Final Fridays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  I. - ON READING, WRITING, AND THE STATE OF THE ART

  Keats’s Fears, Etc.

  The State of the Art

  Two More Forewords

  LETTERS

  SABBATICAL

  “In the Beginning”: The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox

  1.

  2.

  How It Was, Maybe: A Novelist Looks Back on Life in Early-Colonial Virginia and Maryland

  Further Questions?

  Incremental Perturbation

  “The Parallels!”: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges

  My Faulkner

  ¿Cien Años de Qué?

  A Window at the Pratt

  On Readings

  The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It?

  “I’ve Lost My Place!”

  The Place of “Place” in Fiction

  Liberal Education: The Tragic View

  The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American

  “All Trees Are Oak Trees . . .”: Introductions to Literature

  The Inkstained Thumb

  Future Imperfect

  I.

  “In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night . . .”

  The Morning After

  It Can Be Arranged: A Novelist Recalls His Jazz-Drumming Youth

  The End? On Writing No Further Fiction, Probably

  II. - TRIBUTES AND MEMORIA

  Introduction to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme

  The Passion Artist (tribute to John Hawkes)

  THE WRITER:

  THE TEACHER:

  THE VOICE:

  The Accidental Mentor (homage to Leslie Fiedler)

  “As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy” (80th birthday salute to William H. Gass)

  The Last Introduction (memorial tribute to Joseph Heller)

  APPLAUDING JOE

  Remembering John Updike

  The Judge’s Jokes: Souvenirs of My Father, the After-Banquet Speaker

  Eulogy For Jill

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  For Shelly

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MOST OF THE pieces here collected have been published separately, in slightly different form. The author gratefully acknowledges the following sources: The New York Times Magazine for “Keats’s Fears, Etc.”; The Wilson Quarterly for “The State of the Art”; Dalkey Archive Press for the forewords to LETTERS and Sabbatical; Anchor Books for “‘In the Beginning’”; U. Michigan Press for “Further Questions?”; Story Press for “Incremental Perturbation”; Context for “‘The Parallels!’”; U. Mississippi Press for “My Faulkner”; U. de León for “¿Cien Años de Qué?”; Journal of Experimental Fiction for “The End of the Word as We’ve Known It?”; Hartford Courant for “The Place of ‘Place’ in Fiction”; Albuquerque Tribune for “Liberal Education: The Tragic View”; Einaudi for “The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American”; Poets & Writers Magazine for “‘All Trees Are Oak Trees . . . : Introductions to Literature’”; Writers Digest Press for “The Inkstained Thumb”; Tin City for “Future Imperfect”; Sarabande Books for “I.” ; The Believer for “‘In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night’”; Signet Classics (Penguin Group USA) for “The Morning After”; The Atlantic for “Do I Repeat Myself?”; Granta for “The End?”; Random House for “Introduction to Not-Knowing”; New York Times Book Review for “The Passion Artist”; U. Delaware Press for “The Accidental Mentor”; Review of Contemporary Fiction for “‘As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy’”; American Scholar for “The Judge’s Jokes.”

  FOREWORD:

  To the Hyphen, and Beyond

  IN 1984, HAVING reached age four-and-fifty and published eight volumes of fiction, I assembled a collection of essays, lectures, and other nonfiction pieces under the title The Friday Book.1 It was so called, its preface explained, because 1) at that time and for years thereafter, my wife and I, teachers both, routinely met our classes from Mondays through Thursdays and then shifted from Baltimore across Chesapeake Bay for long weekends and summer vacations at our Eastern Shore retreat near the old colonial customs port of Chestertown, Maryland; and 2) being prevailingly a novelist by temperament, with the habit of scratching away at some extended prose fiction on those weekday mornings before my afternoon sessions with undergraduate and graduate-student apprentices in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, I found it a refreshing change of pace as well as a logistical convenience not to haul the accumulating notes, drafts, and research materials for whatever novel was in the works back and forth across the Bay, and instead to dedicate those Friday work-mornings to the muse of nonfiction. The practice soon became so established that I found myself inclined to it more often than not on school-vacation Fridays as well, when Logistical Convenience was no longer a factor. A sort of Shabbat-respite, it was, from the invention of characters, scenes, and plot-developments for novels, novellas, and short stories: one that, however—unlike the Jewish or Christian Sabbaths—could readily be shifted to a different day if the demands of some fiction-in-progress (or travel commitment, or whatever) took precedence. Contrariwise, I might declare some Tuesday or Saturday to be a “Friday” if some lecture- or essay-draft needed extra attention as its deadline approached.

