Final Fridays (17 page)

Et cetera. And of course, like any young artists in any medium, these university apprentice writers must undoubtedly have sometimes found from their exposure to such eminent visitors and their works the sort of navigational assistance that I myself found in the works of Machado de Assis and Borges. Just recently, for example, I picked up a new novel by one of our distinguished alumnae from the Johns
Hopkins Writing Seminars—a novel called
The Antelope Wife
, by Louise Erdrich
⁵
—and I read its marvelous opening passage, called “A Father's Milk,” in which a U.S. cavalry troop in the 1880s slaughters a village of Ojibwa Indians (Ms. Erdrich herself is of half Ojibwa and half German ancestry). One of the soldiers, for reasons that he himself does not understand, deserts his company in mid-massacre, rescues an Indian baby girl, and flees with her into the wilderness. Unable to feed her or to silence her crying, in desperation he puts the infant to his own breast, which she suckles with fierce contentment but without nourishment—until,
mirabile dictu
, “half asleep one early morning [with] her beside him, he felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back . . . in bliss, who . . . looked, impossibly, well fed.... He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his own watery, appalling, God-given milk.” The renegade soldier believes that his breast-milk has come from God;
my
strong suspicion is that although North American Indian cultures have their own sorts of Magic Realism, this particular miraculous lactation came from Ms. Erdrich via Gabriel García Márquez, whose fiction she would certainly have been exposed to, and was perhaps nourished by, during her apprenticeship at Johns Hopkins.

I wonder whether that benign and nourishing
leche de padre
flows in both directions. Have any young Latin-American writers been inspired by the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Grace Paley, John Hawkes, Philip Roth, or Toni Morrison? I don't know. I do know that it pleased me a few years ago to hear Sr. García Márquez acknowledge Hemingway and Faulkner to have been “[his] masters,” and even more to hear
him remark (in an interview in the
Harvard Advocate
⁶
) that Faulkner “is really, you know, a Caribbean writer”—an observation that certainly gave me a fresh perspective on the sage of Oxford, Mississippi. Here is a conspicuous instance of a great writer “creating his own precursors,” as Borges said with respect to Franz Kafka: One reads Faulkner somewhat differently after reading
Cien Años de Soledad
. Even a few such seminal exchanges (excuse the expression: “seminal exchanges” comes more naturally to me than “father's milk”) may suffice for cultural cross-fertilization. If there are traces of Faulkner in the literary DNA of Gabriel García Márquez, then no literary paternity suits should be filed by chauvinistic critics who see Magic Realism in Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich.

We are speaking here, after all, of admiration and inspiration, not of international trade balances. 20th-century Modernist and Postmodernist fiction owe much to Ireland, for example, for giving us James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; but Joyce's and Beckett's own navigation stars were from all over the literary firmament, and so it's futile and pointless to try to calculate cultural trade deficits and surpluses—all the more so when we bear in mind my dictum that a writer's navigation stars are not to be confused with his or her destination. 45 years ago, the brilliant novels of Joaquim Machado de Assis helped me to find my own first voice as a novelist. But much of what I borrowed from Machado to write
The Floating Opera
, Machado had borrowed in turn from Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
, which I had not yet discovered for myself at that time, and which anyhow might not have had the impact on me that it did when reorchestrated by Machado's Romantic pessimism. A dozen years later, Jorge Luis Borges's
Ficciones
inspired me to imagine the possibilities of a Literature of Exhausted Possibility and what came later
to be called Postmodernist fiction; but Borges's own navigation stars were chiefly English, from Beowulf through G. K. Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson. Apollo be praised for such happy cross-cultural miscegenation!

Perhaps this mixed metaphor—international trade balances, celestial navigation, and DNA analysis—is itself a metaphor for my point: I have steered my own writerly course by the various lights of Faulkner, Joyce, Machado, and Borges, not to mention Cervantes, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Scheherazade; my muse's DNA, like that of most writers, is a
mestizo
smorgasbord of these and many other literary-ethnic inputs, and while I freely acknowledge my debt to them and to the assorted literary traditions that produced them, it is not the sort of debit that requires repayment. My books, whatever their worth, are my only intercultural bookkeeping. If, on some literary-critical balance sheet, those books show a net cultural deficit to Ireland, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Italy, France, and medieval Araby, that debit is a debt merely of gratitude. And of gratitude I have a plenitude: if not yet quite
cien años de
, at least
cinquenta años de gratitud.

