AMBIVALENT RITE OF authorial passage! Just the day before yesterday, one was gratified to be listed among the Literary Upstarts to Keep an Eye On; today one’s sentiments are solicited under the aspect of Storyteller Emeritus, Still-Functioning Codger Novelist, Superannuated Scheherazade.

Well, it happens. In the foreshortened busy interval between that Day Before Yesterday and this Today, one’s fortune has been neither to autodestruct nor to be by the world destroyed; to sire and raise a family, among other adventures; and with the muse’s connivance to perpetrate some 5,000 pages worth of fiction¹—this while one’s life (which is not a story) exfoliated in accordance with its own, imperfectly comprehended principles. Like one’s biological children, those book-bound pages, once launched and independent, have made their way as chance and their merits would have it: praised here, trashed there, attended and ignored, but somehow (knock on wood) surviving, persisting, even modestly thriving unto the present hour, their expiration-dates bidding fitly to extend beyond that of their author. “What a long, strange road it’s been!” used to exclaim the Grateful Dead’s (late) Jerry Garcia. Even for the least programmatically colorful of us, quite so. I could tell you a story….

But one’s calling is invention, not confession, and the subject in hand is neither Yesterday nor the Day Before, but Tomorrow, as seen from the presumable vantage-point of a fairly high-mileage Today.

Tomorrow and tomorrow: On average and on paper, one has more of those in prospect these days than folks did formerly. At age 67, Yours Truly is on the one hand 95 percent through the “biblical” threescore-and-ten, while only 56 percent through the 120-year span alloted us mortals in Genesis 6:3 and reneged on ever since, but latterly affirmed by some gerontologists to be the inherent design-life of Homo sapiens sapiens. More probably — after jiggering my American generation’s actuarial averages upward for my skin color, downward for my gender, and upward thrice again for (knock on wood) my rude good health, the longevity of my parents, and a blessed remarriage — I can with luck anticipate perhaps 20 more years of breathing air, with most of my faculties more or less though ever less and less intact through much of that period, and always allowing for the circumstance that the world might end (one’s own world, anyhow) before this sentence does, or the one to follow.

20 years more: That many? That few? One feels a proper twinge of that echt-20th-century emotion, Survivor’s Guilt: Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver — splendid writers cut off in the full fruition of their gifts at a younger age than one’s present, their voices stilled for keeps while one’s own yarns on. One recalls John Keats’s famous fears (well justified, in the event) that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain; likewise the writerly counterfears (let’s not name names) that one might go on being and being and being after one’s pen, et cetera, silenced not by death or devastation but by mere bare-cupboardhood. One takes courage from the exemplary counter-instances, e.g., of Arthur Miller, just past 80 and evidently going strong²; of even-older-at-the-time Thomas Mann, bringing off as his final novel the high-spirited elaboration of his early short story Felix Krull—a stunt about which I could write a whole praising page but won’t, here; of even-older-yet Sophocles, closing out at age 90 his Theban trilogy with the magnificent Oedipus at Colonus.

And having thus twinged, thus recalled, and thus taken courage, one draws yet another deep bonus breath — refills one’s trusty fountain pen, boots up one’s trusty word processor, whatever — and like the afore-invoked Scheherazade (perhaps for not-dissimilar reasons) deftly segues into the one about. .

Et cetera.

THE ART WHOSE state I mean to review here is that of the novel in particular; the art more generally of printed fiction, especially in the USA; and the art most generally of fictional narrative in whatever medium — again, especially in this country, where certain aspects of the scene are changing more rapidly, for better or worse, than they seem to me to be changing elsewhere.

By way of beginning, I submit the following gleanings from my recent and by no means systematic reading on the subject. Readers unfamiliar with some of the names I’m about to drop should not feel particularly left out; I’m unfamiliar with many of them too, and once I’ve dropped them, I intend to drop them.

“We are [in]. . the late age of print,” declares the hypertex-tualist Michael Joyce in the American Book Review, “a transitional time when the book as we know it gives way to writing the mind in lightforms.” (By “lightforms” Mr. Joyce means reading and writing on computer screens; more on “hypertext” presently.)

A writer named Mark Amerika (too good to be true), again in the American Book Review, declares, “The zine scene is alive and well…. Offhand, I can think of a dozen zines that are doing wonderful stuff: Further State(s) of the Art, Puck, Sensitive Skin, Red Tape, Taproot Reviews, Dissonance, Boing Boing, Frighten the Horses, Central Park, Nobodaddies, Science Fiction Eye, MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, just to name the first dozen that come to my mind.” (Those are not the first dozen that come to my mind, but let that go.) And one Mr. Lance Olsen, likewise in the ABR, in an essay entitled “Death-metal Technomutant Morphing,” declares, “Me, I’m going down reading Mark Leyner and Jean Baudrillard simultaneously, a copy of Wired in my lap, hypertext by Carolyn Guyer on the computer screen, television turned to MTV, windows wide open… my fire-retardant corrosion-resistant nickel-base alloy robo-enhanced methyl isocyanate flamethrower exploding, while I listen to Sonic Youth’s Dirty turned up real, REAL loud.”

I confess to being addicted to such catalogues of Where It’s At: catalogues with which the American Book Review particularly abounds. Here is another from the same lively source, by one Martin Sheter, in an essay called “Writing As Incorrectness”:

And then there’s what I call the “third rail”: the remarkable. . resurgence of all sorts of creativity going on in the nineties, right under the nose of all these [American academics] — people ranging the spectrum from Hakim Bey, Fact-Sheet 5, R U Sirius, ACT-UP graphicists, feminist collaborators, black and Native American oralists, and shock performance theoreticians, all the way to. . MTV’s “Liquid Television,” the San Francisco “transgressive” school, Brown-University-sponsored “unspeakable practices,” various cyberpunk and slipstream fictionalists. . (no doubt I’ve left out quite a bit here).

TIME WAS WHEN the publishers of good-quality books with less than best-seller appeal could hope at least to break even by keeping such works in print and selling a modest number of copies per year over an extended period, meanwhile deducting for tax purposes the cost of warehousing the unsold copies. The U.S. Supreme Court’s unfortunate “Thor Tool Company” ruling in 1979² declared that practice illegal, with the unhappy result that in America nowadays, a book either makes its publisher a profit in a hurry or is fed to the shredder — just as, in commercial television, a high-quality drama series may be canned because its audience, while sizeable, is less so than that of some competing network’s offering: bad news for the culture in both cases. Periodic attempts by such organizations as the Authors Guild and PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) to overturn that infelicitous court ruling have thus far been unsuccessful; until they succeed, if ever, the slack has been taken up somewhat by university presses and others outside the “trade,” where volumes of poetry, essays, and good-but-non-“commercial” fiction may find sanctuary, and by the larger houses’ “trade paperback” lines: Doubleday’s Anchor Press, Random House’s Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin’s Mariner Books, et cetera.

A number of my own past productions have had the good fortune to lead second lives in such editions, for which their new publisher often requests a foreword. Hence the “Four Forewords” aforementioned, and hence the two here following: one to the large and complex novel LETTERS, first published by Putnam in 1979; the other to the smaller, more straightforward Sabbatical: A Romance, from the same publisher three years later. Neither novel was a commercial success; happily for their author, both were subsequently reissued (in 1994 and 1996, respectively) by the University of Illinois’ excellent Dalkey Archive Press, to continue their trickle of annual sales. After all, one reminds oneself, long-haul trickles can have large effects: e.g., the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributary outside my workroom window, both formed in part by the eons-long trickles of the last Ice Age’s retreating glaciers….

— Postscript, possibly evidencing that truth is more Postmodern than fiction:

themselves girdles….

And they likewise stitched together, in their subsequent/consequent generations, everything from scripture and scriptural commentary to quantum physics and the Anthropic Principle — all implicit, though not predictable, bereshith.

THE OPERATIVE WORDS in my title, as I trust you’ll have noticed already, are the words “maybe” and “novelist.” They are intended not quite to disqualify me from addressing an audience of professional and amateur specialists on the subject of colonial life hereabouts, but to disclaim any particular authority in the matter — in short, to cover my butt. By trade and by temperament I am in fact not any sort of historian or antiquarian, but a novelist and short-story-writer, a fictioneer — a professional liar, we might as well say, of whom the most one can reasonably demand is that his fabrications be of professional quality. I’ll do my best.

What’s worse, I’m not even a historical novelist, properly speaking. The straightforward historical novel — Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, James Michener’s Chesapeake—is a category of fiction that makes me just a tad uneasy,¹ even though I’ve much enjoyed such exceptional specimens as Robert Graves’s Roman-Imperial epic I, Claudius. Of my dozen-plus published books, only one and a half have anything at all to do with colonial Virginia and Maryland, and the one called The Sot-Weed Factor—which very much does have to do with life in early-colonial Tidewaterland — was written between 1956 and 1960, when its author was not yet thirty years old. I wasn’t exactly a greenhorn back then in the medium of fiction (my first two novels had been published already), but I was an entire novice in the area of historical fiction and its attendant research. It’s gratifying to me that this many years after its initial appearance, the Sot-Weed novel remains in print. The flip side of that gratification, however, is that its author is still sometimes mistaken for an authority on matters of regional history, when in fact what I’ll be looking back on here is not only Life in Early-Colonial Et Cetera but my researches into that subject four decades ago.

Just recently, for example, I got a call from a bona fide colonial historian at work on a study of William Claiborne’s 17th-century Virginian trading post on Kent Island, in the upper Chesapeake: a famous thorn in the side of Lord Baltimore’s first Maryland settlers. She had noticed, this historian told me, that in my Sot-Weed Factor novel Lord Baltimore refers to that rogue Virginian as “Black Bill Claiborne”; her question was whether I could vouch for the use of “Bill” as a nickname for William in the 17th century. Heck no, I was obliged to tell her: Back when I was up to my earlobes in the documents of our colonial history, I might have confirmed or disconfirmed that usage with some confidence, but that time itself was history now. I then offered her my guess that although “Will” was unquestionably the most common nickname for William back then, if I chose to have Lord Baltimore say “Bill,” it was quite possible that I had seen that sobriquet deployed in some colonial document or other. But I reminded her, as I now remind you-all, of Aristotle’s famous distinction between History and Poetry — between how things were and how things might have been, or let’s say between verity and verisimilitude — and further, that while my memory is that in that novel I tried to stay rigorously close to the facts of colonial life and language where such rigor was appropriate, it was not at all impossible that the muse of Poetry rather than that of History dictated “Black Bill Claiborne,” as a denunciation more euphonious than “Black Will Claiborne.” (“Wicked Will,” I guess I could’ve called the fellow, if “Bill” is in fact an anachronism — but then “Wicked Will” sounds too much like that night-calling bird, doesn’t it….)

You see how we storytellers operate: Truth, yes — but not always truth to the historical data. And how do historians operate? Well, my caller dropped me a note somewhile later to thank me for my assistance and to announce her intention of staying with “Bill,” despite my warning, on the strength of The Sot-Weed Factor’s “general historical authenticity.” It makes a person wonder.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU begins one of his lectures by saying, “You have invited me; you have engaged to pay me; and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.”

My resolve here is the same as Thoreau’s. The better to implement it, I’m going to serve me up to you by asking myself and replying seriously to a number of altogether unexciting questions — the first of which, reasonably enough, is “Why bother to do that?”

Well: The fact is that like many another American writer in the second half of the 20th century, I served my literary apprenticeship not in expatriate cafés or Depression-era boxcars or on the assorted battlegrounds of any of our several wars, but for better or worse in undergraduate and then in graduate school — majoring in, of all things, writing. Ernest Hemingway would disapprove; likewise, no doubt, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, and many another alumnus of the School of Hard Knocks. So did I, for that matter, now and then, for it was on such writers that I was raised. But except for a sculpting uncle of mine who attended the Maryland Institute’s College of Art shortly before dying in the First World War,² I was the first of my immediate family ever to “go past high school,” as people where I come from used to say (my older brother’s educational trajectory was detoured by the Second World War), and on the whole I regard my apprenticeship in académe as both benevolent and beneficial indeed, although even at the time I understood that literature had managed nicely for several millennia without the benefit of creative-writing programs and would doubtless continue to struggle along if they should all disappear tomorrow. (“At the time” here means the late 1940s, when the then-new program at Johns Hopkins was only the second degree-granting writing program in our republic — second after Iowa’s. At last count the number exceeded 400, I believe,³ but I stand by my proposition.) I shall circle back, perhaps, to a hedged defense of this almost uniquely American, post-World War II phenomenon, the college creative-writing program, and of the concomitant phenomenon of poets and fictionists as professors. I bring the matter up now in order to launch the following reminiscence by way of reply to Question #1: “Why bother, et cetera?” It is an anecdote I’ve told elsewhere; kindly indulge its twice-telling:

My then-closest graduate-school-fellow-apprentice-writer-friend and I, as we were about to be duly diploma’d by our university as Masters of Arts, considered together one spring afternoon — no doubt over a couple of celebratory beers — what we might do to pay the rent until the golden shower of literary fame and fortune descended upon us like Zeus’s stuff on Danae. Having had some school-vacation experience of such alternatives as factory-, sales-, and office work as well as manual labor, we agreed by passionate default that college teaching looked to be the least abusive of our available options and potentially the richest in free time for writing. It had not escaped our notice that doctors, lawyers, administrators, and businessfolk, for example, tend to get busier as their careers advance, whereas the workloads of university professors in the humanities appeared to us to get progressively lighter and more flexible as they ascend the academic ranks. Never mind whether this perception was correct; my buddy and I were persuaded enough thereby to decide to become writer/teachers: Writers in the University. Inasmuch as we ourselves had been blessed with splendid professors of a great many disciplines and were the opposite of cynical about the teaching half of our prospective double careers, our next consideration was how we might spend our classroom time most fruitfully for our students-to-be and ourselves. My friend — who had a stronger intellectual string to his bow than I and a more solid background in literature, history, and philosophy — decided that he would devote his academic life to the answering of rhetorical questions. Should some smart-ass future student of his happen to ask blithely, for example, “Who’s to say, finally, Professor, what’s Real and what isn’t?” Ben vowed that he would tap himself on the chest, say “Check with me,” and lead that student rigorously through the history of metaphysics, from the pre-Socratics up to the current semester.

