Final Fridays (29 page)

It was a great job: My courses were Remedial English (“English Zip”)—where I met a few Nittany Lion football stars and learned the actual rules of grammar, syntax, and punctuation that I'd been applying more or less correctly without formally knowing them—and Freshman Composition (basic theme-writing), and would eventually include Advanced Composition and a course in “Humanities” (literature and philosophy) as well. And I implemented my very low starting salary by playing drums in a not-bad local dance band with regular gigs in a nearby American Legion hall and occasional frat-house dances. But the rule for us entry-level instructors was “three years and then up or out”: I.e., either finish a doctorate, publish a book, or find another job. And so in 1955, after two years of full-time teaching, I managed to complete a new and very different sort of novel from that faux-Faulkner M.A. thesis:
The Floating Opera
, inspired by memories of a Chesapeake showboat called
The James Adams Floating Theatre
that I'd seen tied up at the Cambridge municipal wharf in my childhood.

It worked—in the nick of time. In the spring of 1956, after its rejection by several publishers who found it too unconventional for their taste, and just as I was obliged to consider reapplying to Hopkins to attempt completion of that abandoned Ph.D., my agent called to inform me that
The Floating Opera
—still happily afloat in trade-paperback print 55 years later, as I write this—had been accepted for fall publication by Appleton-Century-Crofts with a princely advance of $750 ($675 after deduction of agent's well-earned commission). No matter the tiny sum, even by mid-20th-century standards: My academic butt was saved, I already had a second novel brewing (
The End of the Road
), and the
Opera
's publication earned me a promotion from Instructor to Assistant
Professor. I stayed on at Penn State for eight more years and discovered in its Pattee Library the complete
Archives of Maryland
(documents of the colony's history from its founding by Lord Baltimore in 1634 to its statehood in 1776) and a late-17th-century poem by one Ebenezer Cooke called
The Sot-Weed Factor, or, A Voyage to Maryland: A Satyr
, said to be the first satire on life in the American colonies. Cooke's poem—together with another important library-discovery, Joseph Campbell's
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
, about the ubiquitous pattern of wandering-hero myths in various cultures throughout history—inspired my
Sot-Weed Factor
novel, and I reorchestrated Campbell in my next one as well,
Giles Goat-Boy
(its wandering hero somehow spawned by intercourse between a computer and a goat), meanwhile ascending the academic ladder from Instructor through Assistant to Associate Professor and still playing occasional dance-jobs with Bob Shea's band.

In 1965, the critic Leslie Fiedler, whom I'd met when he visited Penn State, persuaded me to join him in the English Department of the newly-upgraded State University of New York at Buffalo. I accepted—among other reasons because a full professorship with considerable salary increase, lighter teaching load, and other amenities, plus the shift from rural Pennsylvania to a more urban environ, we hoped might salvage what had become an unfortunately ever-more-strained and distanced marital connection.

It didn't, but my seven years on the shores of Lake Erie were otherwise fruitful indeed. In the lively, rather avant-garde atmosphere of “High Sixties” Buffalo, I published
Lost in the Funhouse
(subtitled
Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice
: fourteen previously-published pieces rearranged into a “series”) in 1968, and in 1972 the novella-triad
Chimera
, a reorchestration of the myths of Perseus (
Perseid
),
Bellerophon (
Bellerophoniad
—a pun on his being, in my version, not a bona fide mythic hero but rather a “perfect imitation” of one), and Scheherazade's kid sister Dunyazade (
Dunyazadiad
). In Buffalo too I found among my new colleagues the ablest musician-friends I'd ever played jazz with: Ira Cohen, the Provost of Social Sciences, had played tenor sax with Glenn Miller's Army band and after Miller's death with his successor, Tex Beneke, and after VJ-Day had put his horn away and switched to chamber-music clarinet, but with the encouragement of pianist, bassist, trumpeter, trombonist, and drummer, in one semester he moved with us from 1940s big-band swing to the late-'60s “cool jazz” style of our current favorites: Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck.