Thank you;
muchas gracias
; et cetera.

Winners of the Enoch Pratt Society's Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award, established in 1997, are expected to say a few words upon their accepting that distinction at Baltimore's fine old Enoch Pratt Free Library and then, the following evening, to say a few more before giving a reading from their work. My receipt of that honor in 1999 prompted the following remarks on literary awards and then, the next day, the mini-essay after this one, on public readings—both published here for the first time.

 

 

J
OHANN WOLFGANG VON Goethe once remarked to the Duke of Weimar—no doubt on the occasion of accepting some ducal honor—that refusing a distinction (as Boris Pasternak and Jean-Paul Sartre, for different reasons, declined their Nobel prizes in 1958 and 1964) can be as immodest as chasing after it. Philip Roth, upon accepting a New York Book Critics Circle Award, observed that since he, like many another writer, often feels that such prizes go to the wrong guy, this must be his night to be the wrong guy. John Updike's character Henry Bech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize that his author surely deserves but has yet to be graced with,
¹
declares that
that
prize “has become so big, such a celebrity among prizes, that no one is worthy to win it, and the embarrassed winner can shelter his
unworthiness behind the unworthiness of everyone else.” That reminds me of how the undergraduates at Washington College over in Chestertown, where my wife and I live, feel about the college's prestigious Sophie Kerr Lit Prize, a $35,000 plum awarded annually for quite a few years now to one of their number, none of whom thus far (so they tell me) has subsequently evolved into a professionally publishing writer: So convinced are the student competitors that the Kerr Prize is cursed (“Sophie's Curse,” they call it) that upon my being appointed a Senior Fellow of the college a few years back, I made it my first official act to pronounce that curse lifted. We'll see what happens.
²
And a writer friend of mine—as we were either applauding Gabriel García Márquez's receipt of the Nobel in 1982 or else shaking our writerly heads at someone else's receipt of it in some other year, I forget which—observed sagely that there are on the one hand those who do honor to the prize, and on the other hand those to whom the prize does honor.

Well: In the short history of the Pratt Society's Lifetime Achievement award, my two forewinners (Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates) have done enough honor to the prize to permit me simply to be honored by it—as I hope you'll disagree. In any case, my thanks to the adjudicating committee, whoever you are, the difficulties of whose task I can appreciate, having paid my dues on a similar committee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Indeed, after doing three years' hard time on that awards committee, while at the same time tisking at the Swedish Academy for passing over such contemporary giants as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino in favor of one or another lesser entity, I was led to what I think of as the Tragic View of Recognition: namely, that a worthwhile literary prize is one that will at least occasionally be
bestowed upon an author
despite
the fact that she or he happens to deserve it. By that stringent definition, the Pratt Prize has a high credit rating indeed, to which I hope tonight's occasion will not do lasting damage.

That said, I must confess to feeling a slight chill in the presence of any “Lifetime Achievement” award. Since I persist in still going to my writing-table every weekday morning to see what my muse has on her mind, I can't help wishing that the thing would say “Lifetime Achievement
Thus Far
.” In any case, as I used to tell my apprentice fiction-writers up at Johns Hopkins, lit prizes are a bit like PhDs: They don't invariably equate with excellence (in some cases they may barely equate with proficiency), and some of the very best practitioners don't have them. But if you're going to be shrug-shouldered about either literary prizes or doctoral degrees, it's better to be so after winning them, so that your shrug-shoulderedness can't be mistaken for sour-grapes envy.

