by John Barth
Do we?
We don't, really, most of us more-or-less-Failed Old Farts, at least not most of the time. For one thing, showing all those apprentice scribblers what wasn't working in their works (that worked so well in the works of the great ones they were reading) showed us FOFs, on another level, the same thing vis-à-vis our own, if you follow me, and our consequent self-silencing spared posterity a lot of second- and third-rate writing, no? Though, come to think of it, most of our never-finished-if-ever-even-started stuff wouldn't have found a publisher anyhow, and most of what managed to find one would've mostly gone unread. So what the hell.
That being the case, why in the world am I writing this, and where, and to whom? The where, at least, I can answer: I'm in my office-cum-guest-room in our empty-nest coach home in Blue Crab Bight, a neighborhood of over-and-under duplexes in the sizable community of Heron Bay Estates, itself one of several extensive developments—residential and commercial, urban/ suburban/exurban—built by the virtual patron of Stratford's Shakespeare Prize Fund, the afore-mentioned Tidewater Communities, Inc. Indeed, inasmuch as our house purchase made it's tiny contribution to TCI's profitability and thus to the wealth of it's philanthropical CEO, we Newett-Todds feel triply linked to that problematical award: as coaches of it's candidates, as judges of their efforts, and as (minuscule, indirect) contributors to the winner's outsized jackpot.
It's a jackpot that Stratford's apprentice writing community regards, only half humorously, as jinxed: Shakespeare's Revenge, they call it, or, if they know their Hamlet, the Bard's Petard ("For 'tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petard," the Prince observes grimly in act 3)—as if, having hit the literal jackpot on some gargantuan slot machine, the unlucky winner then gets crushed under an avalanche of coins. Much as our Public Information Office welcomes the publicity attendant on every spring's graduation exercises, when the Shakespeare Prize routinely gets more press than the commencement speaker, it's ever more embarrassing side is that of the nearly two-score winners over the decades since the award's establishment, nearly none so far has managed to become "a writer"—i.e., a more or less established and regularly publishing poet, fictionist, essayist, screenwriter, journalist, or scholar—even to the limited extent that their coaches did. Worse yet, some who aspired simply to additional practice in one of our Republic's numerous master of fine arts programs have had their applications rejected by the more prestigious ones despite their not needing a teaching assistant-ship or other financial aid. And the few of our B.A.s who have gained admission to those top-drawer graduate programs happen not to have been among our Shakespeare laureates: a circumstance in itself no more surprising than that a number of the world's finest writers—Joyce, Proust, Nabokov, Borges, Calvino—never won the Nobel Prize, while not a few of it's winners remain scarcely known even to us lovers of literature. C'est la vie, n'est-ce pas? But awkward, all the same, for the Bard awardees and awarders alike.
In vain our efforts to reduce the pot to some more reasonable though still impressive size—four or five thousand dollars, say, or even ten—and divert the surplus to other of our program's amenities: more munificent honoraria to attract eminent visitors, better payment for contributors to The Stratford Review, upgrades of Shakespeare House's facilities, larger salaries for the writing faculty ... Our benefactor's team of canny lawyers saw to it that the terms of the endowment are un-fiddle-withable. In vain too what I thought to be Mandy's and my inspired suggestion to a certain noted novelist on whom the College conferred an honorary Litt.D. ten years ago: that once the doctoral hood was hung on her, just before the awarding of the Prize, she announce, "By the authority invested in me by the Muse of Story and the Trustees of Stratford College, I declare that what I've been told is called Shakespeare's Curse is hereby lifted, both henceforward and retroactively. My warm congratulations to whoever may be this year's winner: May your efforts bear rich fruit! And my strong encouragement to all previous winners: May the Muse re ward with future success your persistence in the face of past disappointment! Amen."
The audience chuckled and applauded; the media were duly amused; that year's prizewinner (a high-spirited and, we judges thought, quite promising young African-American poet from Baltimore) hip-hopped from the podium over to the seated dignitaries, check in hand, to bestow a loud kiss on his would-be savior—and returned triumphantly after the ceremony to his ghetto 'hood across the Bay, only to be killed later that summer in a "drug-related" drive-by shooting. Nor did his forerunners' and successors' fortunes appreciably improve, although several of my thus-far-luckless novel-writing protégés from commencements past have kept on scribbling vainly with their left hands, so to speak, while pursuing nonliterary careers with their right, their old coach having warned them that unlike violinists, mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and even lyric poets, for example—all of whom tend to blossom early or never—many novelists don't hit their stride until middle age.
Or later.
