The Friday Book Read online

  For the posturing in my first paragraph—“I’m not impressed by the apocalyptic character of the present age…”—I apologize. If I ever wasn’t, I have certainly become so.

  I beseech the Muse to keep me from ever becoming a Black Humorist. Mind, I don’t object to Black Humorists, in their place; but to be numbered with them inspires me to a kind of spiritual White Backlash. For one thing, they are in their way responsible, like more conventional social satirists: They dramatize—and good for them!—the Madness of Contemporary Society, of Modern Warfare, of Life With the Bomb, of What Have We Nowadays. But I say, Muse, spare me (at the desk, I mean) from social-historical responsibility, and in the last analysis from every other kind as well, except artistic. Your teller of stories will likely be responsive to his time; he needn’t be responsible to it. I’m not impressed by the apocalyptic character of the present age—nor is the age to my indifference—though I note the fact, and shall return to it. Joyce figured the writer as Dedalus, Mann as Faust; the best of the Black Humorists are good comical Amoses and Isaiahs.

  My own favorite image in this line used to be Cassandra—a madly laughing Cassandra, of course—the darling of many another young writer convinced that he has unhappy truth by the tail, or on his back, and that no one’s getting the message. Later, shorn of such vanity, I preferred an image out of Dante: the Florentine assassins alluded to in Canto XIX of the Inferno. Head-downwards in a hole and sentenced to be buried alive, the murderer postpones his fate by drawing out his confession to the attendant priest. The beauties of this image are its two nice paradoxes: The more sins he has to confess, the longer retribution is delayed, and since he has nothing to lose anyhow, he may well invent a few good ones to hold the priest’s attention.

  But as soon as his audience grants absolution, the wretch’s mouth is stopped with earth: “Nothing fails like success,” as Leslie Fiedler says of our popular novelists. Less satisfactory are the details that his audience is also captive, duty-bound to hear him out whether entertained or not; respite is granted for as long as he talks, not merely for as long as he amuses, and there’s no real stay of execution, only a hold in the countdown. Moreover, though the fact that the assassin’s tale consists of his own misdemeanors (a perverse kind of authorial self-aggrandizement) may make the image apter yet for some novelists we know—assassins indeed of the characters they “draw from life,” as one draws a man to the gallows—it does not, I hope, apply to my own concoctions.

  In any case, the image I’m lately fonder of—the aptest, sweetest, hauntingest, hopefullest I know for the storyteller—is Scheherazade. The whole frame of those thousand nights and a night speaks to my heart, directly and intimately—and in many ways at once, personal and technical. The sultan Shahryar, you remember, is so disenchanted with life in general and love in particular that he “marries” a virgin every night and has her killed in the morning. Scheherazade, who has “perused the books, annals, and legends of preceding kings, and the stories, examples, and instances of by-gone men… antique races and departed rulers,” volunteers herself. The King “abates her virginity” (as if it were an intense condition), whereafter, with the prearranged assistance of her younger sister, Dunyazade—about whose role much might be said—Scheherazade beguiles her deflowerer with a tale, artfully continued, involuted, compounded, and complicated through a thousand and one nocturnal installments, during the invention of which she also bears three sons by her imperious audience. It is on behalf of these offspring that, her inspiration spent at last, she begs for her life; and the king grants her—in honor of her stories, not her children—the relative tenure of formal marriage. Scheherazade’s tales are published (in 30 volumes), and their author lives happily with her hard-earned family. But not ever after; only until they all are taken by the Destroyer of Delights, whereafter, we’re specifically told, “their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins… and [other] kings inherited their riches”—including The Thousand and One Nights.

  My love affair with Scheherazade is an old and continuing one. As an illiterate undergraduate, I worked off part of my tuition filing books in the Classics Library at Johns Hopkins, which included the stacks of the Oriental Seminary. One was tacitly permitted to get lost for hours in that splendrous labyrinth and to intoxicate, engorge oneself with story. Especially I became enamored of the great tale-cycles and collections: Somadeva’s Ocean of Story in ten huge volumes, Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night in seventeen, the Panchatantra, the Gesta Romanorum, the Novellini, and the Pent- Hept- and Decameron. If anything ever makes a writer out of me, it will be the digestion of that enormous, slightly surreptitious feast of narrative.

  Most of those spellbinding liars I have forgotten, but never Scheherazade. Though the tales she tells aren’t my favorites, she remains my favorite teller, and it is a heady paradox that this persistence, being the figure of her literal aim, thereby generates itself, and becomes the emblem as well of my figurative aspiration. When I think of my condition and my hope, musewise, in the time between now and when I shall run out of ink or otherwise expire, it is Scheherazade who comes to mind, for many reasons—not least of which is a technical interest in the ancient device of the framing-story, used more beautifully in the Nights than anywhere else I know. Chaucer’s frame, for example, the pilgrimage to Canterbury, is an excellent if venerable ground-metaphor—life as a redemptive journey—but, having established it, he does nothing with it. Boccaccio’s frame—ten wealthy young ladies and gentlemen amusing themselves with clever stories while the great post-Easter plague of 1348 lays waste the countryside—is more arresting for its apocalyptic nature, for the pretty rules with which the company replaces those of their literally dying society, for the hints of growing relationships between the raconteurs and raconteuses themselves, and for the occasional relevance of the tales to the tellers and to the general situation. On the other hand, the very complex serial frames of the Ocean of Story, for example, are full-fledged stories in themselves, but except for the marvelous (and surely fictitious) “history of the text” and the haunting title, they have no apparent meaningfulness beyond their immediate narrative interest.