 

ALLOW ME NOW a very brief reminiscence, and then we're done. As an undergraduate apprentice myself at Johns Hopkins in the late 1940s, my comrades and I would often take the bus downtown from the university's Homewood campus to the Pratt, where in addition to using this library's splendid resources we would admire and envy the authors whose works were honored back then with displays in the building's street-side windows. Libraries, after all, as William H. Gass somewhere remarks, “acquire what we cannot afford, retain what we prize and would adore, restore the worn, ignore fashion, and repulse prejudice.” Your typical would-be writer, says W. H. Auden, “serves his apprenticeship in a library [
I
certainly did—but that's another story].” “Though the Master is deaf and dumb,”
Auden continues, “and gives neither instruction nor criticism, the apprentice can choose any Master he likes, living or dead; the Master is available at any hour of the day or night; lessons are all for free; and his passionate admiration of his Master will ensure that he work hard to please him.” Especially to those of my fellow apprentices who (unlike me) had grown up in Baltimore and had made excursions to the Pratt all through their childhood, there seemed to be no more incontrovertible affirmation and validation of one's writerly calling than to earn, one day, “a window at the Pratt.” I'm honored to regard tonight's award as
my
Pratt-window; although I hope that I may have a few stories left to tell, I accept with pleasure this recognition of The Stories Thus Far.

Y
ESTERDAY EVENING, IN the course of accepting the Enoch Pratt Award,
¹
I delivered myself of a few remarks about the pros and cons of literary prizes in general.
This
evening, before reading to you a short section from the nearly-finished “millennium” novel that I've been at work upon since 1995,
²
I want to make a few remarks about Public Readings in general.

What prompts me this evening is an observation by my distinguished fellow fictioneer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as quoted some few weeks ago in the “Today” section of the Baltimore
Sun
: Mr. Vonnegut allowed as how he gives “talks” here and there from time to time (indeed, he has done so as our guest in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, for example), but “I've never done a reading,” he declared, and then added: “It's the lowest art form imaginable.”

Well, now. This sentiment echoes that of some other notable writers I've heard on the subject: I think, e.g., of Mr. Mark Helprin, who voiced a similar opinion to his audience up at Hopkins (in fact, Mr. Helprin devoted his whole allotted public hour with us to explaining why he wasn't going to give a reading). I think of Gore Vidal's remark somewhere that public readings by authors, especially on the campus circuit, are “just a form of show biz.” And Baltimore's own Anne Tyler, who once did a well-received reading for us from her then-new novel
Morgan's Passing
, decided subsequently that
fiction-readings are a bad idea, and although she visited our Writing Seminars again thereafter, she confined herself to chatting with a roomful of apprentice writers.

In certain cases, I suspect, a writer's disinclination to public readings may stem from simple platform-shyness or the circumstance of that writer's not happening to be an effective public reader of his or her work. (Neither of those factors, let me say at once, applies to Ms. Tyler, whose presentation was confident and capable, a pleasure to attend.) But some more general objections to public readings are worth considering apart from those circumstances, and I'd like to review them before I myself descend to this “lowest form of art.”

It is a matter that I feel reasonably qualified to address. For one thing, in my years of professoring at Penn State, State University of New York at Buffalo, and especially Johns Hopkins—where my job-description included inviting writers to visit the campus, confer with our students, and give public presentations—I have heard every sort of delivery: from the masterful to the inept, from the histrionic to the eye-glazingly monotonous, from the exhilarating to the embarrassing, or the intoxicating to the intoxicated, and including the over-long, the inaudible, and the all but unintelligible, whether owing to the speaker's accent, the room's acoustics, the nature of the material, or possibly some foreign substance in the lectern water-pitcher. Moreover, I confess to being guilty myself, over 40-plus years as a publishing writer, of 400-plus public readings from my output, whether of work already published, or of work “finished” but not yet published, or (as is the case with tonight's material) of work not-yet-even-quite-finished but close enough thereto to risk reading from it without tempting the muses to strike, or to go on strike. What's more, I have almost invariably found the experience agreeable,
despite the occasional fouled-up airline connection and the occasionally disappointing, disappointed, or less than entirely comprehending audience—as in, say, Tokyo or Tangier.