Final Fridays

Introduction to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme

Although it’s neither my first memorial tribute to Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) nor my last,¹ what follows — written at the request of Donald’s brother Frederick (himself an accomplished novelist, editor of The Mississippi Review, and alumnus of the Hopkins Writing Seminars) to introduce a posthumously published collection of Don’s nonfiction²—is the one I think best suited to open this “Tributes and Memoria” section of Final Fridays.

“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!

ITS COURSE IN hand displays most directly the high intelligence behind the author’s audacious, irrepressible fancy. The complementary opening essays, “After Joyce” and “Not-Knowing” (that title-piece was for years required reading in the aforementioned graduate fiction-writing seminar at Johns Hopkins); the assorted reviews and pungent “comments” on literature, film, and politics; the pieces “On Art,” never far from the center of Donald’s concerns; the seven flat-out interviews (edited after the fact by the interviewee) — again and again I find myself once again nodding yes, yes to their insights, obiter dicta, and mini-manifestoes, delivered with unfailing tact and zing. See, e.g., “Not-Knowing”’s jim-dandy cadenza upon the rendering of “Melancholy Baby” on jazz “banjolele”: as astute (and hilarious) a statement as I know of about the place of “aboutness” in art.⁴ Bravo, maestro banjolelist: Encore!

Here is a booksworth of encores, to be followed by one more: the story-volume yet to come, a final serving of the high literary art for which that high intelligence existed.

And then?

Then there it is, alas, and for encores we will go back and back again to the feast whereof these are end-courses: back to Come Back, Dr. Caligari, to Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, to Snow White and City Life and the rest. Permanent pleasures of American “Postmodernist” writing, they are. Permanent literary pleasures period.

The Passion Artist (tribute to John Hawkes)

Shortly after the author’s death on May 15, 1998, this tribute to John Hawkes was first published in The New York Times Book Review.¹

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.

THE WRITER:

Hawkes’s books number nearly a score, from The Cannibal in 1949 (actually from a privately printed verse-collection in 1943, but the author never returned to poetry except in his prose, which never left it) through An Irish Eye in 1997. Mostly novels, all of modest heft, plus a scarifying story-and-novella collection and a volume of short plays, they have in common a preoccupation with the horrific, suffused with the erotic and redeemed by the comic. One sees affinities with Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor; to mention such affinities, however, is to be reminded of Hawkes’s difference from those compatriots, all of whom he admired. Like theirs, his fiction is in the American-gothic grain, but his material is more cosmopolitan — closer in this respect to that of his bookshelf-neighbor Hawthorne, or to Poe. A Hawkes novel may be set in England, Germany, Maine, Alaska, the Caribbean, “Illyria,” or some Transylvania of the soul; literal places are less important to him than the geographies of passion and language. His imagination, like Kafka’s, is powerfully metaphorical. And dark. And comic.

It has been also one of the most consistent among our contemporaries’, both in quality and in voice. One never knew what Hawkes would write of next — Nepal? Patagonia? The Moon? — but one recognized at once that narrative voice: the sensuous cadences refracting comic-horrific scenes (a boy plays Brahms outside the door of the lavatory where his father is committing suicide; an earnest but hapless male teacher is set upon and all but castrated by his murderous Maenad students in St. Dunster’s Training School for Girls — and comes back for more); the fearsome, unexpected details (a sexually voltaged foursome retrieve from a dark pit in a ruined medieval fortress a rusted, toothed iron chastity belt; a dead horse’s ears are “as unlikely to twitch as two pointed fern leaves etched on glass”); the ubiquitous sensuality and trademark rhetorical questions (“[Did she not] note Seigneur’s unsmiling countenance and his silence and the way he stood at a distance with his feet apart and that strange mechanical staff gripped in a firm hand, its butt in the sand and its small iron beak towering above his head on the end of the staff? Wouldn’t this sight be quite enough to instill in most grown women. . the first unpleasant taste of apprehension? But it was not so. .”).

