My declared major as a very green Hopkins freshman was Journalism: One was obliged to choose something, and I had done a humor column for our school newspaper in my senior year. Never mind how I stumbled from journalism into fiction-writing; what’s relevant here, in retrospect, is that the literature most provocative to my adolescent curiosity, apart from the mystery novels and Tom Swifties, was not the canonical classics, but Modernism on the one hand (as represented in its American grain by the Dos Passos and those early, mostly minor Faulkners) and on the other hand the venerable tale-cycle tradition, as represented ribaldly in those Avon Readers. At Hopkins I had professors both excellent and inspiring and was at last baptized, though not totally immersed, in the canonical mainstream — but two circumstances, fortunate for me, reinforced those earlier, fugitive, extracurricular samplings.
The first, as I’ve written elsewhere,4 was my very good luck in having to help pay my way by filing books in the university library. “My” stacks happened to be the voluminous ones of the Classics Department and of William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, as it was then called; the books on my cart therefore included not only Homer and Virgil and other such standard curricular items, but also Petronius and Apuleius and the unabridged Scheherazade and the Panchatantra and The Ocean of the Streams of Story and the Vetalapanchavimsata as well as, by some alcove-gerrymandering, Boccaccio and Rabelais and Marguerite of Angouleme and Giovanni Basile and Poggio Bracciolini and Pietro Aretino — hot stuff, which I sampled eagerly as I filed, and often borrowed from the book-cart to take home and read right through: what I think of as my à la carte education.
The second lucky circumstance is that in Hopkins’s literature departments at that time, one did not generally study still-living or even recently dead authors; but our brand-new and somewhat frowned-upon Department of Writing, Speech, and Drama (later renamed the Writing Seminars) broke ranks and energetically held forth on Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and Faulkner — this last via my very first fiction-writing coach, a Marine-combat-veteran teaching assistant from the deep South at work on the university’s first-ever doctoral dissertation on the sage of Oxford, Miss.
Let’s cut to the chase: For the next three years I imitated everybody, badly, in search of my writerly self, while downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can. Owing to some tension between our writing operation and the English Department, my curricular reading in literature was freighted with the Greek and Roman classics, with Dante and Cervantes and Flaubert, and with the big Modernists aforementioned, while my library cart supplied me with extracurricular exotica. What I never got, for better or worse, was the standard fare of English majors: good basic training in Chaucer and Shakespeare and the big 18th-and 19th-century English novelists, though there had been some naughty Canterbury Tales in those Ribald Readers, and I reveled in Fielding and Dickens on my own. So many voices; so many eloquent and wildly various voices — none more mesmerizing to me (thanks to that ex-Marine T.A. writing coach, the late Robert Durene Jacobs of Georgia State University) than Faulkner’s. I read all of him, I believe — all of him as of that mid-century date — and I saw that the Faulkners I’d stumbled upon in high-school days were mostly warm-ups for such chef d’oeuvres as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom. It was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me, and while I had (and have) never thought of myself as a capital-S Southerner — nor a Northerner either, having grown up virtually astride Mason’s and Dixon’s Line — I felt a strong affinity between Faulkner’s Mississippi and the Chesapeake marsh-country that I was born and raised in. My apprentice fiction grew increasingly Faulknerish, and when I stayed on at Johns Hopkins as a graduate student, my M.A. thesis and maiden attempt at a novel was a heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera about sinisterly inbred Chesapeake crabbers and muskrat trappers. The young William Styron, visiting our seminar fresh from winning his National Book Award for Lie Down in Darkness, listened patiently to one particularly purple chapter, a mishmash of middle Faulkner and late Joyce, and charitably praised it; but the finished opus didn’t fly — for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopeses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh. A copy of the manuscript made the rounds of Manhattan in vain until my agent gave up on it; I later destroyed it as an embarrassment. The original languished in the dissertation-stacks of the Hopkins library for a couple of decades until, to my indignant half-relief, some unprincipled rascal stole it. Thanks anyhow, Bill Faulkner and Bill Styron.
AND WHERE WERE Scheherazade and company all this time? Singing in my other ear and inspiring my second and final major apprentice effort: A Faulknerian/Boccaccian hybrid this time, called The Dorchester Tales: 100 tales of my Eastern Shore Yoknapatawpha at all periods of its human history. This, too, failed, at round about Tale 50, and this manuscript too, lest it come back to haunt me, I later destroyed except for a few nuggets that worked their way, reorchestrated, into The Sot-Weed Factor. But I like to think that it was a step in the right direction: an attempt to combine the two principal strains of my literary DNA. In hindsight, as I’ve declared elsewhere,5 it’s clear to me that what I needed to do was find some way to book Faulkner, Joyce, and Scheherazade on the same tidewater showboat, with myself at both the helm and the steam calliope. Another way to put it is that I needed to discover, or to be discovered by, what later came to be called Postmodernism. With the help of yet another fortuitous and highly unlikely input — the turn-of-the-century Brazilian novelist Joaquim Machado de Assis, whose works I stumbled upon in the mid-1950s, this came to pass.
In the decades since, I am obliged to report, although the figure of Ms. Scheherazade has remained so central to my imagination that merely to hear one of the themes from Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite is enough to deliquesce me yet, Mr. Faulkner’s currency in my shop has had its ups and downs. My wife used to teach Light in August to her high-school seniors; while rereading it periodically for that purpose, she would recite memorable passages to me, and a time came when the rhetoric that had once so appealed to me now seemed. . over-pumped. I would tease her (and Faulkner, and myself) by wondering, for example, whether it was the Immemorial Wagon-Wheels going down the Outraged Path or the Outraged Wheels on the Immemorial Path, and what final difference there was between those sonorous propositions.
¿Cien Años de Qué?
The following was delivered (in English) in 1998 at Spain’s León University as part of the conference described below and published two years later in Volume I of that conference’s proceedings.1