And I? Well, the Answering of All Rhetorical Questions is no easy act to follow — Wouldn’t you agree? — but it occurred to me to vow in my turn that I would spend my academic life saying over and over again All the Things That Go Without Saying; that (if I may paraphrase myself) I would stare first principles and basic distinctions out of countenance; face them down, for my students’ benefit and my own, until they confessed new information. What is literature? What is fiction? What is a story?

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.

What’s a story?

Storytellers (it goes without saying) tell stories. Fiction-writers write them; playwrights and screenwriters script them; opera singers sing them; balletists dance them; mimes mime them. But what’s a story?

Damned if I know, for sure. “A whole action, of a certain magnitude,” says Aristotle in effect in his Poetics. “A meaningful series of events in a time sequence,” say Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their New-Critical textbook Understanding Fiction.

Yes, well. But. .

Most working writers of fiction — myself included when the muse and I are at it — operate less by articulated narrative theory than by the hunch and feel of experience: our experience of successfully (sometimes unsuccessfully) composing, revising, and editing our own stories and, prerequisite to that, our experience of the tens of thousands of stories that all of us audit, read, spectate, and more or less assimilate in the course of our lives. But it’s another matter when, as teachers of novice fiction-writers and coaches of more advanced apprentices in the art, we find ourselves in the position of trying to explain to them and to ourselves why the manuscript before us, whatever its other merits, lacks something that we’ve come to associate with stories, and is in our judgment the less satisfying for that lack. “Gets off on the wrong foot,” somebody in the room may opine. “Something askew in the middle there. . ” “The ending bothers me. . ”

Okay: But exactly what about the beginning, the middle, the ending, fails to satisfy? What keeps the thing from achieving proper storyhood? Freud remarks that he didn’t start out with such peculiar notions as the Oedipus Complex; that he was driven to their articulation by what he was hearing from the psychoanalytical couch. That’s how I feel with respect to dramaturgical theory.

What’s dramaturgy?

In my shop, “dramaturgy” means the management of plot and action; the architecture of Story, as distinct from such other fictive goodies as Language, Character, Setting, and Theme. Be it understood at the outset that mere architectural completeness, mere storyhood, doth not an excellent fiction make. Every competent hack hacks out complete stories; structural sufficiency is hackhood’s first requirement. On the other hand, about a third of Franz Kafka’s splendid fictions, for example, and a somewhat smaller fraction of Donald Barthelme’s, happen to be “mere” extended metaphors rather than stories — metaphors elaborated to a certain point and then, like lyric poems, closed — and they are no less artistically admirable for that.² Such exceptions notwithstanding, the fact is that most of the fiction we admire is admirable dramaturgically as well as in its other aspects. If we admire a piece of prose fiction despite its non-storyhood, we are, precisely, admiring it despite its non-storyhood. Even the late John Gardner — by all accounts a splendid writing teacher despite his cranky notions of “moral fiction”—used to advise, “When in doubt, go for dramaturgy.” Amen to that.

Back to Aristotle: The distinction between Plot and Action can be useful to what we might call clinical dramaturgical analysis, since a story’s problems may lie in the one but not the other. As a classroom exercise, one can summarize the story of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, for example, entirely in terms of its plot with little or no reference to its action: “A happily married and much-respected head of state comes to learn that his eminent position is owing to his having unwittingly broken two major-league taboos, and in a day his fortunes are reversed.” Clearly, any number of imaginable sequences of action might body forth that summarized plot. One then proceeds to examine for efficiency and effect the particular sequence chosen by Sophocles to do the job. Indeed, one may summarize the drama contrariwise, entirely in terms of its action with little or no reference to its plot: “A delegation of Theban elders complains to King Oedipus that a plague has fallen upon the place. The King sends his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to find out what’s going on. That emissary returns with news of the gods’ displeasure. The chorus of elders sings and dances apprehensively,” et cetera.

Aristotle’s stipulations that the action be 1) “whole” and 2) “of a certain magnitude” can be at least marginally useful, too: A “whole” action includes everything necessary to constitute a meaningful story and excludes anything irrelevant thereto — got that? “Of a certain magnitude” means that the action of fiction ought not to be inconsequential, however much it might appear to the characters to be so. But if we ask “What’s the meaning of meaningful?” or “What do you mean by consequential?”, it turns out that meaningful means “dramaturgically meaningful” and consequential means “dramaturgically consequential,” and around we go (likewise with Brooks and Warren’s “meaningful series of events,” even without their redundant “in a time sequence”). One is tempted to chuck the whole question and go back to good old Hunch and Feel — but these preliminary distinctions and definitions are worth bearing in mind as we try to spiral out of their circularity, mindful that what we’re interested in here is not “mere” theory, but practical dramaturgy: Applied Aristotle.

The curve of dramatic action.

Not all fictive action is dramatic, either in the colloquial sense of “exciting” or in the practical sense of advancing the story’s plot. And drama, to be sure, involves those other elements aforementioned — character and theme and language as well as action — although it’s worth remembering that the Greek word drama literally means “deed,” an action performed by a character, and that Aristotle declares in effect that it’s easier to imagine a drama without characters ³ than one without action, the without-which-nothing of story. Dramatic action is conventionally described as “rising” to some sort of climactic “peak” or turning-point and then “falling” to some sort of resolution, or denouement. In short, as a sort of triangle — not really of the isosceles variety sometimes called “Fichte’s triangle” after the late-18th-century German philosopher, but more like a stylized profile of Gibraltar viewed (in left-to-right cultures, anyhow) from the west: . A ramp, let’s say, which the story’s “rising action” rather gradually ascends to a peak and then precipitately descends (punch lines are normally shorter than their jokes). Add to this ramp a bit of an approach and a bit of an exit——and you’ve graphed the Ingredients of Story as conventionally formulated: Exposition (the information requisite to understanding the action, or, as I prefer to put it, the “ground situation”: a dramatically voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the story’s present time), Conflict (or, in my shop, the introduction of the “dramatic vehicle”: a present-time turn of events that precipitates a story out of the ground situation), Complication (of which more presently), Climax, Denouement, and Wrap-Up (the little coda, closing fillip, or dolly-back shot often appended to the denouement like a jazz drummer’s “roll-off” at the end of a number, and usually suggestive of what the story’s completed action portends for the principal characters).

Seems arbitrary, doesn’t it, this curveless classic curve: an uncomfy-looking Bed of Procrustes upon which the action of fiction must be stretched or chopped to fit, or else. Or else what? Why not a story whose action graphs like this——or this——or that tracks more or less like Lawrence Sterne’s diagrammed flourishes of Uncle Toby’s walking-stick in Tristram Shandy——or that simply flat-lines start to finish (___________)? In fact, that question touches a genuine mystery, in my opinion — and of course one can readily point to stories like the aforementioned Tristram Shandy that appear to proceed aimlessly, randomly, anyhow un-Aristotelianly; that digress repeatedly while in fact never losing sight of where they’re going: up the old ramp to their climax and denouement. For practical purposes, however, the matter’s no more mysterious than why one doesn’t normally begin a joke with its punch line, a concert program or fireworks display with its pièce de résistance, a meal with its chef d’oeuvre, a session of lovemaking with its orgasm: Experience teaches that they simply aren’t as effective that way, and “the rules of art,” as David Hume remarked, are grounded Edward Albee has “not in reason, but in experience.” Edward Albee has declared his preference for stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, “preferably in that order.” Quite so — once one allows for another classical tradition, this one best articulated not by Aristotle but by Horace in his Ars Poetica: the tradition of beginning in medias res, in the middle of things rather than at their chronological Square One. To tell the story of the fall of Troy, says Horace, we need not begin ab ovo: “from the egg” laid by Leda after her ravishment by Zeus-in-the-form-of-aswan, and from which hatched among others fair Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships, et cetera, et cetera. We might begin not even with the opening hostilities of the Trojan War itself, but rather — like Homer — in the ninth year of that disastrous ten-year enterprise, and then interstitch our Exposition retrospectively as we proceed.

In other words, the dramaturgical Beginning need not be and in fact seldom is the chronological beginning, and a story’s order of narration (or a play’s order of dramatization) need not be the strict chronological order of the events narrated. Dramatic effect, not linear chronology, is the regnant principle in the selection and arrangement of a story’s action.

Isomorphs.

Apprentice story-makers may need reminding, however, that the world contains many things whose structure or progress resembles (“is isomorphic to” has a nice pedagogical ring) that of traditional dramaturgy. I have mentioned jokes, concert programs, pyrotechnical displays, multicourse meals, and lovemaking when things go well; one could add coffee-brewing (an old percolator of mine used to begin my every workday with a rising action that built to a virtual percolatory orgasm and then subsided to a quiet afterglow), waves breaking on a beach — you name it, but don’t confuse those same-shapes with stories. In truth such isomorphy can be seductive; many an apprentice-piece hopefully substitutes the sonority of closure, for example, for real denouement; the thing sounds finished, but something tells us — a kind of critical bookkeeping developed maybe no more than half-consciously from our lifetime experience of stories — that its dramaturgical bills haven’t been paid. Similarly, mere busyness in a story’s Middle does not necessarily advance the plot; an analogy may be drawn here to the distinction in classical physics between Effort and Work. Dramatic action, as afore-established, need not be “dramatic,” although a little excitement never hurt a story; it does need to turn the screws on the Ground Situation, complicate the conflict, move us up the ramp. Otherwise it’s effort, not work; isomorphic to storyhood, perhaps, but not the real thing.

So how do we tell. .?

By never again reading your own stories or anybody else’s — or watching any stage or screen or television-play—innocently, but always with a third eye monitoring how the author does it: what dramaturgical cards are being played and subsequently picked up (or forgotten); what waypoints (and how many, and in what sequence) the author has chosen to the dramaturgical destination, and why; what pistols, to use Chekhov’s famous example, are being hung on the wall in Act One in order to be fired in Act Three. By learning to appreciate the often masterful dramaturgic efficiency of an otherwise merely amusing TV sitcom, for example, while on the other hand appreciating the extravagance-almost-for-its-own-sake of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Maybe even by reciting like a mantra this definition of Plot, which I once upon a time concocted out of the jargon of Systems Analysis: the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.

Come again?

With pleasure. The “unstable homeostatic system” is that aforementioned Ground Situation: an overtly or latently voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the story’s present time; one that tends to regulate itself toward equilibrium but is essentially less than stable (otherwise there could be no story). The city of Thebes appears to be doing quite satisfactorily under its new king, who fortuitously routed the Sphinx and married the widowed queen (somewhat his elder) after the old king was mysteriously slain at a place where three roads meet. . et cetera. No ground situation, no story, however arresting the action to come, for it is its effect upon the ground situation that gives the story’s action meaning. On the other hand, if the system merely continues on its unstable homeostatic way, there’ll be no story either. Another child born to Oedipus and Jocasta? What else is new?

“And then one day,” as the narrative formula puts it, the Dramatic Vehicle rolls into town: A murrain descends upon Thebes and environs and is determined to be owing to the gods’ displeasure at the unsolved murder of old King Laius. Because most stories originate in some arresting experience or event—“Wait’ll you hear what happened to me last night! ”—it’s a common failing of apprentice fiction to be more interesting in its action and characters than in its point; to launch an arresting or at least entertaining (potential) dramatic vehicle without a clearly established and thought-through ground situation, as ripe as Sophocles’s Thebes for Incremental Perturbation—

Which is to say, for the successive complications of the conflict. That crazy old prophet Tiresias reluctantly claims that Oedipus himself was old King Laius’s murderer, and then…. The conflict-complications comprising a story’s Middle may in some cases be more serial than incremental: One can imagine rearranging the order of certain of Don Quixote’s sorties against Reality or of Huck’s and Jim’s raft-stops down Old Man River without spoiling the effect. Even in those cases, however, the overall series is cumulative, the net effect incremental; the unstable homeostatic system is quantitatively perturbed and re-perturbed, until….

In the most efficiently plotted stories, these perturbations follow not only upon one another but from one another, each paving the way for the next. In what we might call a camel’s-back story, on the other hand, the complicative straws are simply added, one by one, as the story’s Middle performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and strategically delaying our approach thereto. In both cases, however — as Karl Marx says of history and as one observes everywhere in nature — enough quantitative change can effect a comparatively swift qualitative change: The last straw breaks the camel’s back; one degree colder and the water freezes; at some trifling new provocation the colonies rebel. You say the ditched baby had a swollen foot, like, uh, mine? And that the uppity old dude I wasted back at that place where three roads meet was actually. .?

How many perturbatory increments does a story need? Just enough: Too few leads to unconvincing climax, faked orgasm; too many is beating a dead horse, or broken camel. And how many are just enough? Just enough — although one notes in passing the popularity of threes, fives, and sevens in myths and folk-stories.

The climax or turn, when it comes, happens relatively quickly: It’s “catastrophic” in the mathematicians’ Catastrophe Theory sense, whether or not (as Aristotle prescribes) it involves the fall of the mighty from the height of fortune to the depths of misery. Even in the most delicate of “epiphanic” stories, the little epiphany that epiphs, the little insight vouchsafed to the protagonist (or perhaps only to the reader), does so in a comparative flash — and for all its apparent slightness, is of magnitudinous consequence.