Hawkes-lovers recognize at once that such passages as the above (from Virginie, Her Two Lives) are, among other things, disquietingly comic: neither de Sade played straight nor de Sade played for laughs, but de Sade (and the artist) compassionately, impassionedly satirized. “I deplore. . nightmare,” Hawkes declared in an interview with Robert Scholes; “I deplore terror. [But] I happen to believe that it is only by traveling those dark tunnels, perhaps not literally but psychically, that one can learn. . what it means to be compassionate.” What nightmare? Which terror? “My fiction,” he goes on to say, “is generally an evocation of the nightmare or terroristic universe in which sexuality is destroyed by law, by dictum, by human perversity, by contraption, and it is this destruction [that] I have attempted to portray and confront in order to be true to human fear and. . ruthlessness, but also in part to evoke its opposite, the moment of freedom from constriction, restraint, death.”

Yes, well: also, one might add, to provoke the cathartic laughter at sexual and fictive “contraption” afforded by that hard but pleasurably won freedom. So charged with Eros is just about everything in a typical Hawkes fiction that my private ground-rule for him was No literal sex ever to be described, Jack—a rule that I neglected to inform him of until after its brief infraction in a couple of the later novels, but to which he gratifyingly returns in the last ones.

The last ones—that’s not easily said. Hawkes’s fiction has been widely admired from the start by literary critics and his fellow writers: His book-jackets are garlanded with enthusiastic testimonials from the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Donald Barthelme, Leslie Fiedler. But his standing, alas, has ever surpassed his following, and that’s a pity, for he’s no more for connoisseurs only than is an excellent wine. For those unfamiliar with his fiction, a fine first taste is Humors of the Blood & Skin, A John Hawkes Reader: a self-assembled degustation with autobiographical notes by the author and a beautiful introduction by William H. Gass.² But really, one can begin anywhere: The voice is all of a piece.

THE TEACHER:

Whatever one thinks of the post-World-War-Two American phenomenon of poets and novelists as professors in creative writing programs, it has most certainly afforded a generation of aspiring writers and students of literature close access to practitioners of the art; in the best cases, to masters of the art, impassioned (that word again) about their coaching and their coachees as well as about their own congress with the muse. By all accounts, John Hawkes was among the chiefest of these. After a stint driving ambulances in Italy and Germany in the closing months of World War II, he married his indispensable, sine qua non Sophie (who with their four grown children survives him), graduated from Harvard and published his first novel in 1949, worked for six years at his alma mater’s university press, began teaching there as an instructor in English, and in 1958 shifted to Brown, where he anchored the graduate writing program until succeeded upon his retirement by his close friend and distinguished writer-comrade Robert Coover. I too am a beneficiary of that post-war phenomenon, and inasmuch as a certain number of apprentice writers have gypsied between Brown and Johns Hopkins, we have over the decades had a number of alumni in common, every one of whom revered Hawkes as an intense, convivial, time-generous, impassioned mentor/coach as well as an inspired, inspiring artist. “Plus,” the writer Mary Robison once said, concluding her introduction of him to an audience in Baltimore, “he wears the most adorable clothes, and anybody who doesn’t think so can go straight to hell!”

Jack inspired that kind of fierce admiration. The least pedagogical of pedagogues, for a time in the latter 1960s he nevertheless involved himself—passionately, of course — with an innovative program called the Voice Project, meant to reform the teaching of writing in American schools as the New Math was meant to reform that discipline. Federal start-up funding forthcame, and at Hawkes’s urging a considerable number of us writer-teachers convened at Sarah Lawrence College to learn about and perhaps help launch the project. We sat through a day of presentations by not-always-inspiring educationists; during one particularly sententious holding-forth, Susan Sontag asked me sotto voce, “Doesn’t the guy realize that we’re all here only for Jack Hawkes’s sake?” Toward the end of that long day, I confessed to Donald Barthelme that I, for one, still didn’t quite grasp what exactly the project-organizers meant by “Voice.” “Neither do I,” admitted Donald; “but Jack does, so it’s probably all right.”

