aspiring writer, I wonder, who imagines that a change of instruments might induce the muse to sing? Can she or he be thinking, “Since that guy uses Microsoft Word 5.0 on a Macintosh LCIII and his stuff gets published and even remains by and large in print, perhaps if I [et cetera] . . .” It’s a magic syllogism. Even if the question’s motive is less complimentary, its logic is no less fallacious: “Ah, so: He writes with a MontBlanc Meisterstück fountain pen. That explains the Germanic interminability of certain of his novels,” et cetera.
No, no, no, dear interrogator: You must seek elsewhere the explanation of their Germanic und so weiter. What earthly difference can it make to the muses whether one composes one’s sentences with a Cray mainframe supercomputer or with the big toe of one’s left foot (like the cerebrally palsied Irish writer Shane Connaught) or with one’s nose or with some other appendage of one’s anatomy or for that matter of someone else’s anatomy? It goes without saying—Does it not?—that those sentences are what they are, for better or worse, whatever the instrument of their setting down.
I do remember, however, once hearing the critic Hugh Kenner speak in an interesting way of how literature changed after the 19th century when it came to be composed on typewriters instead of penned, its alphabetical atoms no longer cursively linked within their verbal molecules (these metaphors are mine, not Professor Kenner’s) but ineluctably and forever side-by-siding like wary subway passengers, and leached of individual calligraphy as well. When I objected that a few antediluvians, such as my Baltimore neighbor Anne Tyler and myself, still prefer the “muscular cursive” (Tyler’s felicitous term) of longhand penmanship for first-drafting our prose, Kenner replied, “All the same, you grew up breathing the air of literature composed on the typewriter.” Well, he had me there, sort of—except that the air that most oxygenated my particular apprenticeship was a fairly equal mix of high Modernism (presumably typewritten) and of quill-scrawled antiquity, with a healthy component of the oral tale-telling tradition as well. It is a mixture that I heartily recommend to apprentice writers: one foot in the high-tech topical here and now, one foot in narrative antiquity, and a third foot, if you can spare it, in the heroic middle distance.
My favorite response to the classic pen/pencil/PowerBook question, you’ll be excited to hear, comes in fact from those older storytelling traditions. The enormous Sanskrit tale-cycle Katha Sarit Sagara, or The Ocean of the Streams of Story, was set down in the 10th or 11th century—with a quill pen, presumably—by the Kashmirian court poet Somadeva. Its ten large folio volumes pretend to be a radical abridgment of the surviving one-seventh of what has to have been in its original version the longest story ever told or written: the Brihat Katha, or Great Tale, first told by the god Shiva to his consort Parvati as a thank-you gift for a particularly divine session of lovemaking. By my calculations (based on what’s conjectured about the Homeric oral tradition), it must have taken Shiva two and a half years to spin the thing out, while Parvati sat listening patiently on his lap—the primordial laptop, I suppose. No problem in their case, since the tale, the teller, and the told were all immortal. But when Shiva’s Great Tale was first written down by the scribe Gunadhya (so our later writer Somadeva declares), its passage from the oral to the written medium required seven full years—which is just as well, inasmuch as the medium of transcription was the scribe’s own blood.5
So it is, more or less, my friends, with all of us: a good case for writing short stories and lyric poems, perhaps, unless your blood-replacement capacity is that of an Anne Rice male-lead vampire. Just as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested a few years ago that the efficient cause of American violence isn’t guns but ammunition, so maybe the pen/pencil/PowerBook question ought to be Skrip, Quink, ribbon, bubble-jet, or laser? Blood-group O, A, or B? There is much more, by the way, to that exemplary Kathapitha, or Story of the Story, as Volume One of Somadeva’s ten-volume abridgment of the surviving one-seventh of The Ocean of the Streams of Story is called. But I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of your reading it for yourself.
Once upon a time a quarter-century ago, as I was driving the poet John Ashbery to his scheduled reading-plus-Q&A at Johns Hopkins, he wondered aloud to me what sort of questions he was likely to be asked. “The usual, no doubt,” I assured him: “Like, Do you write with a pen or a pencil? Stuff like that.” “Oh, I hope they ask that one,” Ashbery said; “I like that one!”
Truth to tell, so do I. To get right down to it, breath-bated auditors, I write my fiction with a much-beloved old British Parker 51 fountain pen deployed in an even older three-ring looseleaf binder.6 From there, at morning’s end, the day’s “muscular cursive” is Macintoshed for extensive editing and revision. And I compose my nonfiction, this lecture included, mainly on Fridays, with a MontBlanc Meisterstück 146 fountain pen bequeathed me by a beloved Spanish friend and critic7 upon his untimely death from stomach cancer, he having chosen for his epitaph this line from a story of mine about a skeptical spermatozoon: “It is we spent old swimmers, disabused of every illusion, who are most vulnerable to dreams.”8 And I deploy that Meisterstück in an altoget
her different, history-free binder before Macintoshing, et cetera. Lately, however, I seem to have taken to non-ficting directly on the word-processor, without that cursive foreplay. Make of that datum what you will.
Q: Have any of your novels been made into movies?
A: I always used to answer No to that question, even when some film buff claimed to have seen The End of the Road back in the early 1970s, with Stacey Keach playing Jacob Horner, Harris Yulin as Joe Morgan, Dorothy Tristan as Rennie Morgan, and James Earl Jones as the capital-D Doctor. Despite my name in the credits and my modest payment for the film rights, I deny that that wretched flick has anything to do with my rigorous little 1958 novel of the same title and dramatis personae. (The movie critic John Simon declared at the time, correctly, that the principal difference between the novel and film versions of the story is that whereas my novel concludes with a harrowing abortion, the film is a harrowing abortion from start to finish.) But what was the question for ?, I used to wonder, as I did with the pen-or-pencil one. I couldn’t help translating it to mean “Reading’s a drag, man, but I dig movies, so I’ll maybe catch you out at the nabes and see if you’re on my wavelength.”