Which consequence we measure by the net difference it effects in the ground situation. Like some pregnancy tests, the measurement is only one-way valid: If nothing of consequence about the ground situation has been altered, no story has been told; the action has been all Effort and no Work. If the ground situation has unquestionably been changed (all the once-living characters are now dead, let’s say), then a story may have been told. The follow-up test is whether that change — be it “dramatic,” even melodramatic, or so almost imperceptible that the principals themselves don’t yet realize its gravity — is dramaturgically/thematically meaningful, in terms of what has been established to be at stake. The “equilibrium” of a story’s denouement is not that of its opening: Order may reign again in Thebes, for a while anyhow, under Kreon’s administration; but Jocasta has hanged herself, and Oedipus has stabbed out his eyes and left town. It is an equilibrium complexified: qualitatively changed even where things may appear to all hands (except the reader/spectator) to be Back to Normal.

Otherwise, what we have attended may have its incidental merits, but for better or worse (usually worse) it’s not a story.

MY PERSONAL REMINISCENCES of the writer we here celebrate can be covered in short order, for I didn’t come to know the man nearly so well on that level as I wish I had. Italo Calvino’s fiction I discovered in 1968, the year Cosmicomics appeared in this country in William Weaver’s translation.¹ I was teaching then at the State University of New York at Buffalo and had fallen much under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges, whom I had discovered just a couple of years earlier. In that condition of enchantment I had published in’68 a sort of proto-postmodernist manifesto called “The Literature of Exhaustion”² and also my maiden collection of short stories, entitled Lost in the Funhouse and subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (that particular deployment of the term “fiction” is a salute to Borges’s ficciones). In short, the ground had been prepared for my delight in Calvino’s Cosmicomics and then in his T-Zero stories, which appeared in Mr. Weaver’s English the following year. Here, I thought, was a sort of Borges without tears, or better, a Borges con molto brio: lighter-spirited than the great Argentine, often downright funny (as Sr. Borges almost never is), yet comparably virtuosic in form and language, comparably rich in intelligence and imagination.

I was sufficiently impressed — and the university was sufficiently well funded in those Lyndon Johnson/Nelson Rockefeller years — to write soon after to Signor Calvino at his Paris address, inviting him to visit Buffalo as Señor Borges had recently done, also at my eager invitation. Indeed, I urged Calvino to be my professorial replacement for a semester or even a whole academic year. At that time I was the lucky sitter in a brand-new and peculiarly endowed professorial chair whose generous income I was not permitted to draw as additional salary, but was allowed to use to hire a visiting writer to replace me from time to time. The first of these eminent succedanea had been Donald Barthelme; I much wanted the second to be Italo Calvino. In due time I received a cordial reply — in Italian, which I gathered (and a bilingual colleague confirmed) to say that while Calvino was gratified by the invitation, he was not yet confident enough of his English to preside over a “creative writing” course at our university. Such enterprises were and are, of course, quite foreign to our European brethren. My enthusiasm for Calvino’s fiction, however, was sufficiently shared by others at that lively place in that lively time (imagine having Don Barthelme and Michel Foucault as simultaneously visiting professors, as we did in Buffalo in 1972) to inspire the drama department to mount a charming stage adaptation of Cosmicomics in honor of the author; and having made each other’s epistolary acquaintance, Calvino and I exchanged books and occasional letters thereafter. He sent me Invisible Cities and the Tarots, both of which I found wonderfully good; I sent him Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera.

A few years later, in 1976, I was able to re-extend my come-visit invitation, this time from Johns Hopkins, whereto I had moved and wherefrom we contrived to extract some special funding for distinguished visitors in connection with the university’s centennial festivities. And this time, to our interdepartmental delight, Calvino accepted. Indeed, he accepted in English, declaring that he now felt confident enough in our language to give the thing a brief try. And at the close of his letter of acceptance I was charmed by. . Friendly yours.

In the event, he was with us in Baltimore for about two weeks in March of that year: a dapper, courteous, reserved but entirely cordial fellow whose alert, rather intense mien reminded me of a sharp-eyed bird’s. To my apprentice fiction-writers he read his essay on fiction as an ars combinatoria within a closed field. To the university’s Italian community he lectured in Italian on Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (but he politely declined an invitation from the Italian consulate in Baltimore to attend a reception there in his honor, on the grounds that he was visiting as a writer, not as a paisano). To the university community at large he gave a public reading from Cosmicomics, T-Zero, and Invisible Cities, which my wife and I remember with particular warmth despite the strain of his fallible and often hesitant English. I had let Calvino know, earlier, that his fiction had been among my courtship materials in the wooing of my bride — especially the lovely closing story from Cosmicomics, called “The Spiral”—and in acknowledgment of his unwitting role as our Galeoto, he included that story in his program, dedicating it to us. Finally, to our literature students and faculty he gave a delightful talk in English on his adventures with the Tarot cards, illustrating his remarks with the deck itself. A student of mine from those days remembers his accidentally dropping the whole pack in mid-demonstration; I myself cannot imagine Italo Calvino ever dropping a card or missing a trick — and sure enough, when I recently reviewed the videotapes of that occasion, I was gratified to see vindicated both my memory and Calvino’s manual dexterity.

Of that too-brief Baltimore sojourn I recall little else. We pointed out to Calvino our city’s funky Bromo-Seltzer Building, which Baltimoreans declare to resemble a Sienese tower. Calvino politely opined that it did not look remarkably Sienese to him, even without the giant blue trademark bottle that used to crown its clock (with the letters B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R instead of numerals). We showed him a particularly bleak nighttime stretch of featureless East Baltimore rowhouses, their cornices lined with hundreds of chattering starlings; to me the scene looked very like de Chirico, but Calvino, delighted with it, said, “It’s all Edward Hopper!” Both impressions, I think, are defensible. Off he presently went to join his wife up in New York City, which he loved, then down with her to Mexico City, which he didn’t love (although he much admired the smaller towns and the Mexican countryside, and was an avid collector of pre-Columbian artifacts), and then back to his home turf, the Paris/Torino axis along which he regularly commuted in those days. We continued to exchange books and occasional letters (such a lover of “lightness” and “quickness” cannot have admired my enormous novel called LETTERS, which I sent him in 1979, although I’m confident he would have approved its formal design). My wife and I looked forward to a reunion with him and Mrs. Calvino during his Norton lectureship at Harvard in 1985/86: a reunion and a lectureship that, alas, never came to pass.

Two final reminiscences, and then on with the story. Just a week or so after the news reached us of Italo’s death on September 19, 1985, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a much closer friend of Eco’s, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco’s “chaperon,” as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had it on good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of the massive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the man managed to utter, as perhaps his final words, “I paralleli! I paralleli!” (“The parallels! The parallels!”). Kindly perpend that wonderful exit-line, to which I shall shortly return.

A year or so later, Esther (“Chichita”) Calvino telephoned to ask whom I might recommend to write a foreword to the Harvard University Press’s forthcoming publication of her husband’s never-delivered Norton lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Promptly and warmly I recommended myself for that melancholy last rite, but she explained that the Press was insisting on the introducer’s being someone from the Harvard community. On that I drew a blank, and in the event she wrote the touching and altogether admirable foreword herself — the first of several that she has since written for posthumous editions of her husband’s work.

In those five lovely Memo lectures—“Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” and “Multiplicity”³—Calvino voices several times his admiration for Jorge Luis Borges, an admiration that he and I had shared in our Baltimore conversations. The story-series Lost in the Funhouse, I had told Calvino, was my attempt to assimilate my encounter with Borges’s narrative imagination; the T-Zero collection, Calvino had replied, was his endeavor to do likewise. If parallel lines can be bent non-Euclideanly back upon themselves, I shall circle now back to this lecture’s starting-place and draw a few paralleli—also some anti-paralleli—between the fiction of those two superb writers, who were born a quarter-century apart (both, as it happens, in Latin America) but who died, alas for literature, within nine months of each other (both as it happens, in Europe).

IT’S UNDERSTOOD, I trust, that I’m with you today not in my capacity as a Faulkner specialist, for I have no such capacity, but merely and purely as a writer of fiction, who will presently read a short passage from a not markedly Faulknerian work in progress.² But the great American writer celebrated by this annual conference happens to have been among my first-magnitude navigation stars during my literary apprenticeship, and I’d like to speak a bit to that subject before I change voices.

In 1947, virtually innocent of literature, I matriculated as a freshman at the Johns Hopkins University. I can scarcely remember now what I had been taught before that in the English courses of our semi-rural, semi-redneck 11-year county public school system on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore; I certainly don’t recall having been much touched by any of it, or inspired by any of my pleasant, well-meaning teachers. I borrowed books busily from the available libraries³—Tom Swift, Edgar Rice Burroughs — and indiscriminately from my father’s small-town soda-fountain/lunchroom, whose stock in trade included magazines, piano sheet music, and the newfangled paperbound pocket books: Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and my favorite of all, the Avon Fantasy Reader series (Abe Merritt, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft, inter alia). I remember being baffled but intrigued by an item called Manhattan Transfer, by one John Dos Passos, and by another called Sanctuary, by somebody named William Faulkner, when they turned up randomly in my borrowings. Those were, I came to understand later, my accidental first exposures to modern lit; I sensed their difference from my regular diet, and even found and read some other items by that Faulkner fellow in the pile: The Wild Palms, Soldier’s Pay, and Pylon. On the whole, however, I was more intrigued by another anthology series just then appearing on Dad’s shelves, called The Ribald Reader: pretty spicy stuff by my then standards, and illustrated with titillative line-drawings. What I only dimly registered at the time was that those naughty anthologies were of considerable literary quality and admirable eclecticism: Their ribaldry was culled from the Decameron, Pentameron, and Heptameron, from The 1001 Nights and the Gesta Romanorum and the Panchatantra, among other exotic sources — all news to me, and not to be found in either the Dorchester County Public or the Cambridge (Maryland) school libraries (where The Arabian Nights was a much-abridged and expurgated edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth).

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.

WHAT A REMARKABLE occasion for a pan-American literary conference at a Spanish university: the centennial of the Spanish-American War and of Spain’s consequent loss of her last American colonies; the end of her enormous empire, which, as the British historian Hugh Thomas recently declared, “in its duration and cultural influence. . overshadows the empires of Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and even Russia.”

At first one might wonder, Why commemorate such an historical setback with a literary conference? But then one remembers that when a newspaper reporter once asked William Faulkner what, in his opinion, accounted for the impressive literary flowering of the North American Southland after our Civil War, Faulkner replied: “We lost.” And does not Homer somewhere remark ironically that “Wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about”? Perhaps we can revise that obiter dictum to read “Wars are lost so that” et cetera. Clearly, the aphorism applies with particular poignancy to Spain after 1898. I shall return to it after expressing my gratitude to this university, to the Fulbright Commission, and to the organizers of this conference for providing my wife and me with an occasion to revisit España: a country for which we share a longstanding affection; a country that we have visited a number of times over the decades, and that has been of some importance to me as a writer of fiction.

Indeed, for reasons that I shall presently make clear, one of my tentative titles for this talk was “One Hundred Years of Gratitude” (Cien Años de Gratitud: The rhyme with solitude works in English, though not in Spanish). Reflecting upon the literary activity in North and South America since 1898 and upon literary relations between the two continents as well, I also considered “One Hundred Years of Plenitude.” But then, shaking my head at some unfortunate aspects of our political relations through that period, I thought perhaps “One Hundred Years of Turpitude” might be more appropriate. (Do we have the word turpitud en español? No? We certainly have it in English.) And then, considering what my more knowledgeable friends tell me of the vigor and diversity of contemporary Spanish literature, I considered “The (Re)Generation of ’98;² or, Forget the Maine!” To this subject, too — I mean the infamous event that triggered the Spanish-American War — I shall return.

What a formidable cien años ours has been! As a novelist, I make occasional use of what are called in English “time lines”: those reference books and computer software programs that attempt to show, like an orchestral concert score, what was happening more or less simultaneously in various fields in various parts of the world at particular periods of history. To look back upon the closing years of the 19th century and at the year 1898 in particular with the help of these time lines is to be impressed by their busyness, by their sheer activity in just about every area of human endeavor, and by what their remarkable accomplishments can now be seen to have portended for the century that followed. Perhaps the same could be said of virtually any decade in recent centuries if one examines it through the lens of hindsight; but just consider: The years 1890 through 1899 gave us the Nobel prizes and the modern Olympic games, Social Darwinism, the Dreyfus Affair, Gobineau’s “scientific” racism, and the Klondike Gold Rush. They saw the triumph of Europe’s colonization of Africa (except for Ethiopia and Liberia) and the suppression of our North American Indians at the battle of Wounded Knee, along with our westward expansion into the new states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. They gave us the Sino-Japanese War and the Cuban Revolution and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; they gave us the first cinema and the first comic strip; they gave us the discovery of radioactivity and the invention of wireless telegraphy, the diesel engine, the automobile, electromagnetic sound recording, rocket propulsion, synthetic fibers, electric subways, the clothing zipper, the safety razor, and the “safety bicycle.” They gave us Frazer’s Golden Bough and Freud’s Studien über Hysterie and Havelock Ellis’s Psychopathia Sexualis; Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Volume 3) and Bergson’s Matiere et Memoire and Herzl’s Der Judenstraat and John Dewey’s School and Society. It was the decade of Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau; of Debussy and Puccini and Richard Strauss and Sibelius and Mahler and Massenet; of Chekhov and Darío and young Yeats and old Tolstoy, of Ibsen and Shaw and Conrad and Henry James and Machado de Assis.