Jack did — enough to devote a trial year to the project at Stanford while serving on a federal Panel on Educational Innovation. What became of the Voice Project I have no idea; but as one of my own undergraduate professors once observed, “a fine teacher is likely to teach well regardless of what educational theories he or she may suffer from.” Hawkes’s teaching voice — discerning, engaged, compassionate, impassioned—was pedagogy more eloquent and effective than any educative theory.

THE VOICE:

I heard him read publicly from his fiction many times: as a visiting writer at my home campus, at literary festivals round about our republic, on shared platforms at such venues as New York’s 92nd St. Poetry Center, and most memorably through an extended reading-tour of Germany in 1979 with William Gass and myself and our spouses — a sort of American Postmodernist road show sponsored by the USIA and local universities. None of us three, I venture, was an inept speaker of our fiction, though we all understood that print-prose is not theater, but an essentially silent transaction between its author and individual readers. One need not have heard Jack read his stuff in order to savor its distinctive, compelling “voice”—but in his readings above all, the intensity, dark humor, and passion were unforgettably on display. Indeed, his fiction, his letters, his telephone and table-talk were all of a register; I hear that voice as I write these lines, as stirringly as I heard it in Tübingen, Berlin, Providence, Palo Alto, Buffalo, Baltimore. Unimaginable, that in the terabyte twilight of the terrible Twentieth one will hear it now only in memory!

WELL: THAT OTHER Voice, Sinatra’s, will endure in its recorded performances for as long as his presently living fans remain interested, and perhaps even somewhat beyond their lifetimes; recorded music is itself so young a medium that we have no way of knowing whether pop singers of the longer past — P. T. Barnum’s “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, for example — would still be listened to with pleasure today. In the venerable and more stable medium of the printed word, it is another matter: For any who had the privilege of hearing him, the so-memorable living voice of John Hawkes rings out in stereophonic high fidelity from every line of his fiction; his written voice, however, is there for the much longer haul — perhaps, in Archibald MacLeish’s words, for “as long. . as the iron of English rings from a tongue”;³ most certainly for as long as the passionate few still read printed literature.

The Accidental Mentor (homage to Leslie Fiedler)

This tribute to Leslie Fiedler was written early in 1997 for a Festschrift intended to celebrate the distinguished critic/professor’s upcoming 80th birthday in March of that year. Alas, however, by the time of the volume’s much-delayed publication in 2003,¹ the tributee had “changed tenses” (as Samuel Beckett was fond of putting it) at age 85. Adieu, colleague, friend, and accidental mentor.

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:

IN THE MID-1960S, Fiedler recruited me to join Albert Cook’s bustling new English department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, whereto he himself had lately shifted after his long tenure in Montana. More than any other single factor, it was Leslie’s presence there that tipped my scales Buffaloward, and for the seven years following we were near neighbors. In retrospect, the lively intellectual /artistic/political atmosphere of that place in that turbulent time seems to me as much centered at the Fiedlerhaus as at the rambunctious university campus and the pop-artful Albright-Knox Museum, both nearby. A Buffalo book-reviewer recently opined, in the course of noticing a new book of mine, that its author had done “his most lasting work at Penn State, his most interesting work at Buffalo, and his most fatuous work since returning to Johns Hopkins.” While I don’t necessarily agree with any of those three propositions and would heatedly contest the last of them, I know what the chap means by that second one. It’s the High-Sixties Buffalo Zeitgeist that I associate with the story-series Lost in the Funhouse (1968), the novella-triad Chimera (1972), and the intricated ground-plan of the novel LETTERS (finally completed and published in 1979); and it is Leslie Fiedler, more than any other single figure, who for me embodies that so-spirited place and time.

From whom if not him did I learn, back then, that the USA had changed “from a whiskey culture into a drug culture”—just when I was learning to appreciate good wine? Who first alarmed me with the prophecy³ that “if narrative has any future at all, it’s up there on the big screen, not down here on the page”? In those pioneer days of Black Studies and Women’s Studies, who puckishly (and illuminatingly, as always) offered counter-courses in White Studies and Male Studies? Whose prevailingly apocalyptic prognoses for literature (expanded to book-length in What Was Literature?)⁴ would one take only half seriously, had one not seen heresy after heresy of Fiedler’s turn into prescience?

