The Friday Book Read online

  The young man’s name is John Balaban; he studied fiction-writing with me at Penn State some years ago and poetry-writing with Robert Lowell at Harvard. But instead of merely writing anguished poems about Vietnam with his right hand while pursuing a literary career with his left, John Balaban has made three separate rescue trips, each about a year long, to the country itself.

  The first two times, under the auspices of the Committee of Responsibility, it was children that he and his co-workers rescued: specifically, children burned so badly by American napalm that only high-tech American hospital care could aid them. Balaban’s work kept him close enough to the action to get him wounded in the 1969 Tet offensive, and close enough to the people to learn not only the Vietnamese language but also something of the country’s literary life and history, in particular its extraordinarily rich and complex tradition of oral poetry.

  Like Chinese, but even more so than Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language: that is, the same word, pronounced at various pitches, may take on various meanings, perhaps quite unrelated to one another. This is what gives some Asiatic languages their peculiar sound in occidental ears; it also gives the poets, as well as the ordinary speakers of those languages, a whole extra dimension of verbal associations to work and play with, in addition to the puns and wordplays that speakers of every language regularly make use of. For this reason, oral poetry—poetry composed to be performed out loud, for the ear—has always played a much more prominent role in Vietnamese cultural life, Mr. Balaban informs me, than it plays in Russian or American cultural life, even in the age of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Allen Ginsberg. And it’s an art practiced not only by the bright young poets of Saigon and Hué and Hanoi, but also on the folk level, by illiterate farmers in the Mekong Delta and Montagnard peasant women, who perform from memory traditional poems of great age and wit, and of a complexity that one can only call oriental.

  In English, for example, we have a number of “palindromic” words—words like Madam or deified, which read the same backwards as forwards—and a few very short palindrome sentences, such as Madam, I’m Adam, or Able was I ere I saw Elba; we even have a few palindromic verses, unrhymed and bordering on nonsense, the longest of which (that I know of) is only two short lines:

  Dog as a devil deified,

  Diefied lived as a God*

  Contrast this with one of several amazing specimens of Vietnamese oral poetry that John Balaban came across between burned children: a sort of bilingual syllabic palindrome, strictly metrical, which reads frontwards as a poem in Chinese, and backwards—tonalities and all—as a poem in demotic Vietnamese, both of them perfectly coherent! Or another, a “children’s” palindrome (word for word, not letter for letter) eighteen lines long!

  But of course, like everything else in South Vietnam, from rain forests to family relationships, this splendid oral poetic tradition is rapidly disappearing, depending as it does on “live” performers in both senses of the word. And so my young poet-friend’s third and current year in Vietnam, which he has just concluded and rather narrowly survived, has been a rescue mission of a different sort: Armed with a tape recorder, a diplomat’s tact, a poet’s sensibility, and a hero’s courage, John Balaban has gone into the rice paddies and the literary cafés, the hill villages and university halls of South Vietnam, has sought out and won the trust of such oral poets as he could reach, and has preserved on tape at least some fragments of this fine and shattered art, which we may hope he will publish with appropriate commentary.†

  As with engravings of the passenger pigeon or photographs of the great American Indian chiefs, one must be grateful that an artist got there in time to preserve the image, even though he couldn’t save the subject. John Balaban’s poetical rescue work absolves us of nothing, any more than the rescue of those burned children does—but thank heaven he did it.

  * Since writing this in 1972 I have seen much longer (and proportionately more tortured) English language palindromes in The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, among other places. A reader of this article even sent me a photocopied typescript of a 50-page novella of his authoring, perfectly palindromic letter for letter, and almost perfectly unintelligible.

  † He did. See Ca Dao Viet Nam: A Bilingual Anthology of Vietnamese Folk Poetry (Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 1980), from which I borrowed heavily for the Vietnamese-poetry passages of my 1982 novel Sabbatical: A Romance.

  Aspiration, Inspiration,

  Respiration, Expiration

  INTRODUCTION TO A READING FROM CHIMERA

  WHILE Allen Ginsberg was being disrupted by the Buffalo Motherfuckers and John Balaban was rescuing oral poetry and burned children in Vietnam, Yours Truly was finishing the successor to Lost in the Funhouse: the book Chimera, which, like its predecessor, has nothing to do with politics at all. Through the season before its publication, I read from it on the campuses with some variation upon the following introduction, which I include here mainly to keep the chronicle complete and by way of transition to the Friday-piece after it. It would have been from one such reading that I returned to the Buffalo disruption aforedescribed.

  Good evening.

  In classical Greek myth, the Chimera is a fire-breathing she-monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body (the word chimera means “nanny-goat”), and a serpent’s tail. The term has three other definitions. 1. It is a creature of the imagination, any impossible or monstrous fancy. 2. It is an organism composed of genetically distinct tissues, such as one partly male and partly female. 3. It is a novel written by Yours Truly, to come out from Random House this fall (1972). This so-called novel—so called because novels sell better than collections of short stories, not to mention series of novellas—is in fact a series of three novellas, as different in appearance as a lion from a goat, et cetera, but built upon a single skeleton, warmed by the same blood, and in turn, I hope, all fueling equally the beast’s internal-external combustion.