As for our “baseline” year: The timelines tell us that 1898 saw the opening of the Paris Metro, the construction of Count Zeppelin’s first dirigible, the discovery of radium and xenon and neon and the dysentery bacillus, and the first successful photography with artificial light. In China, the Boxer Rebellion against Western influences began. Bismarck and Gladstone died that year; so did Lewis Carroll and Stefan Mallarmé. On the other hand, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway were born (as was my mother), and, if my obstetrical arithmetic is correct, both Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov were conceived in 1898. Zola’s “J’Accuse” was published that year, as were Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Knut Hamsun’s Victory and H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol and Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and J. K. Huysman’s La Cathédrale.

All very impressive and rich in promise. But then we reflect upon the staggering century that followed — two world wars and abundant smaller but also dreadful ones; poison gas, automatic weapons, aerial bombing, nuclear and biological weapons; totalitarianism and massacre on an unprecedented scale, despite which our species overruns and despoils the planet and its atmosphere, et cetera ad nauseam — and I am reminded of a cartoon in our New Yorker magazine a few years ago: Our astronauts have landed on a beautiful, verdant new planet, a virtual paradise; indeed, as they step out of their space vehicle they see in the near distance a fruit tree, under which stand a man and a woman, naked; there is a serpent in the tree; the woman holds an apple in her hand, from which she seems about to take a bite — and one of the astronauts runs toward her, shouting “Wait!” Looking back at the timelines for the pre-dawn of this century, I feel like that astronaut: “¡Cuidado! ¡Un momento, por dios!”

Too late: Consummatum est, or almost so — for who knows what may yet happen to us in the small remaining interval between today and the next century, not to mention what that century may have in store for us?

Cien años de plenitud; cien años de turpitud (I’ll use the word, even though it doesn’t exist in Spanish and doesn’t rhyme with soledad). As for gratitud. . well: In the face of our century’s human catastrophes — the hundreds of millions of victims of militant nationalism and colonialism, of ideology in general and totalitarianism in particular — one feels that there is something unseemly, perhaps even obscene, about reviewing its positive accomplishments in science, technology, and the arts, including the Hundred Years of Literary Plenitude that inspired this conference: the century of modernismo and of Modernism; of Postmodernism and Magic Realism and El Boom.³ As if, for example, the scientific and cultural enrichment of the United States (and the world) by refugees from European Fascism and Russian Communism — by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann and Pablo Casals and Vladimir Nabokov and dozens of others in every field, including my own Johns Hopkins professors Leo Spitzer and Pedro Salinas — as if their achievements somehow mitigate the evils that they fled! Or, to come closer to home, as if, in some humanistic double-entry bookkeeping, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica can somehow be balanced against the Guernica of Francisco Franco. Something obscene, I say, about that. And yet….

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON Goethe once remarked to the Duke of Weimar — no doubt on the occasion of accepting some ducal honor — that refusing a distinction (as Boris Pasternak and Jean-Paul Sartre, for different reasons, declined their Nobel prizes in 1958 and 1964) can be as immodest as chasing after it. Philip Roth, upon accepting a New York Book Critics Circle Award, observed that since he, like many another writer, often feels that such prizes go to the wrong guy, this must be his night to be the wrong guy. John Updike’s character Henry Bech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize that his author surely deserves but has yet to be graced with,¹ declares that that prize “has become so big, such a celebrity among prizes, that no one is worthy to win it, and the embarrassed winner can shelter his unworthiness behind the unworthiness of everyone else.” That reminds me of how the undergraduates at Washington College over in Chestertown, where my wife and I live, feel about the college’s prestigious Sophie Kerr Lit Prize, a $35,000 plum awarded annually for quite a few years now to one of their number, none of whom thus far (so they tell me) has subsequently evolved into a professionally publishing writer: So convinced are the student competitors that the Kerr Prize is cursed (“Sophie’s Curse,” they call it) that upon my being appointed a Senior Fellow of the college a few years back, I made it my first official act to pronounce that curse lifted. We’ll see what happens.² And a writer friend of mine — as we were either applauding Gabriel García Márquez’s receipt of the Nobel in 1982 or else shaking our writerly heads at someone else’s receipt of it in some other year, I forget which — observed sagely that there are on the one hand those who do honor to the prize, and on the other hand those to whom the prize does honor.

Well: In the short history of the Pratt Society’s Lifetime Achievement award, my two forewinners (Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates) have done enough honor to the prize to permit me simply to be honored by it — as I hope you’ll disagree. In any case, my thanks to the adjudicating committee, whoever you are, the difficulties of whose task I can appreciate, having paid my dues on a similar committee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Indeed, after doing three years’ hard time on that awards committee, while at the same time tisking at the Swedish Academy for passing over such contemporary giants as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino in favor of one or another lesser entity, I was led to what I think of as the Tragic View of Recognition: namely, that a worthwhile literary prize is one that will at least occasionally be bestowed upon an author despite the fact that she or he happens to deserve it. By that stringent definition, the Pratt Prize has a high credit rating indeed, to which I hope tonight’s occasion will not do lasting damage.

That said, I must confess to feeling a slight chill in the presence of any “Lifetime Achievement” award. Since I persist in still going to my writing-table every weekday morning to see what my muse has on her mind, I can’t help wishing that the thing would say “Lifetime Achievement Thus Far.” In any case, as I used to tell my apprentice fiction-writers up at Johns Hopkins, lit prizes are a bit like PhDs: They don’t invariably equate with excellence (in some cases they may barely equate with proficiency), and some of the very best practitioners don’t have them. But if you’re going to be shrug-shouldered about either literary prizes or doctoral degrees, it’s better to be so after winning them, so that your shrug-shoulderedness can’t be mistaken for sour-grapes envy.

ET CETERA. BUT none of these considerations has to do with public readings as an art form. They may justify, even partially vindicate, my presence here onstage this evening and yours in the audience, or my presence in the audience some other evening to hear some other writer onstage. But is it art, or art of other than the lowest order?

NOW THAT WE seem to have made the transition more or less safely into the new century and millennium, it may require some effort of memory to recall that back in the late Nineteen Hundreds — especially in the year we called “1999”—the word “TEOTWAWKI” was a popular acronym for the most apocalyptic of “Y2K” scenarios: TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It. Difficult as it may be to believe from this historical distance (a full twelvemonth later), chronicles of the period tell us that in certain precincts of Planet Earth it was seriously believed that either widespread critical computer failures or the Second Coming of Christ, perhaps both, would precipitate the collapse of our technology-dependent society, followed very possibly by literal or anyhow figurative Armageddon. The End Time! Eschaton! The end of the world as we’d known it! Convinced TEOTWAWKIs went so far in some instances as to build well-stocked refuges out in the boondocks and to arm themselves against the expected desperate hordes of a no longer civilized civilization. A few, of the Christian-apocalyptic persuasion, put everything behind them and followed their leaders or went on their own to Jerusalem or some comparably appropriate venue to await the Rapture and its sequelae. Even among the skeptical and conservative, we’re told, many withdrew a wad of extra cash and laid in some daysworth of nonperishable food and jugged water, as their government’s Y2K advisors recommended. For such as those (my wife and me among them) these precautions amounted to a scaled-down secular version of Pascal’s famous Wager concerning the existence of God: The world as we knew it wasn’t likely to end, we figured, but at least the weekend might be messed up; no harm in hedging our bets a bit. And so we did.

TEOTWAWKI: In my tidewater-Chesapeake ears, the word sounds like a large, rather ungainly waterfowl taking flight. Great Blue Herons, for example, make a sound like that when they take off or flap in for a landing: TEOTWA W-KI! Characteristically too, on lift-off they emit, along with the squawk but from their other end, a copious white jet of birdlime. And there was certainly no shortage of that back in ’99, associated with what in our house was known as TEOTCAMATTGCACM: The End Of The Century And Millennium According To The Gregorian Calendar As Commonly Misconstrued.

IT MAY BE worth noting that the title of this symposium comprises two separate or at least separable topics: the first general, the second more specific, and both interesting. I’ll make a few remarks first about the general subject of a writer’s being cut off for whatever reason from a geographical/cultural place that had been important to his/her creative imagination, and then about the specific loss of place-identity to what we’re calling “the homogenization of American life.” Both, I’m going to argue, are non-problems — at least in themselves.

As for Topic 1: “I’ve lost my place!” is a lament almost as common among writers as among readers who neglect to use bookmarks. Among the former, the consequences of place-loss by voluntary or involuntary exile, for example, have historically been downright splendid for literature, however painful for particular writers as people. From Ovid through Dante to Joyce and Nabokov, and including the expatriate “Lost Generation” of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, et al., the Literature of Exile is so rich a tradition that it might arguably be well for Place-Lit if all writers were obliged to spend a figurative Junior Year Abroad in the course of their apprenticeship, the way Professor Larry Chisholm at Yale used to require his doctoral candidates in American Studies to spend a year or two in Biafra or Zimbabwe, say, for the purpose of acquiring an anthropological detachment from their subject-matter. In my own case, it was when I left my native Chesapeake tidewaterland after graduate school to go teach in central Pennsylvania that the place I’d put behind me became the locale, if not quite the subject, of my first several novels. But of course writers are so different from one another that no generalizations about the benefits of exile will do. Getting out of Ireland worked as well for Frank McCourt (of Angela’s Ashes fame) as it did for James Joyce; but whether that “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” at the end of Joyce’s very Irish Ulysses would have been good for Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor, for example, is another story.

And as to our real subject — the literary consequences of a place’s loss of its distinctive character to the “homogenization of American life”—I call it a non-problem for at least four reasons, while always acknowledging that anything might turn out to be a problem for some particular writer:

— First (a point I’ll expand upon in my later remarks on “The Place of Place in Fiction”), although many good writers revel and even more or less specialize in the realistic rendition of some particular locale, such rendition is not prerequisite to first-rate fiction. Ernest Hemingway declared that “every writer owes it to the place of his birth either to immortalize it or to destroy it”; I would add that he/ she may opt simply to ignore it, and to set her/his fiction in other real places, or in imagined or imaginary places, or nowhere in particular. I’m not recommending this, mind; only remarking it.

— Second, the loss of a place’s once-distinctive character, whether to cultural homogenization or simply to the passage of time, is what leads to the Literature of Nostalgia: a genre as rich as, and often overlapping, the Literature of Expatriation. Thus Faulkner, for example, whose Mississippi remained central to his imagination even after he himself shifted to exotic Virginia in his latter years, enjoyed contrasting the Old Yoknapatawpha with the New, where automobiles now zip down the streets “with a sound like tearing silk.” All grist for his mill.

— Third, the Homogenization of American Life and consequent attrition of place-identity can itself be a viable literary subject — as can anything, I daresay, in the hands of an appropriately inspired writer.

— And fourth, “homogenization” is always a matter of degree, and can cast what distinctiveness remains into higher relief than formerly. The film-director Jean Renoir observed that “the marvelous thing about [Hollywood] Westerns is that they are all the same movie. That gives a director unlimited freedom.”¹ “Unlimited” is doubtless an exaggeration, but it’s a truism about any genre-art that its practitioners and fans become connoisseurs of small differences within the generic parameters. Against a background of the perceived homogenization of American life, the same might apply to non-generic art as well — as witness the title of Larry McMurtry’s recent essay-collection, Walter Benjamin at the Tasti-Freeze. A once-“wild” West that now has the usual constellation of strip developments and franchise businesses is admittedly less different from other places than it used to be; I submit, however, that a Tasti-Freeze in Archer, Texas, with a Larry McMurtry in it reading the late French literary critic and theoretician Walter Benjamin, remains a distinctive place indeed and (Q.E.D. by the book afore-cited) may be a fit subject for fiction, nonfiction, drama, or verse.

A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS MUST always commence with a joke, even if the somber-sounding title of that address is “The Tragic View of Liberal Education.” As I happen not to have any appropriate jokes of my own, I’m going to borrow one from Bill Cosby, who gave the commencement address at Goucher College in Baltimore this time last year. It is a joke that, as Cosby warned his audience, contains one naughty word — and then he added, “At least it used to be a naughty word.”

It seems that a distinguished physicist and a distinguished philosopher happened to die at the same time, and approaching Heaven’s gate they were informed by the Gatekeeper that because of temporary overcrowding, God was admitting only those deserving souls who could ask Him a question that even He couldn’t answer; all others would have to wait in Limbo indefinitely. The physicist reflected for a moment and then posed the most intricate, difficult problem in quantum mechanical theory — which God solved on the spot. The philosopher then put the most elusive question in metaphysical/ontological /epistemological theory — to which God unhesitatingly gave an irrefutable answer. As the two great thinkers shook their heads in awe, an elderly couple humbly approached and whispered in the deity’s ear; He scratched His head, then shook it and promptly ushered them into Heaven.

“Excuse us, Sir,” the physicist and philosopher then respectfully inquired: “We can’t help wondering what in the world those folks asked that even You couldn’t answer.” To which God sighed and replied, “They asked me, When will our kids ever get their shit together?”

SPEAKING AT JOHNS Hopkins University back when his country was riven by Apartheid, the eminent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee remarked that under such sorry historical circumstances, for him to publish a novel that made no political statement would be tantamount to his making a very conspicuous — and egregious — political statement. From my seat in the audience I nodded sympathetic assent, although Coetzee’s observation was by no means a pitch for sympathy. And, not for the first time, I silently thanked Apollo and all the Muses for affording me the luxury of political irrelevance.