The list goes on: He is a mentor from whom this incidental, often skeptical, sometimes reluctant mentee has never failed to learn, most frequently in that period of our closest association.

TOWARD THE END whereof — while I was visiting-professoring in Boston and deciding to return to Baltimore (though not, I trust, to blissful literary fatuity) — the fellow did me another significant service, a sort of bookend to his having recruited me to Buffalo in the first place. One would prefer to imagine that whatever official recognition one’s writings earn, they earn purely on their literary merits. The world, however, is what it is, and so it did not escape my notice that the five National Book Award jurors in fiction for 1972 included two (Leslie Fiedler and William H. Gass) who had not only spoken favorably of my fiction, but had become personal friends of mine as well, together with one (Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post) who had consistently trashed me, and two with whose literary-critical opinions I was unacquainted (the novelists Evan Connell and Walker Percy). I readily and thankfully assumed that it was owing to Fiedler and/or Gass that my Chimera-book was among that year’s nominees; with equal readiness I assumed that that would be that: victory enough to have been a finalist, as had been my bridesmaid fortune twice before. Leslie even telephoned me in Boston from New York to assure me that I hadn’t a prayer, inasmuch as “the other three” judges had favorite candidates of their own. Not long after, news came that Chimera had won the thing after all (more precisely, a divided jury divided the prize).

How so?

“You had two for you and two against you,” Leslie cheerfully confided to me later, “and I drank the swing-vote under the table.”

Owe you one there, pal. Owe you, rather, yet another.

“As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy” (80th birthday salute to William H. Gass)

Another birthday-Festschrift tribute,¹ this one to the eminent fictionist, critic, scholar, and teacher William H. Gass, who turned 80 in July 2004. Until his academic retirement in 1999, Gass was Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also founded and directed the International Writers Center (now renamed the Center for Humanities). Unlike the preceding tributee, Leslie Fiedler, he is as of this writing still very much alive and busy at his art. Two of his essay collections have won National Book Critics Circle awards; the most recent, A Temple of Texts, won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for literary criticism.

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. .

TO THE RESCUE, maestro!

The Last Introduction (memorial tribute to Joseph Heller)

Three times, at approximate 10-year intervals, it was my pleasure to introduce Joseph Heller to university audiences: first in the tempestuous High 1960s at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and twice later — in the post-Nixon 1970s and again in the twilight of the Reagan ’80s — at Johns Hopkins. These professional path-crossings, along with our having each taught earlier at Penn State in our apprentice days and been often subsequently categorized together as “Black Humorists” back when that label was in fashion, added an extra fillip of literary comradeship to our cordial acquaintance, despite whatever differences between Joe’s muse and mine. What follows is adapted from the last of those three introductions, delivered on October 4, 1988, when Joe and his wife Valerie were book-touring for his just-published “Rembrandt” novel, Picture This. Upon Joe’s death 11 years later (in December 1999, at age 76), Valerie Heller projected a volume of memorial tributes to her husband from sundry of his friends and associates, and in keeping with our established pattern of one Heller-intro per decade, I contributed this one. If introductions had titles, I would call it

APPLAUDING JOE

Joseph Heller has done at least three literary things that I believe any of his fellow novelists would applaud. I certainly do.

To begin with, his first novel (Catch-22, published in 1961 and never out of print since) managed to be at one and the same time artistically serious, enormously funny (the correct adverb, I think, since its humor addresses such enormities as war, military bureaucracy, grisly chance, and ubiquitous death), blackly cynical (the novel is part of the canon of what came to be called Black Humor), and yet tremendously popular and influential. How gratifying it must be, for a serious American novelist at the close of the 20th century, to be read by millions of people who don’t happen to be what Thomas Mann called “early Christians”: devoted worshippers of literature. I would envy Joe that, were I the envying sort; in any case, I vigorously applaud.

