Final Fridays (10 page)

My favorite response to the classic pen/pencil/PowerBook question, you'll be excited to hear, comes in fact from those older storytelling traditions. The enormous Sanskrit tale-cycle
Katha Sarit Sagara
, or
The Ocean of the Streams of Story
, was set down in the 10th or 11th century—with a quill pen, presumably—by the Kashmirian court poet Somadeva. Its ten large folio volumes pretend to be a radical
abridgment
of the surviving
one-seventh
of what has to have been in its original version the longest story ever told or written: the
Brihat Katha
, or Great Tale, first told by the god Shiva to his consort Parvati as a thank-you gift for a particularly divine session of lovemaking. By
my calculations (based on what's conjectured about the Homeric oral tradition), it must have taken Shiva two and a half years to spin the thing out, while Parvati sat listening patiently on his lap—the primordial laptop, I suppose. No problem in their case, since the tale, the teller, and the told were all immortal. But when Shiva's Great Tale was first written down by the scribe Gunadhya (so our later writer Somadeva declares), its passage from the oral to the written medium required seven full years—which is just as well, inasmuch as the medium of transcription was the scribe's own blood.
⁵

So it is, more or less, my friends, with all of us: a good case for writing short stories and lyric poems, perhaps, unless your blood-replacement capacity is that of an Anne Rice male-lead vampire. Just as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested a few years ago that the efficient cause of American violence isn't guns but ammunition, so maybe the pen/pencil/PowerBook question ought to be
Skrip, Quink, ribbon, bubble-jet, or laser? Blood-group O, A, or B?
There is much more, by the way, to that exemplary
Kathapitha
, or Story of the Story, as Volume One of Somadeva's ten-volume abridgment of the surviving one-seventh of
The Ocean of the Streams of Story
is called. But I don't want to spoil the pleasure of your reading it for yourself.

Once upon a time a quarter-century ago, as I was driving the poet John Ashbery to his scheduled reading-plus-Q&A at Johns Hopkins, he wondered aloud to me what sort of questions he was likely to be asked. “The usual, no doubt,” I assured him: “Like,
Do you write with a pen or a pencil?
Stuff like that.” “Oh, I hope they ask
that
one,” Ashbery said; “I
like
that one!”

Truth to tell, so do I. To get right down to it, breath-bated auditors, I write my fiction with a much-beloved old British Parker 51
fountain pen deployed in an even older three-ring looseleaf binder.
⁶
From there, at morning's end, the day's “muscular cursive” is Macintoshed for extensive editing and revision. And I compose my nonfiction, this lecture included, mainly on Fridays, with a MontBlanc Meisterstück 146 fountain pen bequeathed me by a beloved Spanish friend and critic
⁷
upon his untimely death from stomach cancer, he having chosen for his epitaph this line from a story of mine about a skeptical spermatozoon: “It is we spent old swimmers, disabused of every illusion, who are most vulnerable to dreams.”
⁸
And I deploy that Meisterstück in an altogether different, history-free binder before Macintoshing, et cetera. Lately, however, I seem to have taken to non-ficting directly on the word-processor, without that cursive foreplay. Make of that datum what you will.

A:
I always used to answer No to that question, even when some film buff claimed to have seen
The End of the Road
back in the early 1970s, with Stacey Keach playing Jacob Horner, Harris Yulin as Joe Morgan, Dorothy Tristan as Rennie Morgan, and James Earl Jones as the capital-D Doctor. Despite my name in the credits and my modest payment for the film rights, I deny that that wretched flick has anything to do with my rigorous little 1958 novel of the same title and dramatis personae. (The movie critic John Simon declared at the time, correctly, that the principal difference between the novel and film versions of the story is that whereas my novel concludes with a harrowing abortion, the film is a harrowing abortion from start to finish.) But what was the question
for
?, I used to wonder, as I did with the pen-or-pencil one. I couldn't help translating it to mean “Reading's a drag, man, but I dig movies, so I'll maybe catch you out at the nabes and see if you're on my wavelength.”

As you can tell from that vintage slang, the question as given is dated. Its current version would be “Are any of your novels available as videos?”
⁹
The answer is still No, and I can't recommend the audiocassette versions, either. The updated question, I fear, has to be translated “Hauling out to the Cineplex has gotten to be almost as much of a bummer as reading books, but I do like to slug the old VCR if there's nothing on Cable.”

What can a mere novelist say? Echoing Robert Frost's famous definition of poetry as “that which gets lost in translation,” William H. Gass defines
story
as “that which is extracted from a novel to make a movie.” I agree, I guess, although for me the element of story remains first among equals in the ingredients of fiction. But in a good novel (it goes without saying) the story is truly inseparable from the language it's told in and the voice that tells it. Movies are, literally, another story altogether, and videocassettes another story yet. As it happens, the best I can say even for a
good
movie-adaptation of a good novel—such as Anthony Minghella's film of Michael Ondaatje's
The English Patient
or Emma Thompson's screenplay for Jane Austen's
Sense and Sensibility—
is what Thomas Mann said about reading Shakespeare in German translation: “It's like taking a hundred thousand dollars from a millionaire,” Mann declared: “He remains a very rich man.”