More exactly, I felt grateful to chance and history for affording me the option of writing fiction that intends no political/ideological statement; for the good fortune of living in a place and time that can regard as equally honorable the literary credos of, on the one hand, my fellow American fictionist Grace Paley, for example — a heroic protester of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, among her other good causes, who once declared to my students that “Art isn’t important: People are important. Politics is important”—and on the other hand that of the late Vladimir Nabokov, himself a political refugee, who nevertheless maintained that his sole literary aim was “aesthetic bliss.” It should be noted that one can savor a Grace Paley short story on its literary merits alone (I myself do not find her excellent fiction especially “political”), and that Nabokov’s virtuoso novels are by no means oblivious to the political upheavals that drove him from his native Russia. But both authors felt free — as Coetzee by his own acknowledgment did not, and as artists in any politically convulsed or oppressed place and time may well not — either to engage their art in the service of some political/moral cause or to regard that art itself as their cause: Art for Art’s sake, or more specifically, in the case of fiction, art for the sake of language, form, action, character, plot, setting, narration, and theme; Story (mainly though not exclusively) for Story’s sake. For the freedom to be, in my writing, politically engaged or politically irrelevant, I feel as fortunate as for the happy accident of my having been born in just the right narrow historical “window” (the year was 1930) to miss direct involvement in all the U.S.-involved wars of the Terrible Twentieth Century: not here yet for World War I, in which my father served and my uncle died; too young for World War II, in which my older brother served; exempted by student- and then marital/parental deferments from service in Korea, where many of my age-group served; too old to be conscripted for the war in Vietnam (for which my male children, luckily, missed having their draft-lottery numbers called). May that cycle of good fortune be repeated for my children’s children! Would that it could extend to all the world’s children!

Which is not at all to say that I regard every one of those terrible wars as unjustified, any more than (as a citizen of my country and the world) I feel “above” engagement with political/social issues. Not at all. Although I happen to incline to the Skeptical-Pacifist persuasion, had I been born a few years earlier I would no doubt have enlisted patriotically in the 1940s, along with my brother, to oppose Nazism and its Japanese counterpart. I will even grant that if such had been the case, I might very well feel the experience to have been centrally important or at least significant to me as a writer: Most artists’ work is affected in some measure by major experiences of their youth. But I do not regret having missed that particular category of convulsion. Indeed, Ernest Hemingway is the only American writer I can think of who professed a condescending pity for those of his countrymen who happened not to experience the trauma of warfare: I recollect his declaring somewhere or other that World War I was “the defining event of their generation, and they simply missed it.” Hemingway, however, was by notorious disposition a macho adventure-seeker. If his admirable fiction happened to depend upon that appetite, so be it; the no less admirable fiction of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and F. Scott Fitzgerald — to name only a few of his illustrious peers — did not.

My argument is simply that for an artist to be politically concerned and even politically active as a citizen does not — anyhow should not, ideally — mandate politically concerned art. I quite understand J. M. Coetzee’s position as aforestated, which in his case has produced writing as commendable on its literary as on its moral/ political merits. But I admire at least equally the art of the late great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, for example, who, though embarrassed and harassed by the Perón regime (at whose hands he was “promoted” from his post in the Buenos Aires municipal library to the rank of chicken-and-rabbit inspector in the public markets), was not moved thereby to write political allegories and anti-Perónista fables, as he quite justifiably might have been.² Borges admits (in “An Autobiographical Essay”) to having danced in the streets of Buenos Aires when Perón was ousted in September 1955, and also to writing a couple of pro-Israel poems at the time of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967; more typically, however, when his fiction addresses contemporary political/historical matters — as in his short story “The Secret Miracle,” for example, about a Czech playwright executed by the Nazis for the crime of being Jewish — the story is at least as much about art and metaphysics as about the Holocaust.

ON TO MY second category: visiting writers’ obiter dicta to which I readily nod assent and find myself often quoting, but not without some amplification or qualification. I like Dylan Thomas’s (sober, but playful) assertion, for example, that “all trees are oak trees — except pine trees”: It serves to remind early-apprentice writers especially that to say Patsy paused under a tree or Just then Fred’s car zipped by is almost always less effective than specifying what sort of tree and automobile were involved — specificity being one component of sensory texture, and sensory texture being usually a literary plus (but not invariably, I remind them: Don’t forget Beckett). Whence one goes on to suggest — they having in revision paused Patsy under a Norway maple and zipped Fred into a milk-white Camaro — that it were well if those specifications turned out to be not only specific, but relevant. Why a Norway maple instead of a weeping birch? Why a “milk-white Camaro” (Mary Robison) instead of a “gamboge Cadillac” (Frederick Barthelme) or a “high, rat-colored car” (Flannery O’Connor, the mother of automotive specificity in American literature)?

Into this same middle category go the contradictory recommendations of Joseph Heller and E. L. Doctorow regarding dramaturgical advance planning. Heller declared to our seminar that he always wrote his novels’ closing chapters first: How would he know how to get there, he asked rhetorically, if he didn’t know where he was going? Mind you, he went on, these first-draft last chapters were proposals, not binding contracts; by the time he re-reached them, small or large changes might well be in order. But he could no more begin a novel without knowing how he meant to end it than he could launch into a joke without knowing its punch line. Doctorow, on the contrary (not in my seminar, but in one of his at Sarah Lawrence College decades ago, whence one of his students later came to us and retold the tale when I retold Heller’s) is alleged to have said that a novelist “needn’t see beyond [his] headlights”—which I take to mean that knowing the direction of the next plot-turn is navigational data enough; that bridges farther down the road may be crossed when one arrives at them. All very well, perhaps, I warned my seminarians, for a veteran professional like Doctorow with doubtless well-established work habits and seasoned intuitions, but dangerous advice indeed for apprentice novelists, a fair number of whom I’ve seen write themselves into all but inextricable cul-de-sacs. Something between Doctorow’s improvisatory insouciance and Heller’s to-me-unimaginably-detailed advance planning is probably soundest for most of us yarn-spinners: The aforecriticized John Gardner — by all reports a first-rate coach despite his wrongheadedness, by my lights, in certain areas — wisely observes (in his treatise On Becoming a Novelist) that most novels culminate in some sort of all-hands-on-deck Big Scene, and that it were well for the author to have at least some advance notion of that scene’s lineaments. Something may be said for putting off the crossing of bridges until one reaches them, but it helps to know ahead of time that there’s a bridge or two to be crossed, and whether it looks to be a footbridge or the Golden Gate.

THUMB-RULE #1 FOR aspiring writers, it goes without saying, is Be Wary of Writers’ Rules of Thumb. Anton Chekhov liked the smell of rotting apples in his writing desk. Edna Ferber advised nothing more interesting on that desk’s far side than a blank wall. Ernest Hemingway and Scheherazade, for different reasons, inclined to close their day’s (or night’s) output in mid-story, even in mid-sentence. I myself advise no more than that you merely perpend such advisements and predilections, including mine to follow, en route to discovering by hunch, feel, trial, and error what best floats your particular boat. Too many rules of thumb can make a chap all thumbs.

That said, I report that for this writer at least, regularity is as helpful with the Muse as with the bowels: a comparison to be taken just so far and no farther. Go to your worktable at the same time daily, establish your Personal Prep Routine, and you’re likely to find that just as making breakfast (to change analogies) may sharpen your appetite, so some established little ritual of muse-invocation may get your creative juices flowing. I myself — after the breakfast afore-alluded-to with wife and newspaper, followed by that toilette likewise alluded to and a ten-minute routine of stretching exercises picked up half a century ago from an RCAF training manual — refill my thermal coffee mug and disappear into my Scriptorium no later than half past eight every weekday morning. It has separate workspaces for Creation, Production, and Business; ignoring the third of those (appointments calendar, file drawers, check registers and accounting ledgers, telephone, clock, and calculator, all relegated to Later), I pause at the second just long enough to boot up and then promptly anesthetize my more-or-less-trusty Macintosh, which will remain in Standby mode unless this morning’s work is to be the revision and editing of an already first-drafted text — for me, the most enjoyable stage of writing, because it feels agreeably creative, but is so much easier than invention and composition. Turning then to the sanctum sanctorum, the worktable consecrated to Composition, I do the following routine preps, the musely equivalent of those earlier RCAF exercises:

1) Insert a set of Mack’s earplugs from supply in worktable drawer: a habit carried over from that same half-century ago, when my now middle-aged children were high-energy tots and their father was an overworked, underpaid young college instructor obliged to snatch the odd hour of writing-time at a little desk in the bedroom. By the time the nest was empty and my work-area a more commodious and quiet Personal Space, the earplug habit was as fixed as Chekhov’s requisite rotting apples. My muse sings only through ambient silence — her song not always clearly distinguishable, I confess, from the tinnitus familiar to many of us oldsters.

2) Ears plugged, slide selfward the worn, stained, and battered three-ring looseleaf binder procured during Freshman Orientation Week at Johns Hopkins in 1947, in which has been first-drafted every page of my fiction since those green undergraduate days. It’s as weathered now as its owner, who however counts on its continuing to hang together for at least as long as he does.

3) Open that “serviceable old thing” (as W. H. Auden fondly addressed his aging body) either to the Page in Progress or to the blank Next Thing, and take from its nestling-place among the gently rusting triple rings the somewhat less venerable but by me equally venerated Parker pen bought 40-plus years ago in “Mr. Pumblechook’s Premises” in Rochester, England, in honor of the great Boz. Uncap and fill that instrument with its daily draught of Permanent Jet Black Quink, and then….

Well, that depends. Like Hemingway & Co. aforementioned, I try to end each morn’s first-drafting while the going’s good, with maybe a brief penciled or ballpointed note of what’s to follow (the Parker is reserved strictly for Composition, not for notes, correspondence, and suchlike mundanities). If today’s session involves work in progress, then reviewing and editing the print-out of yesterday’s installment usually suffices to reorient the imagination and pump the creative adrenaline enough for me to resume first-draft penmanship — which a couple of hours later I’ll break off in mid-whatever, date in parentheses (with ballpoint pickup-note appended), and type into the waiting word processor for ease of subsequent revision, already editing the draft as I transcribe it. If, on the other hand, what awaited me back there at 8:30 was the between-projects three-hole ruled blank page, it’s a whole ’nother story, so to speak: one in which I’m likely to have recapped and renestled that refilled Parker, taken up Papermate and clipboard instead, and scratched hopeful preliminary notes toward. . who knows what? Maybe a mini-essay on writerly Rules of Thumb?

Most prose-writers nowadays in every genre — perhaps most poets, even — dispense altogether with the venerable, to them perhaps obsolete medium of longhand and compose directly on the PC. For all I know, maybe even their preliminary note-making is done on laptop or Palm Pilot. If so, so be it: As aforedeclared, whatever floats the old boat. For Yours Truly, however, the equation of narrative “flow” with the literal flow of ink onto paper, of the fountain pen with the Fount of Inspiration, holds as firmly as my right hand holds that maroon-and-brushed-silver Parker 51: a rule of (sometimes inkstained) thumb.

1) My chiefest fear for the future is that, like past futures, it will become the present.

SLIMMEST OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE pronouns and yet most self-assertive, even self-important, the nominative-case first-person-singular I (identical in most type-fonts to the Roman numeral, as if to declare “I am Number One!”) is always upper-case, unlike the more self-effacing Spanish yo, Italian io, French je, and German ich, for example, capitalized only when beginning a sentence, or even the English me, my, and mine—suggesting that in our tongue the self that is acted upon, or that merely possesses things, is less self-possessed than the self that takes action or possession.

The skinny thing’s antecedent, its user’s self, is at once obvious—self-evident, let’s say — and teasingly elusive. “Myself”: whose self is that? Who or what is the “self” that’s conscious of self-consciousness, even of being conscious of self-consciousness, et cetera ad infinitum? The “I” who asks that not-unreasonable question — who tries to peer behind that so-slender vertical letter — finds him-/herself caught in the classic philosophical quandary of the Retreating Subject, the infinite regress of facing mirrors. Gnothi seauton, “Know thyself,” advises the Delphic oracle: an incompletable project, sometimes vertiginous, in extreme cases even paralyzing, and commonly productive of unpleasant news. Professional storytellers like. . myself. . may incline to the “neurophilosopher” Daniel C. Dennett’s definition of the Self as one’s “center of narrative gravity”² (always allowing for the famous fictive device of the Unreliable Narrator). Not a bad idea, in “my” opinion, to sneak a peek from time to time in those funhouse mirrors. Having done so, however, better to turn away and ask, not “Who am I?”, but “Who are you? Who are we, and they? What is this, and that, and that?”—and get on with the story.

“HAPPY FAMILIES ARE all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I don’t particularly agree with that famous kick-off proposition of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but I’ll carry it to my grave, along with a clutch of other jim-dandy story-openers.

A first sentence’s job is to draw its reader into the sentences that follow it — while at the same time, in the case of fiction, maybe establishing the tale’s tone and narrative viewpoint, introducing one or more of its characters, and supplying preliminary hints of setting, situation, and impending action. Some do their job so well that they remain in our memory long after we’ve forgotten most of the words that came after, even in a novel that may have changed our lives, or at least deeply engaged our minds and spirits in the way great literature can. A Tale of Two Cities, in this reader’s opinion, is neither the best nor the worst of Dickens’s novels, but it’s the only one whose opening—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. .”—has stayed with me. Likewise the so-casual “Call me Ishmael” that opens Melville’s Moby-Dick (the first time I met the novelist Ishmael Reed, he smiled and said, “Call me Mister Reed”), and García Márquez’s time-straddling fanfare to One Hundred Years of Solitude—“Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—and a dozen more, from the bibliophilic beagle Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night” in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip (a cliché opening by the 19th-century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which the poor mutt never gets beyond) to the slyly soporific first words of Marcel Proust’s multivolume Remembrance of Things Past: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure,” that last one reads in the original, and the poet/translator Richard Howard thought it sufficiently important to preserve that opening’s word-order, even at some slight cost to its sense, that he amended Scott-Moncrieff’s earlier translation to read “Time was when I went to bed early,” so that Volume One of Proust’s epic about Time begins (as it will end) with that key word — and then, seven volumes later, outflanks its subject by having “Marcel,” at the saga’s close, set about to write the time-intensive tale that we’ve finally finished reading: a story about a storyteller’s preparing himself to tell the story that we’ve just been exhaustively told.