But while Author's work was going well (
Chimera
won that year's National Book Award, and I was rewarded with an endowed professorship whose perks included every third semester off with pay—a blessing for us scribblers), his marriage wasn't: It ended in divorce in 1969, just as the last of our children was preparing for college. To help with alimony and child-support expenses (including three college tuitions) I took as many speaking/reading engagements as I could manage and launched into a large and complex new writing-project, the novel
LETTERS
: a 20th-century reorchestration of the 18th-century epistolary novel genre that would take me seven years to complete.

One of those reading-gigs fetched me in February 1969 from an all-but-snowed-in Buffalo to a ditto New England, to do a reading at Boston College. The flight was delayed, the reading late, but intrepid Bostonians turned out in gratifying number—including (so I learned at the post-reading audience reception, when she came up to say hello) a former star student in my Penn State Humanities class:
in fact, that university's official 100,000th graduate, a distinction earned by her having achieved the highest academic average in the school's 100-plus-year history. Sharp, lively, and lovely, she was currently teaching in a local junior high school, she informed me, having known since elementary-school days that teaching was her destined vocation; after Penn State she'd done graduate work at the University of Chicago, and now here she was, having got word of my reading in the local press and trudged through the snow to say hi to her former prof. Our eager reminiscences about PSU days being properly constrained by my obligation to chat with other attendees, when my host informed me that it was time for him and me to step into a nearby elevator to attend a faculty reception upstairs, I reluctantly bade her
au revoir
—and was delighted when she asked, “May I come along?”

For details of what followed, see my essay “Teacher” in
Further Fridays
:
²
Enough here to report that by the end of that spring semester she and I had reconnected sufficiently for her to visit me at Lake Chautauqua (my post-marital residence, near Buffalo) and I her in Boston, spend the next summer together at the lake cottage, and marry in her Philadelphia hometown in December of 1970. The following semester, on leave from SUNY/Buffalo, I took a visiting professorship at Boston U.; we then returned to Chautauqua and Buffalo, where she tried teaching at an independent girls' school (Buffalo Seminary), which she expected not to like—all of her previous experience having been in good public schools—but discovered that she loved. She had a chance to hear her hubby play jazz with his SUNY/Buff colleagues and enjoyed that, too—but we both felt that this new chapter in our life deserved a new venue (I was weary of those heroic lake-effect upstate-New-York winters, and for all its pluses, Buffalo was no Boston), and so when an offer came to return
to my alma mater in Baltimore on even more attractive terms than my current ones, we checked out the job possibilities for her down there. Though a bit wary of life below the Mason-Dixon line, she discovered St. Timothy's, another independent girls' high school just north of town, and was so taken with it—and the fact that Baltimore was, after all, just South enough for tennis nets to be left up all winter—that we happily shifted thereto at summer's end, bought our first house together, and began what after forty years remains a much-blessed union indeed: my moral compass, my editor of first resort, hiking/biking/sailing/snorkeling/kayaking partner, planner of all our meals, travels, and activities, and dedicatee of every Barth-book published since—
my
“arranger,” my
sine qua non
Shelly.

The downside of that move, if any, was that among my new colleagues I found no replacement for my Buffalo jazz-pals. After a year or so I sold my drum-set and, encouraged by my new sister-in-law, began playing baroque and Elizabethan recorder duets with her, a pleasure that we still enjoy. As a wordsmith, I take a special satisfaction both in the differences between the two media—the feelings and ideas that music can express more eloquently than words, and vice-versa—and the pleasures both of solo performance with pen and word-processor and of ensemble (anyhow duet) performance on the recorder. As for “arranging,” I feel blessed to have enjoyed it for so many years and to be doing it still, changes changed, at my desk: My forthcoming novel, for example—
Every Third Thought
—is among other things a reorchestration both of Shakespeare's
Tempest
and of characters from my 2008 story-series
The Development
.

Q
: Shall we take it from the edge? Page
one
, page
two
....

First published in the British journal
Granta
, February 2012.

