It is also true, however — as the earlier-mentioned (now late) poet Robert Graves acknowledged about his novelistic forays into classical Roman history — that a fictionist, working by hunch and feel, may invent period tidbits that historians subsequently discover to be factual. That happened with certain details of Graves’s I, Claudius, to the author’s delight, and I’ve known the same pleasure, though not in The Sot-Weed Factor. In another novel of mine, having to do with everyday life not in colonial America but in the household of Sindbad the Sailor, I needed a medieval Arabic slang term for the female genitals. My usually reliable supplier of naughty medieval Arabic is Scheherazade, but it happens that while her 1001 Nights abounds in slang terms for the male sexual equipment, I could find none for the female. Inasmuch as both Arabs and Persians of the period were intimate with the desert, I made an educated guess that the term wahat, one of several Arabic words meaning “oasis,” might just serve my purpose, and so deployed it (the word oasis itself, you’ll be excited to hear, is a Latin derivative from the same Egyptian root that wahat derives from; the two terms are etymological cousins). You will understand my subsequent joy upon reading an Arab-born British reviewer’s sniffy observation (in the London Times, I believe it was), that while I had misspelled the Arabic slang term for the male sexual organ (I had not; it’s a matter of transliteration and of dialect), I had got right the term for its female counterpart!
TWO CHEERS FOR the facts of history! say I, including the history of everyday life in early-colonial Maryland and Virginia. And three cheers for human narrative imagination, which ought properly to respect those facts, but which — when narrative push comes to dramaturgical shove — need not be bound by them like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver hog-tied by the Lilliputians. “Black Bill” Claiborne let it be: Damn the torpedoes, and on with the story!
Further Questions?
First delivered in the spring of 1998 as the University of Michigan’s annual Hopwood Lecture (in conjunction with their awarding to some promising U.M. student the Hopwood Prize in creative writing), this essay was published later that year in the Michigan Quarterly Review and subsequently collected with sundry others in The Writing Life: Hopwood Lectures, Fifth Series,1 edited and introduced by Nicholas Delbanco, himself an accomplished novelist and professor at the university.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU begins one of his lectures by saying, “You have invited me; you have engaged to pay me; and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.”
My resolve here is the same as Thoreau’s. The better to implement it, I’m going to serve me up to you by asking myself and replying seriously to a number of altogether unexciting questions — the first of which, reasonably enough, is “Why bother to do that?”
Welclass="underline" The fact is that like many another American writer in the second half of the 20th century, I served my literary apprenticeship not in expatriate cafés or Depression-era boxcars or on the assorted battlegrounds of any of our several wars, but for better or worse in undergraduate and then in graduate school — majoring in, of all things, writing. Ernest Hemingway would disapprove; likewise, no doubt, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, and many another alumnus of the School of Hard Knocks. So did I, for that matter, now and then, for it was on such writers that I was raised. But except for a sculpting uncle of mine who attended the Maryland Institute’s College of Art shortly before dying in the First World War,2 I was the first of my immediate family ever to “go past high school,” as people where I come from used to say (my older brother’s educational trajectory was detoured by the Second World War), and on the whole I regard my apprenticeship in académe as both benevolent and beneficial indeed, although even at the time I understood that literature had managed nicely for several millennia without the benefit of creative-writing programs and would doubtless continue to struggle along if they should all disappear tomorrow. (“At the time” here means the late 1940s, when the then-new program at Johns Hopkins was only the second degree-granting writing program in our republic — second after Iowa’s. At last count the number exceeded 400, I believe,3 but I stand by my proposition.) I shall circle back, perhaps, to a hedged defense of this almost uniquely American, post-World War II phenomenon, the college creative-writing program, and of the concomitant phenomenon of poets and fictionists as professors. I bring the matter up now in order to launch the following reminiscence by way of reply to Question #1: “Why bother, et cetera?” It is an anecdote I’ve told elsewhere; kindly indulge its twice-telling:
My then-closest graduate-school-fellow-apprentice-writer-friend and I, as we were about to be duly diploma’d by our university as Masters of Arts, considered together one spring afternoon — no doubt over a couple of celebratory beers — what we might do to pay the rent until the golden shower of literary fame and fortune descended upon us like Zeus’s stuff on Danae. Having had some school-vacation experience of such alternatives as factory-, sales-, and office work as well as manual labor, we agreed by passionate default that college teaching looked to be the least abusive of our available options and potentially the richest in free time for writing. It had not escaped our notice that doctors, lawyers, administrators, and businessfolk, for example, tend to get busier as their careers advance, whereas the workloads of university professors in the humanities appeared to us to get progressively lighter and more flexible as they ascend the academic ranks. Never mind whether this perception was correct; my buddy and I were persuaded enough thereby to decide to become writer/teachers: Writers in the University. Inasmuch as we ourselves had been blessed with splendid professors of a great many disciplines and were the opposite of cynical about the teaching half of our prospective double careers, our next consideration was how we might spend our classroom time most fruitfully for our students-to-be and ourselves. My friend — who had a stronger intellectual string to his bow than I and a more solid background in literature, history, and philosophy — decided that he would devote his academic life to the answering of rhetorical questions. Should some smart-ass future student of his happen to ask blithely, for example, “Who’s to say, finally, Professor, what’s Real and what isn’t?” Ben vowed that he would tap himself on the chest, say “Check with me,” and lead that student rigorously through the history of metaphysics, from the pre-Socratics up to the current semester.
And I? Well, the Answering of All Rhetorical Questions is no easy act to follow — Wouldn’t you agree? — but it occurred to me to vow in my turn that I would spend my academic life saying over and over again All the Things That Go Without Saying; that (if I may paraphrase myself) I would stare first principles and basic distinctions out of countenance; face them down, for my students’ benefit and my own, until they confessed new information. What is literature? What is fiction? What is a story?