If that sounds too clever by half — too vertiginously “metafictive” or proto-Postmodern — it has some distinguished and comparably dizzying antecedents, none more offhandedly cunning than the opening of “Scheherazade’s” Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah, or The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. English translations from the anonymous compiler’s 13th-century Persian vary considerably, but my two favorites — Sir Richard Burton’s freewheeling and footnote-rich 1888 version, and Mardrus and Mathers’s more rigorous one a half-century later — both begin by declaring (in effect, and much less directly), “Praise be to Allah, who has passed on to us the tales called The Thousand Nights and a Night, among which is. . [the story of Scheherazade’s telling her nightly postcoital tales to wean the cuckolded King from his serial-murderous revenge].” A double-take opener indeed: The book in our hands, whose introduction we’ve embarked upon, is not Scheherazade’s book, but a book about Scheherazade’s book, which will wind up multivolumes later (17 in Burton’s edition, a modest four in M&M’s) with the welcome news that King Shahryar relents, lifts his nearly three-year-old entertain-me-or-die ultimatum, marries Scheherazade (who has by that time delivered him three male heirs as well as a kilonightsworth of stories), and commands her to tell them all over again to the royal scribes — thus accounting not directly for the book we’re finally at the close of, but for the book that that book is about: “And this is all that has come down to us concerning the origins of this book.”¹

Allah willing, Amen!

Which terminal imperative may remind us that this kind of ingenious once-upon-a-timery has been a storyteller’s ploy from the beginning, so to speak. Whether or not the God of the Bible ever winked at the devoted audience of His own creation, His chronicler in the Book of Genesis sure did: What subtle, pre-proto-Postmodern chutzpah, to kick off the story of the world’s beginning with the Hebrew word Bereshith, “In the beginning. .”—anticipating Proust’s merely Modernist “Time was” by nearly three millennia!²

But then, the bards of the classical Greek oral tradition, arguably coeval with Genesis if not with the world’s big-bang commencement, traditionally cleared their epic throats by saying, in effect, “Sing, O Muse, the tale that I’m here and now about to repeat: the one about [et cetera].” Which is not necessarily to say, “And while you’re at it, begin at the beginning, okay?” Better to hit the ground running in medias res: advice worth perpending still in Tale-Telling 101.³

A dozen-plus centuries later, at about the same time that the great Persian Anonymous was setting down the story of the story of Scheherezade’s stories, his or her fellow pre-Postmodernist Dante Alighieri, in exile from Florence, ratcheted up his countryman Horace’s advice by beginning his divinely comic epic not only in the middle of its narrator’s story instead of “In the beginning,” but with the very words Nel mezzo. “In the middle of our life’s road, I found myself lost in a Dark Wood”: a quietly bravura overture to a work whose form throughout will figure its three-in-one, unity-of-the-Trinity content, from the traditional division of the Hereafter into Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, through the allotment of (on average) 33 1/3 cantos to each of those departments, to the interlocking three-line stanzas’ terza rima versification. Three cheers, maestro!

Tough acts to follow. But a mere six centuries later, James Joyce completes the movement from Genesis’s “In the beginning” through Dante’s “In the middle” by beginning his dream-epic Finnegans Wake not with “The end” but with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”—which odd, lower-case opener (so we learn 627 dream-dark pages later, unless we’d heard the news already) is the completion of that cyclical opus’s unfinished closing sentence. In short, the author begins his story literally in the middle of its ending: a triple play at which Dante might have nodded approval, unless he’d nodded off. As a graduate student in the 1950s, I proposed in a Joyce seminar that the appropriate print-vehicle for Finnegans Wake would be not a conventionally bound book, but either a very long roller-towel or unnumbered pages fanning out from a central spindle, so that Beginning and Ending would literally conjoin.

Time was (excuse the expression) when some late-arriving epigones of the great Modernists did indeed chafe at what they felt to be the passé bonds of conventional print technology and experimented with alternatives, not necessarily to the print-medium itself, but to its customary modes of presentation: One thinks of Marc Saporta’s 1962 novel-in-a-box Composition 1, its unnumbered and unbound pages packaged in any random “order” and thus sans any fixed opening sentence at all, or any other authorially-determined beginning, middle, or ending; likewise Daniel Spoerri’s unpaginated Anecdoted Typography of Chance, from 1966. That rebellious, “countercultural” decade was particularly rich (if that’s the right adjective) in this sort of post-Dadaist, pre-computer-era experimentation: Apprentice writing-workshoppers back then came up with such alternatives to conventional tale-telling as, e.g., a short story called “Serial,” its several sentences typed on separate paper strips like extended fortune-cookie fortunes, shaken up in an appropriately refigured “cereal” box and dumped into a bowl, to be fished out and read in random order, any one of them potentially the story’s opening sentence. After two or three such “serial” readings, one pieced together the tale’s simple plot; its suspense then became not “What happened?” but “In what order will its component actions be recounted this time around?” And it worked, sort of, to hear a line like “Three months later they found what remained of Lizzie in the marsh” now as the story’s opening, now as its ending, now as one mid-course complication — a bit like reassembling a familiar jigsaw puzzle or reconstructing a fossil skeleton from its scattered bones. One remembers too Spencer Holst’s “Pleasures of the Imagination: 64 Beginnings,” comprising just that: 64 more or less arresting openers like “The obese puppeteer washed the dishes in the dark,” with no stories attached.

The advent of word processors, “hypertext,” online interactive fiction, and even an Electronic Literature Organization may make such Marshall McLuhan-era innovations seem as quaint as tail-finned autos. But it may also remind us (if we need reminding) that the mature and stable technology of the printed book, like the narrative/ dramatical conventions of Beginning, Middle, and Ending — older than print, older even than writing — can be jiggered and redeployed to memorable effect as long as homo sapiens still savors the eminently human pleasure of hearing and recounting tales. As Donald Barthelme liked to say (and as I’m fond of repeating), the important question about a story isn’t whether it’s realistic or irrealistic, traditionalist or “experimental,” pre- or post-Modern: The important question is “Does it knock your socks off?”

To which one might add that a real socks-knocker of a story may have a deliberately low-keyed opening (“Call me Ishmael”), just as a first-rate movie may start with nothing more “dramatic” than a man shaving or a woman pouring the breakfast coffee. Contrariwise, a lapel-grabbing opening shot or sentence — car chase, pistol fired as if at viewer, string of Boldface all-caps obscenities! — may open an eminently forgettable yarn. The wannabe novelist Joseph Grand in Albert Camus’ The Plague tinkers endlessly with his manuscript’s first sentence (“One fine morning in the month of May, an elegant young woman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne,” among numerous other versions) in a vain effort to get it so exactly right that any editor must cry “Hats off!”—while Camus’s chef d’oeuvre itself opens with the simple declaration that “The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194_ at Oran.”

Do I have your attention, Reader? On with the story, then….

DAVID BEAUMONT’S MASTERFUL Introduction to Volume I of the two-volume Signet Classics edition of The Arabian Nights opens in true Scheherazadean style: “The story of the book called The Arabian Nights, it has been said, is a story worthy of being in The Arabian Nights.”

To that introduction-to-an-introduction, your present introducer of Volume II — no scholarly authority like Professors Beaumont and Jack Zipes (whose Afterwords to both volumes are likewise excellent), but a longtime yarn-spinning fan of Ms. Scheherazade — cannot resist adding that “the story of the book called The Arabian Nights” in fact is in The Arabian Nights, or anyhow just outside it. It’s the frame that frames the frame, so to speak.

I mean this literally. The stories, stories-within-stories, and stories-within-stories-within-stories that comprise the Kitab Alf Laylah Wa Laylah, or, as it’s variously called, “The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night” or “The Arabian Nights Entertainment,” are from all over the Indian/Persian/Arabic map. Over the centuries, like old-time merchant-traders traveling the Silk Road and adding to their stash of goods along the way, the book’s innumerable compilers picked up yarns from here and there and stitched them into their narrative quilt. And they’re famously framed by the best story of them all: the story of their teller, the courageous, canny, beautiful, and learned young daughter of the king’s Grand Vizier — a monarch so murderously deranged by his wife’s infidelities that after executing her he “marries” a virgin every night and has her killed in the morning before she too can cuckold him. For the story of that story, see Beaumont’s preface to Volume I — and then read the opening story in that volume, “The Story of King Shahryar and His Brother,” which explains why and under what circumstances Scheherazade will spin out, by my count, no fewer than 169 “primary” tales, at least 19 of which contain tales-within-the-tale: 87 “secondary tales” in all, at least four of which contain tertiary tales-within-the-tale-within-the-tale, for a total of some 267 complete stories, plus about ten thousand lines of verse in Sir Richard Burton’s original unexpurgated ten-volume translation of the Nights (1885–1886), of which the present version is an artful two-volume abridgment. And that’s before we even get to the seven volumes of Burton’s later Supplemental Nights.

But this apparently outermost frame — the tale of King Shahryar of “the lands of India and China,” his similarly-cuckolded and similarly-vengeful brother King Shah Zaman of Samarkand, and Scheherazade and her younger sister Dunyazade, which begins more than a thousand nights before Night 1 and winds up well after Night 1001—is itself framed, sort of, by an intriguing formulation (intriguing to some of us later storytellers, anyhow): In all versions, after the ritual invocation to Almighty Allah, the anonymous narrator-scribe declares in effect, not that “There once was a jealous king named Shahryar,” et cetera, but that “There is a book called The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, in which one will find the story of King Shahryar and his brother Shah Zaman [and Scheherazade and Dunyazade], which goes like this. . ” A thousand-plus nights later, after that so-productive young talester — talestress? — has delivered herself not only of those several hundred stories, but also of three male children (“one walking, one crawling, one suckling”) sired by her entertain-me-or-die consort, and has delivered the king as well from his pathologically murderous, kingdom-wrecking jealousy, she successfully pleads for her life, officially weds the father of her children and inspirer of her stories in a regally elaborate joint ceremony with her now older and less innocent kid sister and Shahryar’s up-till-then equally murderous kid brother, and the foursome are declared to have lived happily thenceforth — not “ever after,” as in Western fables, but more realistically “until the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies and Desolater of Dwelling-places came upon them”: the standard wrap-up of Scheherazade’s own stories. Whereupon the successor to Shahryar’s throne (One of those three sons? We’re not told) discovers in the late and no doubt unlamented king’s treasury the tales that not only entertained him but saved his kingdom and their teller’s life, and which grateful Shahryar had therefore obliged his scribes to record after the fact in thirty volumes for posterity (another story: imagine weary Scheherazade having to recollect and re-tell all those tales to the royal clerks!); and said successor is so delighted with them that he has his scribes re-copy the whole shebang and “spread them throughout the world.”

Then comes the almost off-handed punch line: “As a consequence,” concludes this story-of-the-story-of-the-stories, “the tales became famous, and the people called them The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights. This is all that we know about the origins of this book, and Allah is omniscient. . FINIS.”

Q: MUSIC, ESPECIALLY jazz, has played a significant role in your life and your writing, has it not?

A: Yes and no. My years as an ardent amateur and semiprofessional jazz drummer were certainly an important part of my life from my teens into my forties. But except for passages in the novel/memoir Once Upon a Time (1994) and the novella Tell Me (2005), I’ve seldom written directly about that experience in either my fiction or my non-fiction. More relevant to me as a writer, I believe, was my early ambition to be, not primarily a composer or a performer of music, but an orchestrator—an “arranger,” as it was called back in those swing-band decades.

Q: Shall we “take it from the edge,” as musicians say (or used to say)? A-one, a-two. .

A: Well: As kids in a family of modest means on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the Great Depression, my twin sister and I had the privilege (though we didn’t always see it that way) of weekly piano lessons and daily practice sessions from our elementary-school years through junior high. Because of our twinship, at our teacher’s annual student recitals we were usually assigned duets, my sister playing the primo, or upper-octave melody part, and I the lower-octave secondo. And the recitals would climax, as I remember, with Miss Hubbard herself at the piano and her students providing a scored percussion accompaniment of tambourines, triangles, and such — more to my taste, actually, than the keyboard, although in my later dance-band-drumming days I still did a couple of “specialty” piano solos from time to time: self-arranged versions of “Bumble Boogie” (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee with an eight-to-the-bar left hand) and the like.

As soon as we were allowed, at age thirteen or so, Sister Jill and I quit our piano lessons — and once released from the drudgery of obligatory practice, we found ourselves seriously attracted to music: not the classical piano-exercise books that we’d been drilled in, but pop tunes of the sort sold as “sheet music” in our father’s lunchroom /soda-fountain in Cambridge along with magazines, comic books, and, when they were invented, paperback books (in those days virtually every house had a piano, and sheet music was sold wherever magazines were) — also the swing-band music we heard on the radio and on 78rpm recordings: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Harry James. Through the Depression and then World War II years, our Dorchester County’s public school system had neither a high-school band nor instrumental instruction of any sort (nor even a twelfth grade), but I pieced together a rudimentary drum set, and with Jill on piano and a couple of friends on trombone and alto saxophone, by age fifteen or sixteen we’d cobbled up a successful jazz “combo” called the Swingtette. Through our junior and senior high-school years we played regular Saturday-night dances at the Cambridge Country Club and the Salisbury Town Club in a neighboring county. We even made a recording that was played on the local radio station, and the band was featured onstage in a “Teen-Age Revue” at Schine’s Arcade, the local movie theater.

