by John Barth
It’s a rather far-fetched bit of biological arithmetic, I’ll grant, though quite within the salty parameters of the Nights. For details, see essay—which it was my privilege to deliver as an open-air lecture on a warm June night in 1983 at the American School in Tangier, Morocco, under a crescent moon signaling the end of the holy month of Ramadan, while muezzins called to the faithful from the lighted minarets of nearby mosques in the city that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite: a moving experience indeed for this long-time admirer of Ms. S.
Better yet, read the book: her book, the one called The Arabian Nights or Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, which this Signet Classics version (and Burton’s and all the others) are books about.
You’ll be enchanted.
It Can Be Arranged: A Novelist Recalls His Jazz-Drumming Youth
A mini-memoir of sorts, published here for the first time.
Q: MUSIC, ESPECIALLY jazz, has played a significant role in your life and your writing, has it not?
A: Yes and no. My years as an ardent amateur and semiprofessional jazz drummer were certainly an important part of my life from my teens into my forties. But except for passages in the novel/memoir Once Upon a Time (1994) and the novella Tell Me (2005), I’ve seldom written directly about that experience in either my fiction or my non-fiction. More relevant to me as a writer, I believe, was my early ambition to be, not primarily a composer or a performer of music, but an orchestrator—an “arranger,” as it was called back in those swing-band decades.
Q: Shall we “take it from the edge,” as musicians say (or used to say)? A-one, a-two . . .
A: Well: As kids in a family of modest means on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the Great Depression, my twin sister and I had the privilege (though we didn’t always see it that way) of weekly piano lessons and daily practice sessions from our elementary-school years through junior high. Because of our twinship, at our teacher’s annual student recitals we were usually assigned duets, my sister playing the primo, or upper-octave melody part, and I the lower-octave secondo. And the recitals would climax, as I remember, with Miss Hubbard herself at the piano and her students providing a scored percussion accompaniment of tambourines, triangles, and such—more to my taste, actually, than the keyboard, although in my later dance-band-drumming days I still did a couple of “specialty” piano solos from time to time: self-arranged versions of “Bumble Boogie” (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee with an eight-to-the-bar left hand) and the like.
As soon as we were allowed, at age thirteen or so, Sister Jill and I quit our piano lessons—and once released from the drudgery of obligatory practice, we found ourselves seriously attracted to music: not the classical piano-exercise books that we’d been drilled in, but pop tunes of the sort sold as “sheet music” in our father’s lunchroom /soda-fountain in Cambridge along with magazines, comic books, and, when they were invented, paperback books (in those days virtually every house had a piano, and sheet music was sold wherever magazines were)—also the swing-band music we heard on the radio and on 78rpm recordings: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Harry James. Through the Depression and then World War II years, our Dorchester County’s public school system had neither a high-school band nor instrumental instruction of any sort (nor even a twelfth grade), but I pieced together a rudimentary drum set, and with Jill on piano and a couple of friends on trombone and alto saxophone, by age fifteen or sixteen we’d cobbled up a successful jazz “combo” called the Swingtette. Through our junior and senior high-school years we played regular Saturday-night dances at the Cambridge Country Club and the Salisbury Town Club in a neighboring county. We even made a recording that was played on the local radio station, and the band was featured onstage in a “Teen-Age Revue” at Schine’s Arcade, the local movie theater.
In 1947, at age seventeen, after graduating from our eleven-year public school system, I enrolled in Juilliard’s six-week summer program with money saved from those country-club gigs (I could never have qualified for admission to the Institute’s regular curriculum). The placement test obliged me to take Elementary Theory, but oddly qualified me for a course in Advanced Orchestration, and I managed to do well in both. The instructor in that latter course was Ted Royal Dewar, orchestrator of Brigadoon and other Broadway musicals and a disciple of the then-fashionable Schillinger System, an avant-garde math-to-music method of composition with which one could, e.g., transfer a photo of the Manhattan skyline onto graph paper and convert the numerical values into a musical score. The technique didn’t particularly interest me (though George Gershwin reportedly used it), but I quite enjoyed that summer in upper Manhattan—my first away from home, except for earlier Boy Scout summer-camping—from which I learned that while some of my classmates were quite likely to become bona fide professional musicians, I was not of that number. During that instructive six-week absence from home I also lost my high-school girlfriend to a no doubt more advanced rival, and so in mid-August returned to Maryland without the foggiest notion of what to do next.