  Thus The Friday Book.

  Three novels and 520 Fridays later, I had accumulated a second volumesworth of such pieces: Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984–1994.2 By then five-and-sixty, I retired from 40-plus labor-intensive but enormously rewarding years of teaching, as did my wife from her less lengthy but even more intensive pedagogical career. We continued, however—and, as of this writing, continue to continue—our weekday work-morning routines: me seeing what my primary and secondary muses will come up with next, she serving as my indispensable Primary Editor, General Manager of our household, and what in French resort hotels is called Le Planning: the arranger and scheduler-in-chief of our appointments and errands, chores and pleasures.

  Et voilà: After not another ten this time, but some fifteen yearsworth of further Fridays since Further Fridays, having delivered myself of six more volumes of fiction, I find as I approach age 80 that I’ve accumulated enough nonfiction-pieces for yet a third collection: not 1995–2005, in tidy sequence with its predecessors, but 1995–.

  AND I PAUSE at that hyphen, which gives one pause, like those cemetery headstones bearing a deceased spouse’s birth- and death-dates and the bereft survivor’s birthdate followed by hyphen and blank marble awaiting gravure. (Remember the awkward situation of some such pre-planners at the turn of the millennium, who had engraved their headstones 1910–19__, say, and finding themselves still breathing air and taking nourishment in c.e. 2000, were obliged to have their grave-markers replaced or re-engraved? Given the ever-increasing longevity of dwellers in our planet’s better-off precincts, best to end with the hyphen, even in a new century.) Just as my waiting grave’s marker, if there were one, would read 1930– , I’m dating these Friday-pieces 1995– ; and I call their assemblage Final Fridays on the same actuarial grounds that lead me to regard my eighties as my Final Decade.

  “You should live so long!” some friend or family member might well tease. Given my thus-far-uncommonly-good health, and barring accident or general catastrophe, I just might, guys3—and even longer, though I’ve no desire to unless this book’s dedicatee is with me and we’re still enjoying life more than not. A fair-fortuned life it’s been: If we know some more-blessed ones, we know ever so many less. Among its blessings, in my case, has been the pleasure of imagining, languaging, and publishing all those stories and e
ssays—the latter mainly, though by no means exclusively, on the reading and writing of fiction. The ones in The Friday Book and Further Fridays were ordered chronologically by date of first publication; in the present volume they’re ordered likewise, but within two groups: pieces about “Reading, Writing, and the State of the Art,” and then “Tributes and Memoria” to sundry literary comrades, colleagues, and other navigation stars.

  I CONCLUDE THIS Foreword on the final Friday of the fifth month of the ninth year (or tenth, depending on one’s counting-system) of the 21st century of the Common Era, having published yet another story-book4 and preparing to review and revise these accumulated nonfiction pieces over the next many “Fridays”—some of them Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, perhaps even the odd Saturday or Sunday—while awaiting re-inspiration5 by my Muse-in-Chief. I do not know now in what year these Final Fridays will appear in print (“The world should last so long!” I hear again that Yiddish-inflected Voice Off, probably the Muse’s, simultaneously hoping, half-doubting, teasing, and counter-verhexing). Nor do I promise that there’ll be no further Friday-pieces thereafter from this pen: At my age and stage, one presumes neither way. But in the not-unimaginable event that the world, my muse, and I all manage to persist, I intend to leave open in this collection’s subtitle that space beyond the hyphen.