  You may remember that the original Chimera was done to death by the hero Bellerophon, an ambitious cousin of the hero Perseus. Bellerophon flew over her on the winged horse Pegasus (who was born when Perseus beheaded Medusa) and stuck a lead-pointed spear, like a great big pencil, down her throat, so that the lead was melted by her flaming breath and seared her vitals. In a sense, Chimera cooperated in her own demise, at the hands of a fellow who subsequently (and vainly) attempted to join the company of immortals by flying directly to Olympus aboard Pegasus, his horsefeathered half-brother. Such presumption does not please the gods, who call it hubris and punish it with bolts of lightning. As you see, the Chimera story is a complicated myth of aspiration, inspiration, respiration, and expiration. I myself take it to be also a story about story-writing, but never mind that.

  My version of it, the largest third of my so-called Chimera novel, is a longish novella entitled “Bellerophoniad.” “Perseid,” a novella about Bellerophon’s more authentic cousin, is the middle-sized shaggy center of the beast. Her tail (which however leads off the book) is a shortish novella as apparently different from Perseus’s and Bellerophon’s stories as is a pretty garter snake from a goat or a lion. It is not about myths at all, Greek or barbarian, this last one: It’s about an endless love affair of mine with one of the most splendid women and storytellers ever, Scheherazade. To be sure, like most autobiographical fiction—a genre I have no use for—my love story pretends to be about something else: Scheherazade’s kid sister, Dunyazade, who in my version as in the original sits at the foot of the royal bed for 1001 nights, watching Scheherazade and the king make love and listening to all those stories. The four characters in this novella are Shahryar, “King of the Islands of India and China”; his younger brother, Shah Zaman, King of Samarkand; Scheherazade, the daughter of Shahryar’s Grand Vizier (I cannot speak her name without hearing the solo violin of her voice in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite); and little Dunyazade herself. The story, “Dunyazadiad,” is in three parts, like the Chimera: the first is told by Dunyazade to Shah Zaman, in circums
tances not revealed until the end of her narrative; the second part, shorter, is a dialogue between Dunyazade and Shah Zaman, narrated by the author; the very short conclusion is an address by the author to the reader, or listener.

  The story is really meant more for telling than for reading—but as it takes two hours to tell it all, I shall stop halfway through, in the manner of Scheherazade. You can read the rest, if you care to, in the May issue of Esquire magazine—and you are not forbidden to buy the whole beast when she appears, breathing fire and algebra, in the fall.*

  * More upon the subjects of fire, algebra, the novella form, and the Chimera book in the Friday-piece “Algebra and Fire: A Chat With the Doctors,” farther on.

  The Tragic View of Literary Prizes

  (NATIONAL BOOK AWARD ACCEPTANCE STATEMENT, 1973)

  LITERARY PRIZES: yes, well.

  Chimera won half of the late lamented National Book Award in Fiction for 1972, from a half-hung jury with whose assorted literary tastes I was familiar from their own writings: Evan Connell, Leslie Fiedler, William Gass, Walker Percy, Jonathan Yardley. That the book was even among the nominees was gratifying, as had been the nominations of The Floating Opera in 1956 and Lost in the Funhouse in 1968. In those days, the NBA was the only U.S. fiction prize one took with some seriousness—to the growing dissatisfaction of publishers and booksellers, who after 1979 withdrew their support from that award and replaced it with the less reputable American Book Awards. I did not for a moment expect Chimera to win.

  That it did, sort of, was therefore all the more fun. Shelly and I went down to New York from Boston University, where I was visiting-professoring that year, and having this time inquired in advance whether half-winners were expected to make half-statements, whole statements, or no statements,* I was able to pronounce in the Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center my sentiments on the matter of literary prizes and to use at last that dandy remark of Goethe’s which I’d dug up for the Brandeis Award festivities seven years earlier and still remembered.

  The only three really negative reviews of my Chimera novellas were in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Can this city be trying to tell me something?

  I shall not listen.

  Instead of thanking the fiction judges for discharging their unenviable task as responsibly as they could, I’m going to thank a number of fellow storytellers whose art has given me delight this year, whether or not their books were among the nominees. Most especially I thank the old magician of Montreux, Vladimir Nabokov, who should long since have won the Nobel Prize, and Donald Barthelme, who was good to begin with and gets better with each new book. Also the elder masters Eudora Welty and I. B. Singer, whose stories I’ve read and taught with pleasure over the years; and Ishmael Reed and John Gardner, truly formidable imaginations.

  Then there is my former Penn State office-mate Thomas Rogers, whose novel Confessions of a Child of the Century was among this year’s distinguished nominees. Tom and I thought it amusing back in 1968 to be the first deskmates in literary history ever to be co-nominees for the same award: His Pursuit of Happiness and my Lost in the Funhouse both lost the NBA that year, to Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps. That we were co-nominees again this year, we regard as pretty spooky. If it happens a third time, we’re going to collaborate on a Pennsylvania-Dutch gothic thriller called The Verhexed and sweep the field together.

