And so for the next many years I did, and indeed continue still to do, although the dialogue is more often with myself these emeritus days than with students. And I hope to return to at least the last of those examples (What is a story?) later in this talk. So that’s two things now to be perhaps returned to, the first being. . I forget what, but trust that it will return to me. Meanwhile, having answered or at least responded to my opening question—“Why bother to attempt serious replies to banal questions? ”—I now proceed to a few of those questions themselves.
MY GIFTED GRADUATE-SCHOOL pal, alas, died young, leaving many rhetorical questions still unanswered. In faithful pursuit of our jointly-declared program, however, I’ve been writing fiction as well as professing it ever since, and publishing it for 40-plus years or 5,000-plus pages, whichever is longer4, and giving public readings from it, most often on college campuses, through at least 35 of those 40. More often than not, these reading-gigs include responding to questions from the audience afterward — something that for better or worse a writer doesn’t normally get to do with his or her readers.
As you might imagine, over the semesters at least a few of those questions come to be fairly expectable and not inherently exciting—Do you write your books with a pen or a pencil or what? Have any of your novels been made into movies? What effect, if any, has your university teaching had on your writing? Whether or not such routine questions — and my earnest responses themto — are interesting, it has interested me to see both the questions and the replies evolve somewhat over the decades. Taking them in order (I mean in order to get them out of our way):
1. The old question Do you write with a pen or a pencil or a typewriter or what? changed about a dozen years ago to typewriter or PC? (those were the innocent days when PC still meant “personal computer” instead of Political Correctness), and nowadays it seems to have become desktop or laptop? — as if that exhausts the imaginable options any more than does the classic “Your place or mine?” I have never understood the great pen-or-pencil question’s point, so to speak, in either its low-tech or its higher-tech versions, but I’m impressed by its frequency. Is the asker an aspiring writer, I wonder, who imagines that a change of instruments might induce the muse to sing? Can she or he be thinking, “Since that guy uses Microsoft Word 5.0 on a Macintosh LCIII and his stuff gets published and even remains by and large in print, perhaps if I [et cetera]. .” It’s a magic syllogism. Even if the question’s motive is less complimentary, its logic is no less fallacious: “Ah, so: He writes with a MontBlanc Meisterstück fountain pen. That explains the Germanic interminability of certain of his novels,” et cetera.
No, no, no, dear interrogator: You must seek elsewhere the explanation of their Germanic und so weiter. What earthly difference can it make to the muses whether one composes one’s sentences with a Cray mainframe supercomputer or with the big toe of one’s left foot (like the cerebrally palsied Irish writer Shane Connaught) or with one’s nose or with some other appendage of one’s anatomy or for that matter of someone else’s anatomy? It goes without saying — Does it not? — that those sentences are what they are, for better or worse, whatever the instrument of their setting down.
I do remember, however, once hearing the critic Hugh Kenner speak in an interesting way of how literature changed after the 19th century when it came to be composed on typewriters instead of penned, its alphabetical atoms no longer cursively linked within their verbal molecules (these metaphors are mine, not Professor Kenner’s) but ineluctably and forever side-by-siding like wary subway passengers, and leached of individual calligraphy as well. When I objected that a few antediluvians, such as my Baltimore neighbor Anne Tyler and myself, still prefer the “muscular cursive” (Tyler’s felicitous term) of longhand penmanship for first-drafting our prose, Kenner replied, “All the same, you grew up breathing the air of literature composed on the typewriter.” Well, he had me there, sort of — except that the air that most oxygenated my particular apprenticeship was a fairly equal mix of high Modernism (presumably typewritten) and of quill-scrawled antiquity, with a healthy component of the oral tale-telling tradition as well. It is a mixture that I heartily recommend to apprentice writers: one foot in the high-tech topical here and now, one foot in narrative antiquity, and a third foot, if you can spare it, in the heroic middle distance.
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 critic7 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.