Second, as anybody who lived through the American 1960s knows, that same novel played a certain role in the history of that decade, when Heller’s Yossarian became a tutelary saint of the anti-Vietnam-war movement. I suspect that even those of us who have no a priori ambition to change the world with our art would be secretly pleased to see reality give way a little bit in the face of our fiction — particularly if the effect is benign, as it certainly was in this instance. Enviable: I applaud.

And third, who among us would not be gratified, even if our writing has no effect whatever on the course of history, to live to see it have at least a small effect on language? Perhaps what I most nearly envy Joe Heller is that his term “Catch-22” has come to be used so often, by so many people of all sorts, whether they’ve read the novel or not, to describe a not-uncommon phenomenon that we didn’t have a ready name for until Joe gave us one. We hear it used in the press, by government leaders here and abroad, by anybody caught in such a catch. Not many authors manage to put their trademark on items of our common vocabulary: I think of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, Anne Tyler, Joseph Heller — and I applaud.

BUT OF COURSE Catch-22 is only the first book in Heller’s oeuvre. Five-and-a-half others have followed it¹ (No Laughing Matter, the non-fictional account of his struggle with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, was coauthored with his friend Speed Vogel): books with characters ranging from Henry Kissinger to God. All are comic, even the remorseless Something Happened and the harrowing No Laughing Matter. None is cheering. Heller truly is a Black Humorist, and his new novel, Picture This, may be the darkest of the lot: entertaining indeed; profoundly skeptical if not flat-out cynical in its views of history, art, and classical philosophy; extraordinary in its subject matter; and (like all of Heller’s books) cunning in its architecture. Its author is passing through Baltimore just now on its behalf, and very generously agreed to stop by Johns Hopkins, which he hasn’t visited for a number of years, and to say hello again to our Writing Seminars.

Welcome back, Joe.

(And au revoir, much-missed comrade.)

Remembering John Updike

Written in 2010 for the John Updike Society’s memorial volume Remembrances of John Updike, edited by Professor Jack De Bellis of Lehigh University.

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.

The Judge’s Jokes: Souvenirs of My Father, the After-Banquet Speaker¹

— cornflakes in washing machine / coon hound

—“Living Bra”? What’ll you feed it?

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

MY FATHER, WHOSE first and last names I share — John Jacob “Whitey” Barth (1894–1980), late of Cambridge, on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore — was himself the fifth of six children: four girls and two boys born in the 19th century’s closing decades to a German immigrant stone-worker and his wife. Having crossed from Bremerhaven to Baltimore and found both employment and a bride in that city’s populous German-immigrant community, Herman Wilhelm Barth then crossed Chesapeake Bay with her to Cambridge and established himself there in the tombstone trade. His older son and namesake, evidently the favorite, aspired beyond his father’s craft: Re-crossing the Bay after high school to study sculpting at the Maryland Institute of Art, young Herman (his middle name Englished from “Wilhelm” to “William”) filled his parents’ East Cambridge house with plaster replicas of classical and Beaux Arts statuary, just when International Modernism was hitting the American scene in the 1913 Armory Show. Whether he would have been influenced by that radical new aesthetic, we’ll never know: In World War I he went to France with the AEF to fight his father’s fatherland and died there in the great flu pandemic of 1918, two months before the Armistice.

In contrast to Herman’s ambition (and parental support, presumably: the Maryland Institute is not tuition-free, and few youngsters in that place, time, and class went off to higher education), his kid brother’s was less lofty. As a small boy helping out in the stoneshop, my dad was put to work polishing a flat slab of marble with a piece of railroad iron; as he would tell the story later, chuckling, to his own children, he managed to mash a finger, was sent home crying, and never went back, at least not to apprentice himself to his father’s and elder brother’s trade. At age 16, for reasons never explained to us (but I don’t recall our ever asking for explanation), he dropped out of high school and went to work in a little candy-and-soda shop a few blocks from home, near the bustling crab-and-oyster processing plants on the creek that divided East Cambridge from the town’s business section and other residential wards. In 1917 he too enlisted, and spent the war years as a ground-crewman in the Army’s fledgling “Aviation Section”—but he got no farther from his home town than Langley Field in nearby Virginia, and upon his discharge was content to come back to the bereft family homestead (where he was now the Only Son) and his former employment.

