Meanwhile, if journalism wasn’t to be my major, what was? Welclass="underline" It being after all a Creative Writing program, and knowing myself to be no poet, in my sophomore year (scholarship expired, but I managed to cobble up tuition money from the band-gigs, parental dispensations, and assorted part-time work — including, importantly, a partial-tuition-defraying job filing books in the classics stacks of the university library) I signed up for an introductory fiction-writing course presided over by a gentle ex-Marine from Georgia named Robert Durene Jacobs, himself an English Department doctoral candidate completing his dissertation on William Faulkner. So immersed did I become in Southern Lit under his guidance, my maiden efforts at “Cree-aytive Rotting” (as the art sounded in his deep-south accent) were an Eastern Shore marsh-country mash-up of Faulkner and elements borrowed from Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which I was also imbibing. But Bob was gentle and encouraging; I persisted through my sophomore and junior years, doing better in my academic courses as well, and still playing dances and arranging a few scores for whatever band (I forget its name) succeeded Buzz Mallonee’s.
Q: Arranging: That’s where we came in, I believe.
A: I’m getting there. In my senior year I was bumped up into the department’s graduate-level fiction-writing seminar, presided over by Louis Rubin — another young Southerner (writing his doctoral thesis on Thomas Wolfe) and a first-rate writing coach as well as, subsequently, a much-published non-fiction writer himself and the founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. At the same time, my library-book-filing adventures led me to discover such treasures as Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Burton’s unexpurgated Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the great Sanskrit tale-cycles Panchatantra and The Ocean of the Streams of Story, all of which would become important to me when I finally got my authorial act together. Meanwhile, I married my Eastern Shore girlfriend, who’d finished her associate degree and shifted to Baltimore to work and share a modest student apartment with me (we’d planned to wed after my undergrad degree, but her parents — conservative Methodist minister and wife — intercepted and read a letter I’d written to her while she was visiting home, saw what was what, and insisted on immediate matrimony). Lots of married WWII veterans on campus back then, thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights, some with children already, and so a 20-year-old married college senior with first child in the works was a less anomalous phenomenon than it would be now. We skimped, scraped, worked various part-time jobs, and somehow managed.
Q: Things “in the works”. . How about musewise?
A: Welclass="underline" The department’s policy was to urge its B.A.’s to move elsewhere for advanced degrees, but when I graduated in 1951 I persuaded them to let me stay on with a teaching assistantship in their one-year M.A. program — luckily, because with a first child about to be born and two others soon to follow (those were the Baby-Boomer days!), I depended on my dance-band jobs and additional summer work to support us. My M.A. thesis was more faux-Faulkner: a novel entitled The Shirt of Nessus, the memory of which I’ve happily suppressed except that its title was borrowed from my explorations into Greek mythology.1 Luckily again, after the M.A. I was able to enter a new interdepartmental doctoral program in Literary Aesthetics cobbled up between Hopkins’s Writing and Philosophy departments to provide a rigorous Ph.D. to wannabe writers inclined to pay the rent by teaching until they scored with a trade publisher. I survived for a year in that program, trying vainly to devise a scholarly dissertation-subject while also launching a new fiction project called The Dorchester Tales. A never-to-be completed reorchestration of the great tale-cycles that I’d discovered in my book-filing semesters, it aspired to be 100 tales of my marshy home county at all periods of its history; I set it aside a year or two later, but managed to weave several of its yarns into my later novel The Sot-Weed Factor before tossing the manuscript.
Just as I’d learned in my freshman year that I wasn’t cut out for serious journalism, one year in that Hopkins doctoral program taught me that I wasn’t meant to be a professional scholar/critic either. I quite enjoyed the seminar sessions, presided over by such distinguished scholars as the historian of ideas George Boas, the Romance philologist Leo Spitzer, and the eminent Spanish poet Pedro Salinas (in exile from Franco’s Spain), and did well enough in my courses while still playing occasional dance-band gigs, turning out a second child, and working a summer night-shift job as a timekeeper in Baltimore’s Chevrolet factory. But I had to find something that I could truly do for a living, and so in 1953 I applied for and was accepted at an entry-level instructorship in English Composition at the Pennsylvania State College (later University) in State College, PA. I bought my first car (second-hand Buick sedan, from an uncle in Cambridge who dealt in used cars) and shifted my growing young family (kid #3 already on the way) from urban Baltimore up to the pleasant land-grant campus known to its joking undergraduates as “Dead Center,” it having been built in Centre County — the geographical center of the state — after passage of President Lincoln’s Land-Grant Act.