  —LANGFORD CREEK, MARYLAND: FRIDAY, MAY 29, 2009

  I.

  ON READING, WRITING, AND THE STATE OF THE ART

  Keats’s Fears, Etc.

  An extended reflection on Getting Older, first published in The New York Times Magazine for a 1997 issue on “The Age Boom,” when its author was a mere and still-frisky 67-year old....

  AMBIVALENT RITE OF authorial passage! Just the day before yesterday, one was gratified to be listed among the Literary Upstarts to Keep an Eye On; today one’s sentiments are solicited under the aspect of Storyteller Emeritus, Still-Functioning Codger Novelist, Superannuated Scheherazade.

  Well, it happens. In the foreshortened busy interval between that Day Before Yesterday and this Today, one’s fortune has been neither to autodestruct nor to be by the world destroyed; to sire and raise a family, among other adventures; and with the muse’s connivance to perpetrate some 5,000 pages worth of fiction1—this while one’s life (which is not a story) exfoliated in accordance with its own, imperfectly comprehended principles. Like one’s biological children, those book-bound pages, once launched and independent, have made their way as chance and their merits would have it: praised here, trashed there, attended and ignored, but somehow (knock on wood) surviving, persisting, even modestly thriving unto the present hour, their expiration-dates bidding fitly to extend beyond that of their author. “What a long, strange road it’s been!” used to exclaim the Grateful Dead’s (late) Jerry Garcia. Even for the least programmatically colorful of us, quite so. I could tell you a story....

  But one’s calling is invention, not confession, and the subject in hand is neither Yesterday nor the Day Before, but Tomorrow, as seen from the presumable vantage-point of a fairly high-mileage Today.

  Tomorrow and tomorrow: On average and on paper, one has more of those in prospect these days than folks did formerly. At age 67, Yours Truly is on the one hand 95 percent through the “biblical” threescore-and-ten, while only 56 percent through the 120-year span alloted us mortals in Genesis 6:3 and reneged on ever since, but latterly affirmed by some gerontologists to be the inherent design-life of Homo sapiens sapiens. More probably—after jiggering my American generation’s actuarial averages upward for my skin color, downward for my gender, and upward thrice again for (knock on wood) my rude good health, the longevity of my parents, and a blessed remarriage—I can with luck anticipate perhaps 20 more years of breathing air, with most of my faculties more or less though ever less and less intact through much of that period, and always allowing for the circumstance that the world might end (one’s own world, anyhow) before this sentence does, or the one to follow.

  20 years more: That many? That few? One feels a proper twinge of that echt-20th-century emotion, Survivor’s Guilt: Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver—splendid writers cut off in the full fruition of their gifts at a younger age than one’s present, their voices stilled for keeps while one’s own yarns on. One recalls John Keats’s famous fears (well justified, in the event) that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain; likewise the writerly counterfears (let’s not name names) that one might go on being and being and being after one’s pen, et cetera, silenced not by death or devastation but by mere bare-cupboardhood. One takes courage from the exemplary counter-instances, e.g., of Arthur Miller, just past 80 and evidently going strong2; of even-older-at-the-time Thomas Mann, bringing off as his final novel the high-spirited elaboration of his early short story Felix Krull—a stunt about which I could write a whole praising page but won’t, here; of even-older-yet Sophocles, closing out at age 90 his Theban trilogy with the magnificent Oedipus at Colonus.

  And having thus twinged, thus recalled, and thus taken courage, one draws yet another deep bonus breath—refills one’s trusty fountain pen, boots up one’s trusty word processor, whatever—and like the afore-invoked Scheherazade (perhaps for not-dissimilar reasons) deftly segues into the one about . . .

  Et cetera.