In 1947, at age seventeen, after graduating from our eleven-year public school system, I enrolled in Juilliard’s six-week summer program with money saved from those country-club gigs (I could never have qualified for admission to the Institute’s regular curriculum). The placement test obliged me to take Elementary Theory, but oddly qualified me for a course in Advanced Orchestration, and I managed to do well in both. The instructor in that latter course was Ted Royal Dewar, orchestrator of Brigadoon and other Broadway musicals and a disciple of the then-fashionable Schillinger System, an avant-garde math-to-music method of composition with which one could, e.g., transfer a photo of the Manhattan skyline onto graph paper and convert the numerical values into a musical score. The technique didn’t particularly interest me (though George Gershwin reportedly used it), but I quite enjoyed that summer in upper Manhattan — my first away from home, except for earlier Boy Scout summer-camping — from which I learned that while some of my classmates were quite likely to become bona fide professional musicians, I was not of that number. During that instructive six-week absence from home I also lost my high-school girlfriend to a no doubt more advanced rival, and so in mid-August returned to Maryland without the foggiest notion of what to do next.

Whereupon, to my happy surprise, I learned that I had won a one-year state-senatorial scholarship to Johns Hopkins University. It was either that or go to work in my father’s store, and so faute de mieux off I went — solo, by bus — from my native Cambridge across Chesapeake Bay to the city of Baltimore and a rigorous research university that I’d never even visited, but from whose College of Engineering my no-less-able older brother, after a similar scholarship year, had dropped out and enlisted in the Army, so ill-prepared were we eleventh-grade redneck high-school grads for serious university work. One had to choose a college within the university: Engineering being of no interest to me, and Business being none of my business, I chose Arts and Sciences. And my major? Well: not the sciences or mathematics, for sure; not history, not economics, not philosophy, not languages. That left. . well. . literature, maybe? But the Hopkins English Department was much heavier on English than American lit back then, and taught mainly the famous dead Brits. If one wanted to study Hemingway and Faulkner, say — and I sort of did, having read a couple of their paperbacks from Dad’s store — one could do it only in a brand-new department called Writing, Speech, and Drama (later renamed the Writing Seminars). Moreover, come to think of it, I’d written a regular humor/gossip column called “Ashcan Pete” for our high-school newspaper back in the day, so maybe. . Journalism?

I gave it a try: hung on by my fingernails through a difficult freshman year during which two fellow Eastern Shoremen whom I’d met and befriended on the bus to Baltimore dropped out, just as my brother (who after the war completed his B.A. elsewhere with high grades and went on to law school and a successful career in D.C.) had felt obliged to do. I flunked Political Economy, but survived my other courses; actually managed an A in the department’s one Journalism course (taught by a visiting lecturer from the Baltimore Sun’s senior editorial staff, and having more to do with the history and “philosophy” of journalism than with hands-on newspaper work); did well enough in my other required courses, such as Classics in the History of Western Literature and Classics in the History of Western Thought; and learned the valuable lesson that journalism wasn’t really my thing. Importantly too, among my new friends was another Eastern Shoreman—“Buzz” Mallonee from Centreville, across the Chesapeake from Baltimore — a trumpet-playing engineering major, several of whose prep-school pals were also Hopkins freshmen and musicians. He organized a dance-band, recruited me as drummer, and scored us dance-jobs in the city and over on the Shore as well as regular Sunday-afternoon “tea dances” at the Naval Academy down in Annapolis. Being non-union “scabs,” we charged less than the local professionals, but got more jobs: a Saturday-night frat-house or other gig followed by the Sunday tea-dance earned me almost as much in 24 hours as some classmates were making in a week’s part-time work. Better yet, Buzz found us a summer-long job at Betterton Beach, a popular bayside resort on the upper Chesapeake: Five of us — trumpet, sax, piano, guitar, and drums — played daily afternoon sessions in the old Betterton Casino’s dance hall when the Baltimore excursion boat Bay Belle docked at the casino’s pier with its load of day-trippers, then an hour of dinner music at the nearby Rigbie Hotel (for which our payment was three free meals a day) and another two-hour dance in the evening back at the Casino, in whose ample storage-room we also lodged for free. On Saturdays the rest of the band joined us from Baltimore and elsewhere for a three-hour evening dance: four saxes altogether, two trumpets, trombone, piano, guitar, drums, and occasionally a female vocalist, we played four-number “sets” (three ballads and an up-beat “jump” tune, a few of which I arranged) with a small break between and a half-time intermission. I don’t recall what we were paid over and above our free room and board, but we sharpened our skills from all those daily performance-hours, enjoyed ourselves on the beach in our free time — and I met a young state-college co-ed, waitressing at the Rigbie, whom two years later I would wed.

Meanwhile, if journalism wasn’t to be my major, what was? Well: 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: Well: 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.

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.

The downside of that move, if any, was that among my new colleagues I found no replacement for my Buffalo jazz-pals. After a year or so I sold my drum-set and, encouraged by my new sister-in-law, began playing baroque and Elizabethan recorder duets with her, a pleasure that we still enjoy. As a wordsmith, I take a special satisfaction both in the differences between the two media — the feelings and ideas that music can express more eloquently than words, and vice-versa — and the pleasures both of solo performance with pen and word-processor and of ensemble (anyhow duet) performance on the recorder. As for “arranging,” I feel blessed to have enjoyed it for so many years and to be doing it still, changes changed, at my desk: My forthcoming novel, for example—Every Third Thought—is among other things a reorchestration both of Shakespeare’s Tempest and of characters from my 2008 story-series The Development.

Q: Shall we take it from the edge? Page one, page two….

IN 2011 AND 2012, two new products of this pen — a novel entitled Every Third Thought and this Final Fridays essay-collection — are scheduled for publication by Counterpoint Press, a non-“trade” publisher in California. Both were completed in 2009, my 80th year of life and 53rd as a publishing writer. At the time of their composition, I didn’t think of them as my last books, only as the latest: my seventeenth volume of fiction and third of non-fiction, respectively. But in the year-and-then-some since, although I’ve still gone to my workroom every weekday morning for the hours between breakfast and lunch, as I’ve done for decades, and re-enacted my muse-inviting ritual, I find that I’ve written. . nothing.

That room is divided into three distinct areas: Composition (one side of a large work-table, reserved for longhand first drafts of fiction on Mondays through Thursdays and nonfiction on Fridays, with supply drawers and adjacent reference-book shelves), Production (computer hutch with desktop word processor and printer for subsequent drafts and revision), and Business (other side of worktable, with desk calendar and office files). As for the ritual: Prep-Step One is to seat myself at the Composition table, set down my refilled thermal mug of breakfast coffee, and insert the wax earplugs that I got in the habit of using back in the 1950s, when my three children (now in their fifties) were rambunctious toddlers, and that became so associated with my sentence-making that even as an empty-nester in a quiet house I continue to feel the need for them. Step Two is to open the stained and battered three-ring loose-leaf binder, now 63 years old and held precariously together with strapping tape, that I bought during my freshman orientation-week at Johns Hopkins in 1947 and in which I penned all my undergraduate and grad-school class notes, professorial lecture-drafts during my decades in academia, and first drafts of the entire corpus of my fiction and non-fiction. Step Three is to unclip from that binder’s middle ring the British Parker 51 fountain pen bought during my maiden tour of Europe in 1963/64 (in a Volkswagen camper with those same three then-small children and their mother) at a Rochester stationer’s alleged to be the original of Mister Pumblechook’s Premises in Dickens’s Great Expectations: the pen with which I have penned every subsequent sentence, including this one. (Its predecessor, an also much-valued Schaeffer that saw me through college and my first three published novels, was inadvertently cracked in my shirt pocket a few weeks earlier when I leaned against a battlement in “Hamlet’s castle” in Elsinore — Danish Helsingor, near Copenhagen, the northernmost stop of that makeshift Grand Tour — in order to get a better view of Sweden across the water.) I recharge the venerable Parker with jet-black Quink, wipe its well-worn tip with a bit of tissue, fix its cap onto its butt, and proceed to Step Four….

Which in happier days meant reviewing and editing either the print-outs of yesterday’s first-draft pages (left off when the going was good and thus more readily resumed) or work-notes toward some project in gestation, to be followed by Step Five: re-inspiration and the composition of new sentences, paragraphs, and pages. Of late, however, Step Four has consisted of staring vainly, pen in hand, at blank ruled pages, or exchanging fountain pen for note-taking ballpoint and perusing for possible suggestions either my spiral-bound Work Notebook #5 (2008–) or my little black six-ring loose-leaf personal notebook/diary, to little avail. That latter—The Black Book of not so bright (or sunny) observations & reflections, its title page declares, on which also are the rubber-stamped addresses of its serial residences over the past forty years — has only a few blank leaves remaining, and no room for more. And the workroom’s bookshelves, reserved for one copy of each edition and translation of every book, magazine article, and anthology contribution that I’ve published, are already crowded beyond their capacity, with new editions lying horizontally across older ones and jammed into crannies between bookcase and wall.

That almost-exhausted notebook-space; those overflowing shelves — are they trying to tell me something? I plug my ears; strain not to listen. Like most fiction-writers of my acquaintance (perhaps especially those who mainly write novels rather than short stories), I’m accustomed to a well-filling interval of some weeks or even months between book-length projects: an interval not to be confused with “Writer’s Block.” Indeed, I’ve learned to look forward to that bit of a respite from sentence-making after a new book has left the shop — bulky typescript both snail-mailed and e-mailed to agent and thence to publisher — and to busily making notes toward the Next One while final-copyediting and galley-proofing its predecessor. This time, however. .

Well.

Well? A writer-friend from Kansas who knows about water-wells informs me of the important distinction between dry wells and “gurglers,” which may cease producing for a time but eventually resume; he encourages me to believe that I’m still a Gurgler. I hope that’s the case — but if in fact my well turns out to be dry, I remind myself that as we’ve aged, my wife and I have been obliged to put other much-enjoyed pleasures behind us: snow- and water-skiing, tennis, sailboat-cruising on the Chesapeake, and yes, even vigorous youthful sex (but certainly not love and intimacy, and as someone once wisely observed, “Sex goes, memory goes, but the memory of sex — that never goes”). If my vocation — my “calling”!—has joined that sigh-and-smile list of Once Upon a Times, its memory will be a fond one indeed.

Time will tell.

Meanwhile, maybe write a little piece about. . not writing?

“HOW COME YOU write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”

Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?”

“Well,” DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”

“But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester. . ”

“That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping: Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”

Although I count myself among my late comrade’s most appreciative fans — invariably delighted, over the too-few decades of his career, by his short stories, his novels, his infrequent but soundly-argued essays into aesthetics, and his miscellaneous nonfiction pieces (not to mention his live conversation, as above) — I normally see The New Yorker, in which so much of his writing was first published, only in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I have therefore grown used to DB-ing in happy binges once every few years, when a new collection of the wondrous stuff appears (originally from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; anon from Putnam; later from Harper and Row; finally from Random House) and I set other reading aside to go straight through it, savoring the wit, the bite, the exactitude and flair, inspired whimsy, aw-shucks urbanity, irreal realism and real irreality, wired tersitude, and suchlike Barthelmanic pleasures.

Finally, it says up in that parenthetical list of his publishers. The adverb constricts my spirit; I feel again what I felt when word came of Donald’s illness and death in 1989, at age merely-58, in the fullness of his life and happy artistry: my maiden experience of survivor-guilt, for we were virtual coevals often assigned to the same team (or angel-choir or Hell-pit) by critics friendly and not, who require such categories — Fabulist, Postmodernist, what have they. We ourselves, and the shifting roster of our team-/choir-/pit-mates,³ were perhaps more impressed by our differences than by any similarities, but there was most certainly fellow-feeling among us — and was I to go on breathing air, enjoying health and wine and food, work and play and love and language, and Donald not? Go on spinning out my sometimes hefty fabrications (which, alphabetically cheek-by-jowl to his on bookshelves, he professed to fear might topple onto and crush their stage-right neighbor), and Donald not his sparer ones, that we both knew to be in no such danger?

Well. One adds the next sentence to its predecessors, and over the ensuing years, as bound volumes of mine have continued to forth-come together with those of his other team-/choir-/pit-mates, it has been some balm to see (impossibly posthumous!) Donald’s appearing as before, right along with them, as if by some benign necromancy: first his comic-elegaic Arthurian novel The King (1990); then The Teachings of Don B. (1992), a rich miscellany eloquently foreworded by T-/C-/P-mate Thomas Pynchon; now Not-Knowing; and still to come, a collection of hitherto unpublished and/or uncollected short stories.

Benign it is, but no necromancy. We owe these last fruits not only to Donald’s far-ranging muse, but to the dedication of his literary executors and the editorial enterprise of Professor Kim Herzinger of the University of Southern Mississippi. Thanks to that dedication and enterprise, we shall have the print-part of our fellow whole, or all but whole. Never enough, and too soon cut off — like Carver, like Calvino, all at their peak — but what a feast it is!