It now appears evident that what movies and network television did to live theater earlier in this century (not to mention what they did to the audience for printed fiction), the VCR and cable TV are doing to the movie houses and to some extent to the film industry. That's just a fact of technological life. Of more interest to me is a different analogy: If movies and television have affected the art of prose fiction in the 20th century in something like the way that still photography affected the art of painting in the latter 19th, then
we can reasonably expect that the development of interactive television and high-tech “virtualism” in the century to come will have a comparable effect on movies and videos as we know them today. We are told by another of my fellow American scribblers, Robert Coover, that electronic fiction and computer hypertext generally will have a comparable revolutionary impact on what remains of printed-book culture, with its obsolescent notions of author, reader, text, publisher, copyright, and the like.
¹⁰
I confess that I won't at all regret missing that particular technological revolution, which along with electronic virtuality offers to do to the audience for “p-fiction” what the rise of the novel since the 17th century did to the audience for poetry. It gives me some comfort to note, however, that while in my lifetime I've had to replace my 78 rpm records with 45s and then with 33.3 LPs, and then those with audiocassettes and then those with compact disks, each time discarding and expensively rebuilding the Barths' recorded-music library, the oldest volumes in our
book
library remain by and large as conveniently accessible as they were on their publication-day, perhaps centuries ago. If fewer and fewer people read printed fiction in the century to come, that won't be because the marvelously low-tech, high-protein medium of the book is outmoded, but because the pleasures of reading will have been displaced by glitzy and evanescent high-tech distractions for which civilization may on balance be the poorer. If thus it must go, then I shall with some small relief go first.

That curmudgeonly sentiment brings me to the last of these evolving but nevertheless routine questions, after which we'll move on to a couple of less routine ones and then have done.

A:
My reply to this gee-whizzer used to be, “It delays their completion.” In this case, however, although the question remains the same, the respondent's altered circumstances require a different answer. As afore-established, I was indeed for four decades a full-time teacher as well as a full-time writer, and for the first two of those four decades I was a full-time parent as well—when you're young, you can full-time it on several fronts at once. Then my children grew up and (just as my late friend and I had foretold) my academic workload eased off, so that for several years I taught only one semester out of two, and for a few years after that only one graduate-level seminar every second semester. More lately, for the first time since kindergarten I've been out of the classroom altogether. To my total unsurprise, in these progressively time-richer circumstances my literary output has remained almost exactly what it was 40 years ago, when I was teaching four sections of freshman composition, six days a week, and helping to raise three small children, and moonlighting in a dance band on weekends for extra cash. Back then I
stole
time to write, and my larceny was sufficiently grand that I was able to go straight later on. Now that I have all the writing-time I want—in a day, in a week, in a year, if never in a lifetime—I find that although I enjoy generating sentences and stories as much as ever, I don't spend any more time at it than I did when I wished that I had a lot more time to spend. One's musely metabolism, evidently, is what it is almost regardless of circumstances, and so I infer that what used to delay the completion of my novels was not university teaching after all; it was (and it remains) living that part of life that doesn't consist of writing fiction—the part of life without which, in my case anyhow, there wouldn't be any fiction to write, even though that fiction seldom has to do directly with its author's biographical experience.

Does that, too, go without saying, I wonder? In any case, there it is: said.

 

SO MUCH FOR those profoundly routine questions, which I seem to find routinely profound. Of the non-routine sort I shall instance just one, and then ask myself one myself, and then we're done. Now and then, in the post-reading or post-lectorial Q&A, someone will come up with something at least as perceptive, and on occasion as unsettling, as anything that my most attentive critics have laid on me. It was an anonymous member of some audience a quarter-century ago who in the Q&A observed that my books thus far (of which there were back then only six) tended to come in pairs, the second member of each pair a sort of complement or corrective to the first. Inasmuch as the questioner understood me to be one half of a pair of opposite-sex twins, she wondered how programmatic on my part might be this metaphor of more-or-less-paired books, and what I took to be its significance.

Well, I was floored; I had never until that moment noticed what now seemed evident, even conspicuous—the more so since the theme of twinship itself comes up in a couple of those books. Moreover, although I've never regarded my twin sister and me as complements other than anatomically, and certainly not as reciprocal correctives,
¹¹
I was so intrigued, even charmed by the unintended metaphor that I resolved perversely to defy it. And so I did in Book #7 (a monster novel called
LETTERS
), to which the slender novel that followed it had only the most tenuous connection; and Book #9, a collection of essays, was surely no twin to either of those—so there. But then Book #10, I noticed after writing it, can fairly be regarded as dizygotic not to Book #9 but to Book #8, and Books #11 and #12 to each other,
and Book #13 (a second essay-collection) to the aforementioned Book #9, and Book #14 (a story-series) as trizygotic to Book #5 on the one hand and to Book #15 (another story-series, currently in progress) on the other, and so it would appear that only that gargantuan
Mittelpunkt
, Book #7, remains (so far) untwinned—although, come to think of it, it contains within its intrications sequels to all six of its predecessors....

Make of all this, too, what you will; I myself have come to shrug my shoulders—first the left, and then, complementarily, the right....

 

LET US RETURN to the country of Things That Go Without Saying. One Q that I've never had a chance to A in these public circumstances is the perhaps most basic and apparently elementary of all—which is why I used frequently to put it to my coachees (especially the most advanced apprentice writers among them) and why I put it still to myself, most often in the well-filling interval between books: What is fiction? What's a
story
?

Okay, so that's two questions, really, and for the long replies thereto I refer anyone who's interested to an essay of mine called “It Goes Without Saying,” in the collection
Further Fridays
¹²
—one of those dizygotic twin volumes afore-referred-to. The
short
answer to the question “What's a story?” was provided me by some member of yet another audience past, who after the show pressed upon me a treatise on something called Systems Philosophy and urged me to read it on the flight home. As I had no idea what Systems Philosophy might be, I did indeed leaf through that gift-book up there in the stratosphere, and although I landed not much wiser as to its subject, it did provide me with some wonderful jargon, out of which I constructed the following rigorous definition of the term
story
: A story
(it goes without saying) consists of
the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.