  The State of the Art

  When this essay was first-drafted back in 1994 (too late for inclusion in the Further Fridays collection), subsequently delivered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., as part of their lecture series “Novelists on Literature,” and first published in the Wilson Quarterly,1; “electronic literature”—fiction to be read and in many cases interacted with on a computer—was still a novelty. 15 years later, as I pen this head-note, it remains, if no longer a novelty, still an oddity, enjoyed by a comparitively small audience. My interest in it back then was mainly dutiful: a checking out of the edges of my medium’s envelope for my fiction-writing coachees’ benefit and my possible own: I even agreed to be listed on the advisory board of the newly-formed Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), just to stay abreast of things. Some of its members’ productions I’ve found impressive, literarily as well as technically. I remain, however, a book-person, for whom the computer is a workshop-tool: useful indeed for revising, editing, and printing out my fountain-penned first drafts, for sending and receiving e-mail, and occasionally for Googling some item on the Web (my wife, the house WebMeister, uses its vast resources for everything from trip-planning to recipe-checking), but not a source of sedentary entertainment or aesthetic engagement. For those, in our leisure hours, we turn to music (mostly on CDs, although I still enjoy playing Renaissance and Baroque recorder-duets now that my jazz-drumming decades are behind me), to a nightcap hour of television (mostly movies on DVD rather than network or cable shows)—and above all to the printed, usually book-bound, page, long may it endure: not “virtual reality,” but deliciously virtual virtuality (see below).

  THE ART WHOSE state I mean to review here is that of the novel in particular; the art more generally of printed fiction, especially in the USA; and the art most generally of fictional narrative in whatever medium—again, especially in this country, where certain aspects of the scene are changing more rapidly, for better or worse, than they seem to me to be changing elsewhere.

  By way of beginning, I submit the following gleanings from my recent and by no means systematic reading on the subject. Readers unfamiliar with some of the names I’m about to drop should not feel particularly left out; I’m unfamiliar with many of them too, and once I’ve dropped them, I intend to drop them.

  “We are [in] . . . the late age of print,” declares the hypertex-tualist Michael Joyce in the American Book Review, “a transitional time when the book as we know it gives way to writing the mind in lightforms.” (By “lightforms” Mr. Joyce means reading and writing on computer screens; more on “hypertext” presently.)

  A writer named Mark Amerika (too good to be true), again in the
American Book Review, declares, “The zine scene is alive and well.... Offhand, I can think of a dozen zines that are doing wonderful stuff: Further State(s) of the Art, Puck, Sensitive Skin, Red Tape, Taproot Reviews, Dissonance, Boing Boing, Frighten the Horses, Central Park, Nobodaddies, Science Fiction Eye, MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, just to name the first dozen that come to my mind.” (Those are not the first dozen that come to my mind, but let that go.) And one Mr. Lance Olsen, likewise in the ABR, in an essay entitled “Death-metal Technomutant Morphing,” declares, “Me, I’m going down reading Mark Leyner and Jean Baudrillard simultaneously, a copy of Wired in my lap, hypertext by Carolyn Guyer on the computer screen, television turned to MTV, windows wide open, ... my fire-retardant corrosion-resistant nickel-base alloy robo-enhanced methyl isocyanate flamethrower exploding, while I listen to Sonic Youth’s Dirty turned up real, REAL loud.”

  I confess to being addicted to such catalogues of Where It’s At: catalogues with which the American Book Review particularly abounds. Here is another from the same lively source, by one Martin Sheter, in an essay called “Writing As Incorrectness”:And then there’s what I call the “third rail”: the remarkable . . . resurgence of all sorts of creativity going on in the nineties, right under the nose of all these [American academics]—people ranging the spectrum from Hakim Bey, Fact-Sheet 5, R U Sirius, ACT-UP graphicists, feminist collaborators, black and Native American oralists, and shock performance theoreticians, all the way to . . . MTV’s “Liquid Television,” the San Francisco “transgressive” school, Brown-University-sponsored “unspeakable practices,” various cyberpunk and slipstream fictionalists . . . (no doubt I’ve left out quite a bit here).