  The story of Scheherazade excels these others in all respects. For one thing, her tales are told at night: an inestimable advantage, for the whole conception, despite its humor, is darker, more magical and dreamish than Boccaccio’s or Chaucer’s. Consider too the prerequisites for her taletellerhood: not only native endowment and mastery of the tradition, but the sacrifice of her present personal maidenhead to her auditor and absolute critic—whose pleasure, by the way, fertilizes as well as spares her, and who finally rewards her (for what they have in a manner of speaking created together) with official distinctions which he will not take away (though her productivity, it seems, ends with the award of tenure), but time will.

  Consider finally that in the years of her flourishing, her talent is always on the line: not enough to have satisfied the old cynic once, or twice; she’s only as good as her next piece, Scheherazade; night by night it’s publish or perish. Thus her situation is no less apocalyptic in its way than the Decameron’s, and perhaps more pointed, even without regard to the interesting “public” state of affairs: the King’s epical despair and the ruin it’s bringing his kingdom to. For though the death of one person is not the death of a people, even mankind’s demise will have to consist of each of our dyings. In this respect, all apocalypses are ultimately personal—an important fact, since it validates apocalyptic visions age after age despite the otherwise awkward circumstance that the world has, so far, persisted. Even the detail that Scheherazade’s stories are drawn from the literal and legendary foretime, I find arresting. It reminds me that the eschewing of contemporaneous, “original” material is a basic literary notion, by comparison to which its use is but an occasional anomaly and fad of the last couple of centuries. Not only classical epic and tragedy, and Elizabethan and neoclassical drama, but virtually all folk and heroic narrative, both Eastern and
Western, follows Horace’s advice: “… safer shall the bard his pen employ / With yore, to dramatize the Tale of Troy, / Than, venturing trackless regions to explore, / Delineate characters untouched before.”

  Joyce’s Dedalus calls history a nightmare from which he’s trying to wake; some other writers have found it more a wet-dream (and their readers, perhaps, a soporific). For me, also, the past is a dream—but I laugh in my sleep. The use of historical or legendary material, especially in a farcical, even a comic, spirit, has a number of virtues, among which are esthetic distance and the opportunity for counterrealism. Attacked with a long face, the historical muse is likely to give birth to costume romances, adult Westerns, tiresome allegories, and ponderous mythologizings; but she responds to a lighthearted approach. Magic is what chiefly saves Scheherazade’s tales from these poor categories—a device we may hardly use today, for the realistic tradition and its accompanying cultural history are under our belts, for better or worse, and may not be ignored. They may, however, be come to terms with and got beyond, not by the use of farce alone, surely, but by farce inspired with passion—and with mystery, which, older than magic, still enwraps our lives as it does the whole queer universe. In passionate, mysterious farce, I think, lies also the possibility of transcending categories more profound than Tragedy and Comedy: I mean the distinction between Tragedy and Mystery—or, if you like, tragicism and mysticism, the finest expressions respectively of the Western and Eastern spirits. No matter that the achievement of such a synthesis would want the talents of Scheherazade, Shakespeare, and Schopenhauer combined; it is a pole star that even a middling comic novelist may steer by, without mistaking it for his destination.

  Like a parable of Kafka’s or a great myth, the story of deflowered Scheherazade, yarning tirelessly through the dark hours to save her neck, corresponds to a number of things at once, and flashes meaning from all its facets. For me its rich dark circumstances, mixing the subtle and the coarse, the comic and the grim, the realistic and the fantastic, the apocalyptic and the hopeful, figure, among other things, both the estate of the fictioner in general and the particular endeavors and aspirations of this one, at least, who can wish nothing better than to spin like that vizier’s excellent daughter, through what nights remain to him, tales within tales within tales, full-stored with “description and discourse and rare traits and anecdotes and moral instances and reminiscences… proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests, stories and… dialogues and histories and elegies and other verses…” until he and his scribblings are fetched low by the Destroyer of Delights.

  The Tragic View of Recognition

  (BRANDEIS AWARD STATEMENT, 1966)

  LITERARY PRIZES: another innocence to lose.

  In 1966, the year Giles Goat-Boy appeared, I was given what the Brandeis University Arts Award Commission called a “citation in fiction.” The term suggests a legal summons; for the reasons set forth below, I decided not to defy it. Besides, the main award of the evening was being presented to Eudora Welly, a writer I admired but had never met. Therefore I hired the requisite black-tie regalia and went to New York City for the awards ceremony. En route I composed my maiden acceptance statement: the statement, it will be seen, of a writer attempting for the first time in his career to write short stories.