"So am I there yet?" one such perennially hopeful thirty-five-year-old asked me not long ago in a cover note to the typescript of her opus-still-in-progress, which she'd shipped to Blue Crab Bight for my perusal and comments despite my standing request to our graduates that they pass along all their future publications, to warm their old coach's heart and encourage his current coachees, but show me no more unpublished writings ever, please. A few pages plucked grudgingly from the thick pile's opening, middle, and closing chapters attested that their author wasn't, alas, "there yet." To spare her that blunt assessment, I e-mailed my praise for her persistence, reminded her of my No More Manuscripts policy ("We'd be shortchanging our present students if we kept on critiquing our alumnae"), and reminded her further always to enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope with any manuscript that she wanted returned to her. No reply, and so after a fair-enough interval I recycled her eternally gestating opus through my word processor, using it's pages' bare white backside for next-draft printouts of my own work-in-regress at the time.
Namely? Well, since you asked: a "story" provisionally titled "The Bard Award," not by Yours Truly, George Newett, but by "Yours Falsely, George Knewit"—a.k.a. a certain Ms. "Cassandra Klause" (quotes hers), beyond question the most troublesome, gifted, and all-round problematical coachee that "Yours Falsely" and his colleagues (my wife included) ever had the much-mixed privilege of coaching, and of being coached by.
Those quotation marks; that saucy sobriquet and nom de plume, as openly provocative as the "bare white backside" of a few lines back (all typical Klause touches) ... Who knows how a youngster born to and raised by stolid Methodist parents on an Eastern Shore poultry farm and educated in marshy lower Delmarva's public school system came by age eighteen to be the unpredictably knowledgeable, aesthetically sophisticated, shyly brash and unintimidatable "literary performance artist" (her own designation) who, even as a Stratford freshman, was signing her term papers and exam bluebooks (always in quotes) "Sassy Cassie," "Sandy Claws," or "[in]Subordinate Klause," and contrived on her driver's license and other official documents to have her true name set between quotes? ("It's like that on my birth certificate," "C.K." once declared in class with her puckish smile. "My folks thought it looked more official that way.")
"And anyhow," she added this time last year in my old Shakespeare House office, "what's in a name?, as Uncle Will has that poor twat Juliet ask her hot-pants boyfriend. Best way to find out is to try on different ones for size, right? Like pants or penises. Now then, Boss: my final exam. Ta-da!" Whereupon she turned her back to me, bent forward, and yanked down her low-cut jeans to display, on her unpantied bare white et cetera, the marker-penned title and opening lines of her latest composition: A Body of Words, by Nom D. Plume. I didn't seriously believe, by the way, did I (she nattered calmly on as I hurried to reopen the office door, which she herself had closed before displaying her lettered derrière, and call for my across-the-hall colleague, the FOF poet Amanda Todd, to please come verify that if anyone in the House was
Behaving Inappropriately, it was our student, not her teacher), that that bumpkin of a glover's son from the Stratford boondocks actually wrote those plays himself? About as likely as a down-county chicken farmer's hatchling's winning next year's Bard Award!
Which in fact, however, she added as my wife came to my rescue, she was dead set on doing, this time next year. "C'mon, Doc, examine me!"
"Ms. Klause is up to her old tricks," said I with a sigh to Professor Todd, and gestured toward our saucy pupil's "final exam."
"New tricks, guys." She turned her (plumpish) "text" to the pair of us—and to the open door, which my wife quickly reclosed behind herself. "Just call me Randy Sandy, Mandy."
A calmer hand than her spouse in situations involving bare-assed coeds bent over one's office desk, my Mrs. granted briskly, "Very amusing, Cass. And we get your point, I think: all that feminist/deconstructionist blather about Writing the Body? Up with your pants now, please, or you get an Incomplete for the semester."
Undaunted, "Cass my ass, Teach," the girl came back, and maintained her position: "If y'all don't read Cassie's Ass, her semester's incomplete anyhow."
Said I, "Excuse me now, everybody?" and consulted my wife's eyes for her leave to leave: "Professor Todd will review and evaluate your final submission, Ms. Klause—"
To my desktop she retorted, "Semifinal submission. You ain't seen nothing yet."
I'd seen more than enough, I declared. I would wait in Professor Todd's office while it's regular tenant examined and evaluated the rest of the text for me. "Your title and pen name pretty well establish the general idea."
To my departing back, as with a headshake I thanked Mandy and got out of there, "No fair, Chief. You read 'em out of cunt-text!"
Some while later, over lunch at a pizzeria just off campus, my wife and I shook heads over this latest, most outrageously provocative bit of Klauserie. What she had seen further of A Body of Words, she reported (feet, arms, belly, back, and neck had been enough for her), confirmed her opinion of it's being a not-unclever assemblage of quotes from all over the literary corpus, having to do literally or figuratively with the various anatomical items upon which they were inscribed: Virgil's "I sing of arms" on her forearms, the Song of Solomon's "Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies" encircling her navel, etc. "She said she'd intended to 'perform the whole text,' quote-unquote, in class, but then decided to hear your editorial suggestions first."
"Very considerate of her. What a handful that wacko kid is!"
"A figurative handful, we presume you mean?" Because though no beauty by fashion-mag standards, the ample-bodied Ms. Klause, we agreed, was a not unclever, not unattractive young woman, not unpopular with her classmates both male and female.