 

 

I
N 2011 AND 2012, two new products of this pen—a novel entitled
Every Third Thought
and this
Final Fridays
essay-collection—are scheduled for publication by Counterpoint Press, a non-“trade” publisher in California. Both were completed in 2009, my 80th year of life and 53rd as a publishing writer. At the time of their composition, I didn't think of them as my
last
books, only as the latest: my seventeenth volume of fiction and third of non-fiction, respectively. But in the year-and-then-some since, although I've still gone to my workroom every weekday morning for the hours between breakfast and lunch, as I've done for decades, and re-enacted my muse-inviting ritual, I find that I've written . . . nothing.

That room is divided into three distinct areas: Composition (one side of a large work-table, reserved for longhand first drafts of fiction on Mondays through Thursdays and nonfiction on Fridays, with supply drawers and adjacent reference-book shelves), Production (computer hutch with desktop word processor and printer for subsequent drafts and revision), and Business (other side of worktable, with desk calendar and office files). As for the ritual: Prep-Step One is
to seat myself at the Composition table, set down my refilled thermal mug of breakfast coffee, and insert the wax earplugs that I got in the habit of using back in the 1950s, when my three children (now in
their
fifties) were rambunctious toddlers, and that became so associated with my sentence-making that even as an empty-nester in a quiet house I continue to feel the need for them. Step Two is to open the stained and battered three-ring loose-leaf binder, now 63 years old and held precariously together with strapping tape, that I bought during my freshman orientation-week at Johns Hopkins in 1947 and in which I penned all my undergraduate and grad-school class notes, professorial lecture-drafts during my decades in academia, and first drafts of the entire corpus of my fiction and non-fiction. Step Three is to unclip from that binder's middle ring the British Parker 51 fountain pen bought during my maiden tour of Europe in 1963/64 (in a Volkswagen camper with those same three then-small children and their mother) at a Rochester stationer's alleged to be the original of Mister Pumblechook's Premises in Dickens's
Great Expectations
: the pen with which I have penned every subsequent sentence, including this one. (Its predecessor, an also much-valued Schaeffer that saw me through college and my first three published novels, was inadvertently cracked in my shirt pocket a few weeks earlier when I leaned against a battlement in “Hamlet's castle” in Elsinore—Danish Helsingor, near Copenhagen, the northernmost stop of that makeshift Grand Tour—in order to get a better view of Sweden across the water.) I recharge the venerable Parker with jet-black Quink, wipe its well-worn tip with a bit of tissue, fix its cap onto its butt, and proceed to Step Four....

Which in happier days meant reviewing and editing either the print-outs of yesterday's first-draft pages (left off when the going was
good and thus more readily resumed) or work-notes toward some project in gestation, to be followed by Step Five: re-inspiration and the composition of new sentences, paragraphs, and pages. Of late, however, Step Four has consisted of staring vainly, pen in hand, at blank ruled pages, or exchanging fountain pen for note-taking ballpoint and perusing for possible suggestions either my spiral-bound Work Notebook #5 (2008–) or my little black six-ring loose-leaf personal notebook/diary, to little avail. That latter—
The Black Book of not so bright (or sunny) observations & reflections
, its title page declares, on which also are the rubber-stamped addresses of its serial residences over the past forty years—has only a few blank leaves remaining, and no room for more. And the workroom's bookshelves, reserved for one copy of each edition and translation of every book, magazine article, and anthology contribution that I've published, are already crowded beyond their capacity, with new editions lying horizontally across older ones and jammed into crannies between bookcase and wall.

That almost-exhausted notebook-space; those overflowing shelves—are they trying to tell me something? I plug my ears; strain not to listen. Like most fiction-writers of my acquaintance (perhaps especially those who mainly write novels rather than short stories), I'm accustomed to a well-filling interval of some weeks or even months between book-length projects: an interval not to be confused with “Writer's Block.” Indeed, I've learned to look forward to that bit of a respite from sentence-making after a new book has left the shop—bulky typescript both snail-mailed and e-mailed to agent and thence to publisher—and to busily making notes toward the Next One while final-copyediting and galley-proofing its predecessor. This time, however . . .