Whereupon, to my happy surprise, I learned that I had won a one-year state-senatorial scholarship to Johns Hopkins University. It was either that or go to work in my father’s store, and so faute de mieux off I went—solo, by bus—from my native Cambridge across Chesapeake Bay to the city of Baltimore and a rigorous research university that I’d never even visited, but from whose College of Engineering my no-less-able older brother, after a similar scholarship year, had dropped out and enlisted in the Army, so ill-prepared were we eleventh-grade redneck high-school grads for serious university work. One had to choose a college within the university: Engineering being of no interest to me, and Business being none of my business, I chose Arts and Sciences. And my major? Well: not the sciences or mathematics, for sure; not history, not economics, not philosophy, not languages. That left . . . well . . . literature, maybe? But the Hopkins English Department was much heavier on English than American lit back then, and taught mainly the famous dead Brits. If one wanted to study Hemingway and Faulkner, say—and I sort of did, having read a couple of their paperbacks from Dad’s store—one could do it only in a brand-new department called Writing, Speech, and Drama (later renamed the Writing Seminars). Moreover, come to think of it, I’d written a regular humor/gossip column called “Ashcan Pete” for our high-school newspaper back in the day, so maybe . . . Journalism?
I gave it a try: hung on by my fingernails through a difficult freshman year during which two fellow Eastern Shoremen whom I’d met and befriended on the bus to Baltimore dropped out, just as my brother (who after the war completed his B.A. elsewhere with high grades and went on to law school and a successful career in D.C.) had felt obliged to do. I flunked Political Economy, but survived my other courses; actually managed an A in the department’s one Journalism course (taught by a visiting lecturer from the Baltimore Sun’s senior editorial staff, and having more to do with the history and “philosophy” of journalism than with hands-on newspaper work); did well enough in my other required courses, such as Classics in the History of Western Literature and Classics in the History of Western Thought; and learned the valuable lesson that journalism wasn’t really my thing. Importantly too, among my new friends was another Eastern Shoreman—“Buzz” Mallonee from Centreville, across the Chesapeake from Baltimore—a trumpet-playing engineering major, several of whose prep-school pals were also Hopkins freshmen and musicians. He organized a dance-band, recruited me as drummer, and scored us dance-jobs in the city and over on the Shore as well as regular Sunday-afternoon “tea dances” at the Naval Academy down in Annapolis. Being non-union “scabs,” we charged less than the local professionals, but got more jobs: a Saturday-night frat-house or other gig followed by the Sunday tea-dance earned me almost as much in 24 hours as some classmates were making in a week’s part-time work. Better yet, Buzz found us a summer-long job at Betterton Beach, a popular bayside resort on the upper Chesapeake: Five of us—trumpet, sax, piano, guitar,
and drums—played daily afternoon sessions in the old Betterton Casino’s dance hall when the Baltimore excursion boat Bay Belle docked at the casino’s pier with its load of day-trippers, then an hour of dinner music at the nearby Rigbie Hotel (for which our payment was three free meals a day) and another two-hour dance in the evening back at the Casino, in whose ample storage-room we also lodged for free. On Saturdays the rest of the band joined us from Baltimore and elsewhere for a three-hour evening dance: four saxes altogether, two trumpets, trombone, piano, guitar, drums, and occasionally a female vocalist, we played four-number “sets” (three ballads and an up-beat “jump” tune, a few of which I arranged) with a small break between and a half-time intermission. I don’t recall what we were paid over and above our free room and board, but we sharpened our skills from all those daily performance-hours, enjoyed ourselves on the beach in our free time—and I met a young state-college co-ed, waitressing at the Rigbie, whom two years later I would wed.
Meanwhile, if journalism wasn’t to be my major, what was? Well: It being after all a Creative Writing program, and knowing myself to be no poet, in my sophomore year (scholarship expired, but I managed to cobble up tuition money from the band-gigs, parental dispensations, and assorted part-time work—including, importantly, a partial-tuition-defraying job filing books in the classics stacks of the university library) I signed up for an introductory fiction-writing course presided over by a gentle ex-Marine from Georgia named Robert Durene Jacobs, himself an English Department doctoral candidate completing his dissertation on William Faulkner. So immersed did I become in Southern Lit under his guidance, my maiden efforts at “Cree-aytive Rotting” (as the art sounded in his deep-south accent) were an Eastern Shore marsh-country mash-up of Faulkner and elements borrowed from Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which I was also imbibing. But Bob was gentle and encouraging; I persisted through my sophomore and junior years, doing better in my academic courses as well, and still playing dances and arranging a few scores for whatever band (I forget its name) succeeded Buzz Mallonee’s.
Q: Arranging: That’s where we came in, I believe.
A: I’m getting there. In my senior year I was bumped up into the department’s graduate-level fiction-writing seminar, presided over by Louis Rubin—another young Southerner (writing his doctoral thesis on Thomas Wolfe) and a first-rate writing coach as well as, subsequently, a much-published non-fiction writer himself and the founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. At the same time, my library-book-filing adventures led me to discover such treasures as Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Burton’s unexpurgated Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the great Sanskrit tale-cycles Panchatantra and The Ocean of the Streams of Story, all of which would become important to me when I finally got my authorial act together. Meanwhile, I married my Eastern Shore girlfriend, who’d finished her associate degree and shifted to Baltimore to work and share a modest student apartment with me (we’d planned to wed after my undergrad degree, but her parents—conservative Methodist minister and wife—intercepted and read a letter I’d written to her while she was visiting home, saw what was what, and insisted on immediate matrimony). Lots of married WWII veterans on campus back then, thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights, some with children already, and so a 20-year-old married college senior with first child in the works was a less anomalous phenomenon than it would be now. We skimped, scraped, worked various part-time jobs, and somehow managed.