THE DAY AFTER Frank (“The Voice”) Sinatra died in California at age 82, a no less distinctive American voice — in certain quarters even more prized, though in the nature of things less widely known — was stilled in Providence, Rhode Island. With the death at age 72 of John Hawkes — fiction writer, fiction mentor, and fiction live-reader extraordinaire—we lost one of the steadily brightest (and paradoxically darkest) lights of American fiction through our century’s second half: a navigation star for scores of apprentice writers however different their own literary course, and as spellbinding a public reader of his own work as I have ever heard, who have heard many. Passion was this writer’s subject, even when manifested by non-human characters (the narrator/protagonist of his novel Sweet William is a horse; the deuteragonist of The Frog is a very French amphibian); impassioned was his manner as author, teacher, reader, and friend. He was, to echo another of his titles, truly a Passion Artist: for five decades one of our most original literary imaginations and masterful prose stylists.

IN 1956, A certain American first novel was blessed by a prevailingly favorable review from a certain noted American critic, who characterized it as a specimen of “provincial American existentialism” that committed its author to nothing and left him free to do whatever next thing he might choose. At the time, fresh out of graduate school, this interested reader of that review had no very expert notion of what Existentialism was. Intrigued by that critic’s remark, like a good provincial American Johns Hopkins alumnus I set about re-reading Sartre and Camus (Heidegger was beyond me) and soon decided that all parts of the proposition applied: The book was provincial, American, and Existentialist, and its author was free to sing whatever next tunes his muse might call.

Which I did. 40 years later, I’m gratified to report, that novel, that novelist, and that noted critic are all still actively with us,² and Leslie Fiedler’s instructive characterization of my Floating Opera still strikes me as altogether valid.

Not long after writing that review, the author of Love and Death in the American Novel and other notorious iconoclasms made a lecture-visit to Penn State, where I was then employed, and there began an acquaintanceship that over the years ripened into friendship and colleaguehood; that affected in large and small ways my professional trajectory; and that I remain the ongoing beneficiary of. I have counted those ways elsewhere and will gratefully here recount just a few of them:

NEARLY 40 YEARS ago, in 1966, his then-publisher sent me bound galleys of his first novel, as publishers will, in hopes of testimonial: Omensetter’s Luck, by one William H. Gass.

Never heard of the chap, although I should have: His fiction had already been included in The Best American Short Stories in 1959, 1961, and 1962. Anyhow, my vows to the muse prohibit, among other things, the blurbing of blurbs except for first books by my former students. All the same, I opened the thing (in the middle, unfairly), scanned a page or two in each direction, and found — in a passage describing a midwestern country picnic — these images: “All kinds of containers sat about the table in sullen disconnection. Some steamed despite the hot day; others enclosed pools of green brine where pickles drowsed like crocodiles.”

Well, now, I thought: Imagine a professor of philosophy (so the jacket-note identified the author) who can write pickles drowsed like crocodiles. I was impressed enough to rebegin at the beginning and read the novel right through, more and more wowed as I went along. Wrote the author a fan letter, even, in lieu of blurb. Turned out he liked my stuff, too — some of it, anyhow — and there ensued a decades-long cordial comradeship-in-literary-arms. Membership in the dimly-defined ranks of our peaceable platoon was a matter less of voluntary enlistment than of assignment by reviewers and critics praising, blaming, or merely tabulating the Usual Suspects of “Postmodernism,” “Metafiction,” or whatever, and having thus been called to one another’s attention, we-all most often enjoyed and admired one another’s writings.

Enjoyed too our professional path-crossings through the remainder of the century: at one another’s universities (most though not all of us were professors, typically though not necessarily of literature and/or its writing), at conferences and other literary functions here and there in our republic and abroad. As Omensetter was followed by the story-collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (which I liked even more than its so-impressive predecessor) and that by Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (which if possible I enjoyed more yet: the most formally sportive item in Gass’s oeuvre) and the several splendid essay-collections, I came to know their author a bit, sharing reading/ lecture platforms with him in Buffalo, St. Louis, and Baltimore, in New York and North Dakota, in Germany and in Spain. Admired his presence, onstage and off. Admired his formidable intelligence and learning, his commitment to teaching (“I’ll probably keep at it till I drop,” he remarked to me upon my own academic retirement in 1995, “and then I’ll have myself stuffed and go on teaching”), his obiter dicta (“I’ll never do a fiction-writing workshop,” he once vowed to me: “When I’m reading a bad student paper on Plato, at least I’m thinking about Plato; but when I’m reading a bad student short story about trout fishing, I’m not thinking about anything.”).

Admired and admire most of all, of course, the writing: in the fiction, those inhospitable landscapes and typically pathetic-when-not-monstrous characters, marvelously rendered into language; in the essays, the play of mind and wide-ranging erudition lightly deployed. And in both, the prose, the prose — in particular (if I were obliged to single out one element or aspect for special commendation, which I am not but nevertheless will) the similes: those homely yet showstopping similes, still the Gass trademark for this admiring reader, which stick in my memory long after I’ve forgotten which work they’re from and what subtle additional relevances they no doubt have to their context. A character’s hands “quick as cats,” drafts of air that “cruise like fish through the hollow rooms,” a feeling “like the loneliness of overshoes or someone else’s cough,” a face “like a mail-order ax,” “wires where sparrows sit like fists,” an argument “as sinuous and tough as ivy”—and those drowsing pickles….

One can sieve troves of such gems from Gass’s pages. Indeed, the narrator of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” self-deprecatingly remarks, “Similes dangle like baubles from me.” Not so: A Bill Gass simile does not dangle; it is of a piece with the cadence of its sentence, the stuff of its speaker, the situational moment. And it is no bauble, but an unostentatious gemstone: a diamond not really in the rough, but cunningly polished to look rough, if you follow me. A Bill Gass simile is like. . is like. .

ALTHOUGH IT WAS not my privilege to be among John Updike’s many close friends, he and I were amiable and mutually respectful literary acquaintances for decades. I enjoyed his so-abundant and eloquent publications, from the earliest fiction, verse, and critical essays right through the touching final items written in his life’s last weeks. We regularly sent each other copies of our books as they appeared, and our several path-crossings were invariably pleasant, often memorable occasions.

Unlike his friend John Cheever, for example, who had no use for the likes of Barth, Barthelme, and other “innovative” fictioneers, Updike was able to admire writing very different from his own finely-honed suburban-American realism (from which he himself ventured boldly from time to time, as in the novel Gertrude and Claudius and his several books for children): He supported my election in 1974 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and later seconded my nomination of the brilliant (and quite innovative) novelist Richard Powers to membership in that august body. In the early 1970s, when I was professoring for a year at Boston University, my wife and I visited John in Ipswich: We strolled the nearby beach with him (New England waters too chilly for us tidewater Marylanders!), and — he having learned that I shared his fondness for playing early recorder music — his friend Peter Davison (poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly) joined us for an evening of Elizabethan trios. That same year, John visited our temporary lodgings near Radcliffe College in Cambridge for dinner with Shelly and me and the poets George and Kathy Starbuck, followed by a spirited but friendly four-against-one argument about the Vietnam war (John granted our objections to it, but supported the administration’s position anyhow). And not long thereafter, when he was living in Boston between marriages, I urged him to have another go at teaching: the same visiting-professorship in fiction-writing at Boston U. that I was currently enjoying and that Donald Barthelme would take an initiatory crack at after the Barths had shifted from Boston back to Buffalo and thence to Baltimore for the remainder of our academic careers. Perhaps to his own surprise, Barthelme found the experience agreeable, and taught regularly thereafter in Houston until his all-too-early death. John, however, recoiled from Academia as had I from the chilly waters of New England: In the early 1960s he’d taught one course at the Harvard Summer School, quite disliked the experience, and (except to fill in for the temporarily indisposed Cheever one day in that same B.U. visiting professorship) never taught another class.

Our relations, however, remained warm, and once I was established in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars I persuaded him to have a go at something else to which he’d been habitually disinclined: John resisted public readings, but when he mentioned in a letter that he was seriously hooked up with a new woman, at my invitation he brought Martha down to Baltimore for what he happily declared to be their first public outing together. He gave a delightful reading at Hopkins that included, at Shelly’s and my request, his story “Lifeguard” (one of our favorites), and we guided the new couple through such standard Baltimore sight-sees as the Inner Harbor area and the haunts of Edgar Allan Poe.

Over the ensuing decades, our connection was limited mainly to holiday greetings (we always relished his Christmas-card verses), first-edition swaps (more from that so-prolific John than from this less-prolific one), and occasional Academy-nomination business. Like many another of his admirers, Shelly and I were annually chagrined at his being passed over for the Nobel Prize in Literature: an award to which he would have done as much honor as it to him. In December 2008 we were dismayed to learn of his illness in what — incredibly! — turned out to be his final Christmas-note, and were much moved some months thereafter to receive from his publisher John’s final three volumes^a—the new edition of his Maples stories, the all-new story-collection My Father’s Tears, and his fine last verse-collection Endpoint, with its so-touching final poem “To Martha, on Her Birthday, After Her Cataract Operation”—together with a note from his editor, Kenneth Schneider, addressed to both of us and saying John would have wanted you to have these.

We thank you for that, Mr. Schneider. And even more we thank you, John Updike, for being the miracle that you were — and will remain.

—“I never kissed the Blarney Stone; I only sat on it.”

FOR THE FIRST nine months of our joint existence, my twin sister and I were womb-mates. Conceived just before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and waiting to be born in the first dark spring of the Great Depression of the 1930s, we were blissfully unaware of everything except, I suppose, each other’s presence in that warm dark comfortable space. Even that double presence was somewhat more than our mother and her doctor were aware of in those days before ultrasound scans: Having delivered her of a healthy baby girl and thinking both his and her labors done, the doc checked out — and to all hands’ surprise, an hour and twenty minutes later an also-healthy baby boy followed, delivered by whoever happened to be on call.

Sister first, brother second: I’ll come back to that.

When the news was announced to our three-year-older brother Bill that he was no longer the family’s only child, he gamely replied, “Now we have a Jack and Jill!”—and much followed from that. Having been womb-mates, for the next ten or twelve years my twin sister and I were roommates (in twin beds, appropriately) and though less genetically close than identical twins — indeed, no closer genetically than any other pair of siblings — I’d say we were otherwise about as close as non-Siamese twins can be. From kindergarten through elementary school in Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, we attended the same classes, had the same friends, and were each other’s best friend. We endured plenty of teasing from classmates about the “Jack and Jill” thing (including some memorably naughty versions of the nursery rhyme), but got used to it. When we took piano lessons, our teacher inevitably assigned us duets, wherein Jill always played the upper-keyboard melody part (Primo, considered appropriate for the girl, I guess), and Jack played Secondo, the lower-octave harmony-and-counterpoint part. Fine by me: It felt more manly down there in the bass clef.

By high school, of course, our hormones had kicked in and we’d begun to go our ever-more-separate ways: separate bedrooms, friends, and high-school curricula. But we remained in close harmony both literal and figurative. We organized a successful little jazz group, for example, called the Swingtette — Ms. Primo on piano, Mr. Secondo on drums, and a couple of our friends on sax and trombone — and played regular Saturday-night dances at the Cambridge Country Club through our junior and senior years. After graduation, however, our paths diverged indeed: Jack crossed the Bay to university, and for the next forty years returned to Cambridge and the Eastern Shore only to visit; Jill went to business school in Wilmington, returned to work in a bank in Cambridge, met and married one of her customers (Bob Corkran of nearby Hurlock), and happily went into the accounting business with him there.

Over the ensuing decades, Jack’s life had the wider radius, but Jill’s had much deeper roots: The Corkrans seldom left the Eastern Shore even on vacation, but they maintained warm connections with old friends, enjoyed golf games, crab feasts, weekend evenings at the American Legion hall, and raising their daughter Jo. Jill went from being named the Delmarva Poultry Festival’s “Chicken of Tomorrow” back in her teens to becoming Hurlock’s First Lady when her husband was elected mayor of that small town. And when Bob was sadly and prematurely taken from her by cancer while only in his fifties, Jill soldiered on: She taught my non-Maryland wife Shelly how to cook a softcrab and roast a goose; she presided over her daughter’s wedding and spoke fondly of her son-in-law; she oversaw end-of-life care and funeral arrangements for our parents and other elderly relatives (with a little help from her far-flung brothers and their wives, but Jill carried most of the load, and carried it ably indeed); she enjoyed her granddaughter’s talents and triumphs — and then bravely and cheerfully, when the time came, she made her own move from her house in Preston (not far from Hurlock and Cambridge) to a “continuing care” establishment in also-nearby Easton, where she lived out her final life-chapters, her accountant daughter presiding over her as Jill had done for her parents.

My closing, warmest memory of my twin is from not long after she made that move. In the summer of 2002, the Cambridge High School Class of 1947 celebrated its 55th reunion with a sunset cruise aboard a paddlewheel tour-boat from Suicide Bridge (yup, that’s its name), up near Preston, down the Choptank River to Cambridge and back, with dinner and dancing to live music. Much as my wife and my sister enjoyed each other’s company, Shelly had other commitments that day, and so I picked up Jill at her assisted-living place and we two enjoyed a lovely evening together with old school chums, reminiscing about (among other things) our long-ago Swingtette jazz combo. The high point of that evening, for me, was when one of those good buddies, whom I’d reminded that our group’s theme-song had been the smooth old 1930s ballad called Moonglow, passed that info along to the band without telling us. Next thing we knew, they were playing it for us — first time I’d heard it in maybe half a century! My old womb-mate and I set down our wineglasses and danced — not for the first time, certainly, but for the first time in too long a time, and for the last time, alas.

I can hear it now:

It must have been moonglow,

Way up in the blue….

Moonglow it was, Jill, on that moonlit river, our tidal birth-water — and moonglow it remains. Your old ex-wombmate and ex-roommate is in no hurry to become your tombmate; but it’s poetically appropriate, I suppose, for Ms. Primo to lead the way in our tale’s last chapter, as she did in its first.

Rest in peace, dear Sis.