In which, unglamorous as it was compared to Art, he did well — and who knows whether his sadly short-lived brother would have scored as a sculptor or wound up carving tombstones like his dad? Having mastered as a teenager the ins and outs of the candy and soda-fountain business, in his and the century’s twenties my father set up shop for himself, first as a wholesaler (his earliest printed stationery, now browned and crisped with age, is headed JOHN J. BARTH, Wholesale High Grade Chocolates and Specialties, Cambridge, Md) and soon after as a retail shopkeeper in his own soda-fountain/lunchroom /candy-store “uptown” on Race Street, the town’s main business section. His later letterheads read WHITEY’S, John J. Barth, Cambridge, Md, and in time JOHN J. BARTH, Fine Candy Since 1922, Cambridge, Md. In addition to Whitman’s Chocolates and assorted other candies, the store featured Dolley Madison ice cream, sundaes and sodas (no bottled drinks), cold sandwiches made at the counter (he didn’t like cooking-odors on the premises), and soups made at home by our mom and reheated at the store on a small backroom stove. But the showcases of candy (mainly chocolate) were his chief interest: The business’s name was Whitey’s Candyland, but everybody called it simply Whitey’s.

Whitey’s? On Race Street? In the then totally segregated South?

Race Street, Cambridge MD, 1936, with Whitey’s sign near center.

We’ll get to that — though I don’t recall our ever asking whence the nickname, either, which he carried from boyhood. Meanwhile it’s 1922: The young shopkeeper meets and marries a local young milliner working in a hat-shop a few doors down from the Candyland; they move into a two-story white clapboard house next door to his parents, one block from the broad Choptank River and the hospital where over the next several years their children will be born, and where nearly 60 years later, still a resident of that house, at age 85 he’ll breathe his last. Through the intervening half-dozen decades, despite a youthful sinus infection that in those pre-antibiotic days left him severely hearing-impaired for the rest of his life, he thrived in the small town and marsh-rich rural county that he had no interest in leaving (told by his doctor that the only hope for relief from his chronic sinusitis was a less humid climate, Dad replied that he’d rather be sick on the Eastern Shore than healthy anywhere else). He was gregarious, outgoing, and community-spirited: In addition to storekeeping from morning till night six days a week every week of the year, he served as an elected judge of the Dorchester County Orphans Court every Tuesday afternoon for a record-breaking 44 years, was a devoted member of the town’s volunteer fire company as well as an organizer of similar companies in the county’s smaller towns, and an American Legionnaire who not only marched with his fellow veterans in Cambridge’s annual Armistice Day parade but became the chief organizer of those elaborate events. By comparison to his life, mine (literary and academic) seems almost reclusively detached, its radius much wider but its roots — in serial dwelling-places from Pennsylvania and upstate New York to Maryland and south-west Florida — less deep.

Because those volunteer fire companies, understandably, are tightly bonded social clubs as well as indispensable community-service outfits, in addition to their weekly meetings they have members-only banquets and fund-raising public barbecues and ham-and-oyster suppers. It was as the jocular after-dinner speaker at those banquets, in a dozen-plus venues around the county — his own beloved Rescue Fire Company and those others he’d helped organize — that Judge Whitey came into his own as an entertainer, in demand year after year: never a clown, but a humorist locally renowned for his joke-telling from at least the early 1940s until his death in February 1980, just a month before his scheduled appearance at the RFC’s 37th Annual Memorial Banquet.

Rescue Fire Company, Cambridge, MD, 1938.

— Doctor to patient: Your check came back. Patient: So did my arthritis.