Q: Things “in the works” . . . How about musewise?
A: Well: The department’s policy was to urge its B.A.’s to move elsewhere for advanced degrees, but when I graduated in 1951 I persuaded them to let me stay on with a teaching assistantship in their one-year M.A. program—luckily, because with a first child about to be born and two others soon to follow (those were the Baby-Boomer days!), I depended on my dance-band jobs and additional summer work to support us. My M.A. thesis was more faux-Faulkner: a novel entitled The Shirt of Nessus, the memory of which I’ve happily suppressed except that its title was borrowed from my explorations into Greek mythology.1 Luckily again, after the M.A. I was able to enter a new interdepartmental doctoral program in Literary Aesthetics cobbled up between Hopkins’s Writing and Philosophy departments to provide a rigorous Ph.D. to wannabe writers inclined to pay the rent by teaching until they scored with a trade publisher. I survived for a year in that program, trying vainly to devise a scholarly dissertation-subject while also launching a new fiction project called The Dorchester Tales. A never-to-be completed reorchestration of the great tale-cycles that I’d discovered in my book-filing semesters, it aspired to be 100 tales of my marshy home county at all periods of its history; I set it aside a year or two later, but managed to weave several of its yarns into my later novel The Sot-Weed Factor before tossing the manuscript.
Just as I’d learned in my freshman year that I wasn’t cut out for serious journalism, one year in that Hopkins doctoral program taught me that I wasn’t meant to be a professional scholar/critic either. I quite enjoyed the seminar sessions, presided over by such distinguished scholars as the historian of ideas George Boas, the Romance philologist Leo Spitzer, and the eminent Spanish poet Pedro Salinas (in exile from Franco’s Spain), and did well enough in my courses while still playing occasional dance-band gigs, turning out a second child, and working a summer night-shift job as a timekeeper in Baltimore’s Chevrolet factory. But I had to find something that I could truly do for a living, and so in 1953 I applied for and was accepted at an entry-level instructorship in English Composition at the Pennsylvania State College (later University) in State College, PA. I bought my first car (second-hand Buick sedan, from an uncle in Cambridge who dealt in used cars) and shifted my growing young family (kid #3 already on the way) from urban Baltimore up to the pleasant land-grant campus known to its joking undergraduates as “Dead Center,” it having been built in Centre County—the geographical center of the state—after passage of President Lincoln’s Land-Grant Act.
It was a great job: My courses were Remedial English (“English Zip”)—where I met a few Nittany Lion football stars and learned the actual rules of grammar, syntax, and punctuation that I’d been applying more or less correctly without formally knowing them—and Freshman Composition (basic theme-writing), and would eventually include Advanced Composition and a course in “Humanities” (literature and philosophy) as well. And I implemented my very low starting salary by playing drums in a not-bad local dance band with regular gigs in a nearby American Legion hall and occasional frat-house dances. But the rule for us entry-level instructors was “three years and then up or out”: I.e., either finish a doctorate, publish a book, or find another job. And so in 1955, after two years of full-time teaching, I managed to complete a new and very different sort of novel from that faux-Faulkner M.A. thesis: The Floating Opera, inspired by memories of a Chesapeake showboat called The James Adams Floating Theatre that I’d seen tied up at the Cambridge municipal wharf in my childhood.
It worked—in the nick of time. In the spring of 1956, after its rejection by several publishers who found it too unconventional for their taste, and just as I was obliged to consider reapplying to Hopkins to attempt completion of that abandoned Ph.D., my agent called to inform me that The Floating Opera—still happily afloat in trade-paperback print 55 years later, as I write this—had been accepted for fall publication by Appleton-Century-Crofts with a princely advance of $750 ($675 after deduction of agent’s well-earned commission). No matter the tiny sum, even by mid-20th-century standards: My academic butt was saved, I already had a second novel brewing (The End of the Road), and the Opera’s publication earned me a promotion from Instructor to Assistant Professor. I stayed on at Penn State for eight more years and discovered in its Pattee Library the complete Archives of Maryland (documents of the colony’s history from its founding by Lord Baltimore in 1634 to its statehood in 1776) and a late-17th-century poem by one Ebenezer Cooke called The Sot-Weed Factor, or, A Voyage to Mar
yland: A Satyr, said to be the first satire on life in the American colonies. Cooke’s poem—together with another important library-discovery, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about the ubiquitous pattern of wandering-hero myths in various cultures throughout history—inspired my Sot-Weed Factor novel, and I reorchestrated Campbell in my next one as well, Giles Goat-Boy (its wandering hero somehow spawned by intercourse between a computer and a goat), meanwhile ascending the academic ladder from Instructor through Assistant to Associate Professor and still playing occasional dance-jobs with Bob Shea’s band.