  Well. In a letter to the Duke of Weimar, Goethe wrote: “I am convinced that it is almost as immodest to refuse high distinction as stubbornly to pursue it.” I agree, despite the famous capriciousness and ephemerality of such distinctions. We all share the Tragic View of Literary Prizes; yet it would be boring if there were none, and it is more agreeable to shrug them off having won them. A worthwhile literary prize, in my estimation, is one that on occasion will be awarded to a writer despite the fact that he or she deserves it. By this definition, the National Book Award in Fiction is a worthwhile literary prize; I’m pleased to accept it on behalf of Scheherazade, Pegasus, & Company, and the Chimera they still pursue.

  * See my undelivered statement “The Tragic View of Recognition,” earlier on in this book.

  Praying for Everybody

  THAT SAME YEAR, 1973, the Barths decided neither to remain in lively Boston nor to return to scrappy Buffalo, where by then I had lived and worked for seven years, but to move to Baltimore instead: Shelly to teach at the St.Timothy’s School, me to join the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in which I’d served my own apprenticeship twenty years earlier.

  Though I had in that interim presided over many and many a writing workshop, this would be my first experience of teaching in an autonomous, degree-granting “creative writing” department, entirely distinct from the university’s department of English. The happy prospect of returning to Johns Hopkins and the Chesapeake Bay country notwithstanding, my feelings about such programs were as mixed as were the university’s. A small but historically rigorous school—the first American university patterned after German rather than English or Scottish models—Hopkins had never gone in for practicum courses in the arts: Those were the proper bailiwick of institutes and conservatories, not of universities. Yet it was recognized that writing was more akin to the general intellectual enterprise than were painting and singing, for example, and so—in keeping with the university’s traditions of pedagogical experiment and original research—the Hopkins writing program was among the first to be established, after Harvard’s and Iowa’s.

  By 1973, however, its fortunes had fallen far from the days when the romance philologist Leo Spitzer and the aesthetician and historian of ideas George Boas had joined the poet and founder of the program, Elliott Coleman, in administering a first-rate interdepartmental doctorate in literary aesthetics, designed for writers with an academic string to their bow who wanted a serious Ph.D. Spitzer was now dead, Boas emeritus, Coleman ill and verging upon retirement, and the Writing Seminars attenuated and amateurish, no longer a credit to the school. The appropriate deans and I agreed in interview that the university should either gently retire the program when its founder retired or else thoroughly and expensively renovate it. The options struck me as about equally sensible; if they chose the latter and hired me, I wanted authority to hire a new chairman—preferably a literary critic or theorist who also wrote fiction or poetry—with authority in turn to hire a whole new staff, from poets to secretaries.

  That is what came to pass, and I found myself thinking more attentively than I’d done before about the justification for such programs, which were proliferating like rabbits (there are now well above 200 degree-granting creative writing programs in our republic).* Early in the year, therefore, I went down from Boston to Washington, D.C., to join a symposium at the Library of Congress upon a subject not thitherto much to my taste—The Teaching of Creative Writing—as well as to check out the real-estate scene in Baltimore. My particular panel of symposiasts included Wallace Stegner, who compared the training of writers to the training of horses: The writing teacher, Stegner declared, can be an authoritarian who breaks his colts with a two-by-four; or he can be a rebel who by his unorthodoxy tries to stimulate originality in his charges (I’ve forgotten how this applies to horses); or he can abdicate responsibility and let go the reins entirely, admiring everything his students do and being correspondingly loved by them; or he can really teach, declaring his principles and stating his standards and obliging his students to demonstrate that any innovation they make is better than what they give up to make it.

  By some arrangement of the panelists’ presentations which I cannot recall, mine was drafted in response to his.

  There is no disagreeing with Wallace Stegner’s wise and plain account of the possibility of helping talented novices along in their literary apprenticeships. I concur as well, warmly, with his pedagogical-equestrian typology; having had the advantage, as a student at Johns Hopkins, of two writing teachers in his good fourth category, I’ve striven since in several unive
rsities to measure up to that ideal.

  There are a couple of things that Wallace didn’t say because they go without saying. I shall now say them.

  First, we acknowledge that while a fair amount of current published fiction of the literary sort in the United States is written by people who’ve had some experience in college fiction-writing courses, the fact remains that the great majority of students in college fiction-writing courses—even Creative Writing diplomates—never achieve professional publication, for the reason that their work never gets to be good enough to be competitive. This majority is no doubt vaster in some writing operations than in others, but it is always very large. Elliott Coleman’s list of his published former students over the past quarter-century is impressive; if he kept a list of his unpublished ones, it would be even more so. And a friend of mine who taught fiction-writing at Penn State for at least twenty years and kept in close touch with his former students confessed to me, upon his retirement, that except for Vance Packard and James Dugan, whose writings were nonfiction, not one of his alumni had ever published a word, to his knowledge. So it goes.