"Listen to us," I said to my spinach-mozzarella stromboli: "'Not unclever, not unattractive, not unpopular' ... The girl's extraordinary! One tour de force after another, while everybody else in the room is still doing 'It was a dark and stormy night.' She deserves a fucking prize!"
"Better one of those than the Bard Award, we bet."
A certain small voltage had built across the table during this dialogue; it dispersed, if that's what voltages do, when I here declared, "The PITA Prize is what she deserves: Pain In The Ass." Back to being the dedicated, indeed impassioned teacher/colleague/wife I loved, "The girl's amazing," my wife enthused (a verb that she hates, but that her husband sometimes finds convenient). And "While we're talking about writing," she went on, although we hadn't been, exactly, "Ms. PITA Prize suggested to me that you should, and I quote, 'get some description done in that lame Bard Award story that he and I are supposedly collaborating on,' close quote. By which she meant you and her. Question mark?"
"What?"
That afore-noted small voltage resurged. "Her very words, George." Raising two fingers to make a quote mark, "'Like give the Gentle-Ass Reader some idea of how things feel, smell, sound, and look, for pity's sake, beyond Cassie's Bare White Et Cetera and Ms. Mandy's Jealous-Green Eyes, don't you think?' End of quote—and what the fuck story is she talking about, please? What's this collaboration?"
I was damned if I knew, and energetically swore so, adding that of course Ms. Klause and I had spoken in conference about the much coveted but problematical Shakespeare Prize, I being after all her faculty adviser, and that (partly as a result of that discussion) it had in fact occurred to me that there might be a George Newett short story in there somewhere: about an eccentrically gifted student "writer," say, whose "texts" are collages, rearrangements, pastiches of the words of others. But despite a few notebook notes and a false-start draft page or two, I had yet to work out what that story might be—and most certainly, to my knowledge, hadn't discussed it with "Cassandra Klause." When a potential story of mine is still that nebulous, she might remember, I don't speak of it even to my beloved fellow-writer spouse, much less to my students. And "Could we please change the subject now, hon? Enough voltage already!"
We duly did: spoke of our distant pair of adult children and of our grandchild, already high school age, up in Vermont; of our plans for the weekend; of some of our other, less troublesome Stratford students. But my mind remained at least half on "Cass Klause"'s editorial suggestion, with which I found myself so in accord that I itched to get back to my desk at home and experiment with a bit of sensory detail (never my strongest writerly suit) in that story-not-quite-yet-in-embryo: to "flesh out," for example, such lame lines as "The girl's amazing," my wife enthused with enhancements like My wife closed her [Matahannock-green-brown?] eyes, shook her [uh, very attractive? ruddy-cheeked? short-walnut-hair-framed?] head, and [um, enthused?] "The girl's amazing!"
Better yet, maybe go back and cut out all that river-name and gated-community stuff at the tale's front end and get right to the action: the day when a certain budding prankster/performance artiste proposed to her writing coach that instead of submitting to the class a manuscript of his own for them to criticize (as she'd heard I'd done once or twice in the past, half in jest, at semester's end), I should let her submit one of mine under her name—as if for a change she was making up her own sentences and paragraphs, characters and scenes, instead of rearranging and "performing" other people's, when in fact she wouldn't be! That way I'd get some really objective feedback, right? As could scarcely be expected otherwise, except from her outspoken self ("Too many parentheses and dashes, in this reader's opinion; not enough texture," etc.). Plus maybe submit as mine a story of hers: She'd try to hack out something conventional, maybe about life in a tacky gated community like Heron Bay Estates, or about a professor whose maverick student puts an additional small strain on his prevailingly quite happy marriage by teasing him with her "corpus" ... that sort of thing. Which is pretty much what Ms. "Cassandra Klause" did, Reader, at the time here told of—and here we go, almost.
Additional small strain, somebody just said, on a prevailingly happy marriage. Mandy's and mine has been that, for sure; keenly aware of each other's strengths and shortcomings, we feel much blessed in each other, on balance. But of course there've been trials, strains, bumps in our road: the undeniably disappointing atrophy of our separate literary talents, to which however we feel we have, on the whole, commendably accommodated; one serious temptation apiece, somewhere back there, to adultery—which however we each take credit for candidly acknowledging and, we swear, resisting; never mind the details. And our inevitably mixed feelings, as we've approached or reached the close of our academic careers, not to mention of our lives, about what each and the other have accomplished, professionally and personally: about what we've done and not done, who we've been and not been, separately and together, during our joint single ride on life's not-always-merry-go-round. Hence those occasional small voltage surges above-noted: nothing that our coupled domestic wiring can't handle, as I'm confident we'd agree if we spoke of it, which we seldom do. Why bother? It's an electrical field potentiated over the past year by "Cassandra Klause" at one pole and at the other by my Shakespeare House "rep
lacement," Professor Franklin Lee—who would've been introduced earlier into this "story" if it's "author" didn't have a chip on his shoulder with respect to that smug sonofabitch. That tight-assed, self-important asshole. That ...
