NOW: AS A matter of biographical fact, I happen to be no fan of the present administration in Washington, or of U.S. unilateralism in foreign affairs: No anti-ABM or anti-landmine treaties or Kyoto protocols or International Court of Justice for us Yanks, thanks! Drill the Arctic, cut the parkland timber, bomb Saddam and Roe v. Wade, torture the war-prisoners, and step on the gas! And while I quite understand the post-9/11 fever of patriotic display (as opposed to unostentatious patriotism) among my countrymen, it makes me uncomfortable, as does my government’s ever more lavish military expenditure at whatever sacrifice of other deserving priorities. In my personal political opinion, the charges against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists include, along with their more serious crimes, their having rescued an insecure and, to a great many of us, lamentable American presidency by permitting it to wrap itself in the Stars and Stripes and imply that criticisms of its right-wing heavy-handedness are unpatriotic. One worries that if the terrorists should strike again, some version of our infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee of the 1950s could rise from its well-deserved grave and resume its deplorable witch-hunting. Already, one imagines, complaints like these of mine do not go unnoticed by the nation’s reinvigorated agencies of domestic surveillance. . 4
In the uncertain meanwhile, however, we Americans remain among that minority of the world’s population blessedly free, both as citizens and as artists, either to strive for political relevance or — in our art especially — to savor the honorable privilege of Irrelevance. Long may that treasured banner wave!
“All Trees Are Oak Trees. .”: Introductions to Literature1
WRITERS WHO HANG out in academia to help pay the rent are likely to find that their job description comes to include inviting other writers to visit their campus and then hosting them through their visit, introducing them to their lecture audience, and sitting in on the informal sessions with students that typically complete the visitor’s tour of duty. Such visitations are, I believe, a generally worthwhile feature of any college writing program: beneficial to the visitor, obviously, who gets paid or otherwise rewarded and may possibly gain a few additional readers; potentially enlightening for the visitor’s audience (even those whose curiosity may be more sociological, anthropological, or even clinical than literary); and at least marginally beneficial for the host as well, as I shall attempt to illustrate.
Most certainly, as an undergraduate and then a grad-student apprentice myself at Johns Hopkins in the latter 1940s and early ’50s, I was impressed, entertained, instructed, inspired, and chastened by spectating such eminences grises as W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and a decidedly intoxicated Dylan Thomas, who threw up in the wastebasket of our seminar room just prior to his public reading and had to be walked by our department chairman a few turns around the quadrangle to clear his head. After which — in a chemistry lecture-theater, with lab faucets flanking the podium and the old 92-element periodic table on the wall behind — he delivered himself flawlessly of perhaps the most eloquent, exhilarating, intoxicating poetry reading I’ve ever heard. Indeed, I can summon the cherub-faced Welshman’s majestic voice yet, bidding us Yankee undergraduates Do not go gentle into that good night. . / Rage, rage against the dying of the light….
Farther down the academic road — on the faculties of Penn State, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Boston University, and then back at Hopkins — it devolved upon me to be the frequent host and introducer of visiting literary luminaries: more often than not an agreeable and even instructive chore for the glimpse it afforded of how very different from one another’s and from one’s own are the lives of fellow scribblers whom one respects; likewise for the obligation, in composing their introductions, to articulate in distilled form what one finds distinctive about their writing; and, not least, for their incidental remarks and advice to aspiring writers in the campus workshops.
I like to warn such aspirants that down their own roads, some of them will be saddled with this not-unpleasant responsibility. I trust they’ll learn from it, as I did, to be wary of all generalizations about how fiction and poetry ought to be written or its author’s life lived, since what’s good advice for one writer may be counterproductive if not downright disastrous for another (there’s a generalization they can trust). I hope further, I tell them, that those fortunate enough to one day find themselves being introduced instead of doing the introduction will likewise heed that advice about Advice: What worked for Emily Dickinson would not likely have served Lord Byron; Proust, Kafka, Henry James, and Hemingway would in all probability not have flourished in one another’s milieux.
It has been my happy case to be both introducer and introducee — so often the former that I once considered, half-seriously if only briefly, perpetrating a book to be called Introductions to Contemporary Literature, comprising my “takes” on (to name an alphabetized few) Edward Albee, Paul Auster, the brothers Barthelme (Donald, Frederick, and Steven), Ann Beattie, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Robert Coover, José Donoso, Umberto Eco, Stanley Elkin, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich, William Gass, John Gardner, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Larry McMurtry, James Michener, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Richard Powers, Mary Robison, Anne Sexton, I. B. Singer, Robert Stone, William Styron, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Kurt Vonnegut. In the second capacity — doing reading gigs myself as well as sitting in on fiction-writing workshops all over the republic — I often find myself quoting one or another of those introducees on some particular aspect of writing, usually though not invariably because they made their point so memorably; sometimes because, while memorable, their aphorisms seem to me to need a bit of qualifying, or at least glossing; and other times because I respectfully but firmly disagree and wouldn’t want their recommendations or pronouncements taken as gospel.