It was a great job: My courses were Remedial English (“English Zip”) — where I met a few Nittany Lion football stars and learned the actual rules of grammar, syntax, and punctuation that I’d been applying more or less correctly without formally knowing them — and Freshman Composition (basic theme-writing), and would eventually include Advanced Composition and a course in “Humanities” (literature and philosophy) as well. And I implemented my very low starting salary by playing drums in a not-bad local dance band with regular gigs in a nearby American Legion hall and occasional frat-house dances. But the rule for us entry-level instructors was “three years and then up or out”: I.e., either finish a doctorate, publish a book, or find another job. And so in 1955, after two years of full-time teaching, I managed to complete a new and very different sort of novel from that faux-Faulkner M.A. thesis: The Floating Opera, inspired by memories of a Chesapeake showboat called The James Adams Floating Theatre that I’d seen tied up at the Cambridge municipal wharf in my childhood.
It worked — in the nick of time. In the spring of 1956, after its rejection by several publishers who found it too unconventional for their taste, and just as I was obliged to consider reapplying to Hopkins to attempt completion of that abandoned Ph.D., my agent called to inform me that The Floating Opera—still happily afloat in trade-paperback print 55 years later, as I write this — had been accepted for fall publication by Appleton-Century-Crofts with a princely advance of $750 ($675 after deduction of agent’s well-earned commission). No matter the tiny sum, even by mid-20th-century standards: My academic butt was saved, I already had a second novel brewing (The End of the Road), and the Opera’s publication earned me a promotion from Instructor to Assistant Professor. I stayed on at Penn State for eight more years and discovered in its Pattee Library the complete Archives of Maryland (documents of the colony’s history from its founding by Lord Baltimore in 1634 to its statehood in 1776) and a late-17th-century poem by one Ebenezer Cooke called The Sot-Weed Factor, or, A Voyage to Maryland: A Satyr, said to be the first satire on life in the American colonies. Cooke’s poem — together with another important library-discovery, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about the ubiquitous pattern of wandering-hero myths in various cultures throughout history — inspired my Sot-Weed Factor novel, and I reorchestrated Campbell in my next one as well, Giles Goat-Boy (its wandering hero somehow spawned by intercourse between a computer and a goat), meanwhile ascending the academic ladder from Instructor through Assistant to Associate Professor and still playing occasional dance-jobs with Bob Shea’s band.
In 1965, the critic Leslie Fiedler, whom I’d met when he visited Penn State, persuaded me to join him in the English Department of the newly-upgraded State University of New York at Buffalo. I accepted — among other reasons because a full professorship with considerable salary increase, lighter teaching load, and other amenities, plus the shift from rural Pennsylvania to a more urban environ, we hoped might salvage what had become an unfortunately ever-more-strained and distanced marital connection.
It didn’t, but my seven years on the shores of Lake Erie were otherwise fruitful indeed. In the lively, rather avant-garde atmosphere of “High Sixties” Buffalo, I published Lost in the Funhouse (subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice: fourteen previously-published pieces rearranged into a “series”) in 1968, and in 1972 the novella-triad Chimera, a reorchestration of the myths of Perseus (Perseid), Bellerophon (Bellerophoniad—a pun on his being, in my version, not a bona fide mythic hero but rather a “perfect imitation” of one), and Scheherazade’s kid sister Dunyazade (Dunyazadiad). In Buffalo too I found among my new colleagues the ablest musician-friends I’d ever played jazz with: Ira Cohen, the Provost of Social Sciences, had played tenor sax with Glenn Miller’s Army band and after Miller’s death with his successor, Tex Beneke, and after VJ-Day had put his horn away and switched to chamber-music clarinet, but with the encouragement of pianist, bassist, trumpeter, trombonist, and drummer, in one semester he moved with us from 1940s big-band swing to the late-’60s “cool jazz” style of our current favorites: Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck.
But while Author’s work was going well (Chimera won that year’s National Book Award, and I was rewarded with an endowed professorship whose perks included every third semester off with pay — a blessing for us scribblers), his marriage wasn’t: It ended in divorce in 1969, just as the last of our children was preparing for college. To help with alimony and child-support expenses (including three college tuitions) I took as many speaking/reading engagements as I could manage and launched into a large and complex new writing-project, the novel LETTERS: a 20th-century reorchestration of the 18th-century epistolary novel genre that would take me seven years to complete.
One of those reading-gigs fetched me in February 1969 from an all-but-snowed-in Buffalo to a ditto New England, to do a reading at Boston College. The flight was delayed, the reading late, but intrepid Bostonians turned out in gratifying number — including (so I learned at the post-reading audience reception, when she came up to say hello) a former star student in my Penn State Humanities class: in fact, that university’s official 100,000th graduate, a distinction earned by her having achieved the highest academic average in the school’s 100-plus-year history. Sharp, lively, and lovely, she was currently teaching in a local junior high school, she informed me, having known since elementary-school days that teaching was her destined vocation; after Penn State she’d done graduate work at the University of Chicago, and now here she was, having got word of my reading in the local press and trudged through the snow to say hi to her former prof. Our eager reminiscences about PSU days being properly constrained by my obligation to chat with other attendees, when my host informed me that it was time for him and me to step into a nearby elevator to attend a faculty reception upstairs, I reluctantly bade her au revoir—and was delighted when she asked, “May I come along?”
For details of what followed, see my essay “Teacher” in Further Fridays:2 Enough here to report that by the end of that spring semester she and I had reconnected sufficiently for her to visit me at Lake Chautauqua (my post-marital residence, near Buffalo) and I her in Boston, spend the next summer together at the lake cottage, and marry in her Philadelphia hometown in December of 1970. The following semester, on leave from SUNY/Buffalo, I took a visiting professorship at Boston U.; we then returned to Chautauqua and Buffalo, where she tried teaching at an independent girls’ school (Buffalo Seminary), which she expected not to like — all of her previous experience having been in good public schools — but discovered that she loved. She had a chance to hear her hubby play jazz with his SUNY/Buff colleagues and enjoyed that, too — but we both felt that this new chapter in our life deserved a new venue (I was weary of those heroic lake-effect upstate-New-York winters, and for all its pluses, Buffalo was no Boston), and so when an offer came to return to my alma mater in Baltimore on even more attractive terms than my current ones, we checked out the job possibilities for her down there. Though a bit wary of life below the Mason-Dixon line, she discovered St. Timothy’s, another independent girls’ high school just north of town, and was so taken with it — and the fact that Baltimore was, after all, just South enough for tennis nets to be left up all winter — that we happily shifted thereto at summer’s end, bought our first house together, and began what after forty years remains a much-blessed union indeed: my moral compass, my editor of first resort, hiking/biking/sailing/snorkeling/kayaking partner, planner of all our meals, travels, and activities, and dedicatee of every Barth-book published since—my “arranger,” my sine qua non Shelly.