  In the event, I was disabused of yet a further innocence: Big-prize winners are expected to speak, but those who are merely cited merely stand and get cited and then sit down and then go home and return their rented costumes. I take the present occasion to clear my throat and thank the Brandeis people, belatedly, for citing me.

  Not counting Cracker Jacks, this is the first prize of any sort I’ve won.

  It is tempting therefore to decline it at once, like Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel, especially if one has rather enjoyed being what they call underground. Late or soon, that is whither we must all repair; take it from me, it is not so bad down there. My aspiration was to become a giant truffle, or one of those stones I used to strike with my spade in my salad garden in the Alleghenies: stones that seem like nothing much until you set about to dig them and find that they go to the bottom of the world. Indeed, that they are the bottom of the world.

  Bedrock.

  I happen to believe, though, what Goethe remarked to the Duke of Weimar: that refusing a distinction can be as immodest as chasing after it. Speaking as a Master of Arts in the field of Innocence, I suspect that when it is artificially preserved it sours into arrested development, and that what began as healthy privacy congeals into reclusive crankhood. This is the Tragic View of Recognition.

  For these reasons, it is especially pleasing to share literary honors with Eudora Welty, who has preserved her balance nicely on the line between public and private property, and whose fiction I have often taught and been taught by. My own preference from the first has been the novel—

  O, the novel,

  With its great galumphing grace,

  Amazing as a whale.

  But the number of whales required to constitute a surfeit is perhaps not vast. When we read the beautiful brief writings of Franz Kafka, of Jorge Luis Borges, of Eudora Welty, we realize the continuing viability and appeal of small narratives that delight the ear and can be held whole in the mind’s eye like poems. Miss Welty has made some of the best in our American literature. I thank you kindly for honoring me; I congratulate you heartily for honoring her.

  The Literature of Exhaustion

  YES, WELL.

  “Every man is not only himself,” says Sir Thomas Browne: “Men are lived over again.” At one point during my tenure at Penn State, a fellow with the same name as mine in that big-university small town was arrested on charges of molesting a young woman. His interesting defense was that he was a Stanislavsky Method actor rehearsing for the role of rapist in an upcoming student-theater piece. For some while after, his fans occasionally rang me up by mistake. One of them, when enough conversation had revealed his error, said “Sorry: You’re the wrong John Barth.”

  Not for that reason, in 1965 I moved my family from Pine Grove Mills—an Allegheny mountain village not far from State College, Pennsylvania—up and over the Appalachians to Buffalo, where for the next seven years I taught in the new and prosperous State University of New York’s operation at the old University of Buffalo. In time I was appointed to that university’s Edward S. Butler Professorship, endowed by and named for a late local philanthropist. Thus it came to be declared, on the jackets of some editions of the books I published in those years, that their author “is currently Edward S. Butler Professor of Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.” And sure enough (O world out there, what innocents you harbor!), mail began coming in addressed to “Edward S. Butler, Professor of Literature,” and author—under that nom de plume du jour, I presume the authors of those letters to have presumed—of Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera.

  Those years—1965-1973—were the American High Sixties. The Vietnam War was in overdrive through most of the period; the U.S. economy was fat and bloody; academic imperialism was as popular as the political kind. Among Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s ambitions was to establish major university centers at each end and the middle of the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway (Stony Brook, Albany, Buffalo) as a tiara for the Empire State’s 57-campus university system. SUNY/Buffalo therefore was given virtual carte blanche to pirate professors away from other universities and build buildings for them to teach in: At one dizzy point in its planning, Gordon Bunshaft’s proposed new campus complex for the school was reported to be the largest single architectural project in the world, after Brasilia. Eighty percent of the populous English department I joined had been hired within the preceding two years, as additions to the original staff; so numerous were our illustrious immigrants from raided faculties, troubled marriages, and more straitlaced life-styles, we came to call ourselves proudly the Ellis Island of Academia. The somewhat shabby older buildings and hastily built new ones, all jam-packed an
d about to be abandoned, reinforced that image.

  The politically active among our faculty and students had their own ambitions for the place: the Berkeley of the East. They wanted no part of Mr. Bunshaft’s suburban New Jerusalem rising from filled-in marshland north of the city (“All great cultures,” my new colleague Leslie Fiedler remarked, “are built on marshes”). In some humors, as when our government lied with more than usual egregiousness about its war, they wanted little enough of the old campus, either. They struck and trashed; then the police and National Guard struck and trashed them. Mace and peppergas wafted through the academic groves; the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchism were literally waved at English Department faculty-student meetings, which—a sight as astonishing to me as those flags—were attended by hundreds, like an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading with harmonium and Tibetan finger-cymbals.

  Altogether a stimulating place to work through those troubled years: Pop Art popping at the Albright-Knox Museum; strange new music from Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and their electronic colleagues; dope as ubiquitous as martinis at faculty dinner parties; polluted Lake Erie flushing over Niagara Falls (“the toilet bowl of America,” our Ontario friends called it); and, across the Peace Bridge, endless Canada, to which hosts of our young men fled as their counterparts had done in other of our national convulsions, and from which Professor McLuhan expounded the limitations, indeed the obsolescence, of the printed word in our electronic culture.