— honeybee & horsefly / turnip in mouth / chicken with legs crossed / shad roe

My siblings and I, alas, never got to see our father do his number. Nor did he often tell jokes at home, where our conversation was typically good-humored but, owing at least in part to his deafness, seldom extended or really “personal”: witness those unasked questions about his nickname and his dropping out of high school. It was only as we went through his effects post mortem, in our middle age, that I found two small notebooks of handwritten joke-cues and 14 age-browned Whitey’s Candyland envelopes containing more of the same on notepad-sized separate sheets and bearing the month and day, but seldom the year, of an upcoming gig and its location: C’bge RFC, Taylors Island, Hoopers Island, Church Creek, Lakes & Straits, Neck District. Some held a single sheet of perhaps nine cues; others five or six sheets with as many as 45 cues, occasionally annotated with a check, an X, or the word used. At times, evidently, he would “go around the table,” naming his firehouse comrades and addressing a joke to each (name followed by cue). In all, more than 200 jokes, fewer than half of them written out in full. While free of profanity, about three-quarters of them by my rough count are more or less ribald teasings of romance, courtship, marriage, infidelity, divorce, male and female anatomy, or some other aspect of sex (though a man of impeccable virtue, the Judge was not strait-laced):

—“Am I the first man to sleep with you?” “If you doze off, you will be.”

— Mouse gets pregnant in A&P; didn’t know about Safeway.

— Girdle: keeps stomach in, boys out.

— 2 old maids: 1 trying to diet, 1 dying to try it.

About one in 10 is “ethnic” or otherwise minority-directed, their targets most often African-American (always by cue only, for some reason)

— cats on fence; colored woman

— baptize darkie; last thing remembered

— canning house; sleep with darkie

but also including Native Americans (Indian says, “Chance.” Woman: “I thought all Indians said ‘How.’” Indian: “I know how; just want chance.”), Chinese (Chinaman, food, flowers)[?], Scots (Scotsman comes to U.S.; has 1st baby; wants to tell folks back home. Cablegram = 4 words for $8; he writes “Mother’s features, father’s fixtures.”), Jews (Jewish couple, Abe & Becky, married 50 years, in bed), and gays (homosexuals & hemorrhoids = queers & rears = odds & ends). The rest tease more “neutral” targets: doctors, judges, mechanics, farmers, animals, kids and parents, mothers-in-law. Offensive as one may find those “darkie” jokes in particular — told, one presumes, prior to the Cambridge civil rights riots of the late 1960s, with its attendant sit-ins of Whitey’s Candyland (an obvious target) and other segregated businesses — it’s worth remembering that they’re an extension of the blackface minstrel, Amos ’n’ Andy tradition popular among many blacks as well as whites from the 19th century to the mid-20th, and that unlike most other Southern eateries, Whitey’s risked offending its white customers by serving blacks at least at the candy showcases and the soda fountain, as long as they didn’t presume to sit down: the aptly named “Vertical Negro” policy, easy to tsk at from this remove, but considered liberal in that place and time.

Where did all those jokes come from? Nowadays one’s e-mail is awash with them, forwarded by friends from friends of their friends: a high-speed electronic Oral Tradition. Back then, my guess is that they came from bantering exchanges with friends and customers, from vaudeville acts (even small towns like Cambridge had live vaudeville into the 1930s: touring road companies and the celebrated Adams Floating Theatre), from radio shows like the aforementioned Amos ’n’ Andy, and perhaps from the odd joke book in the Candyland’s magazine rack or paperback bookshelf. Not impossibly Dad made up a few of them himself; if so, it’s a talent that his son (like him, the younger of two) didn’t inherit. (While I’m sometimes described as a comic novelist, the only joke that I can recall ever having invented I literally dreamed up, and was surprised not only to remember upon waking but to find not unamusing: Restaurant waiter serves wine in glass with stem but no base. “How’m I supposed to set this glass down while I eat?” “Sorry, sir: We don’t serve customers who can’t hold their liquor. ”)

More to the point, what about all these jokes and joke-cues? Their most-often-fragmentary nature—prodigal son / fish heads / rabbit sausage—reminds me not only that I never got to see and hear the fellow do this particular one of the numerous things that he evidently did well indeed, but that in this as in who knows how many other ways I never got to know him: that to a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them. For better as well as worse, perhaps: Just as well not to know all those “darkie” jokes, although in the context of that time and place they’d have been as inoffensively entertaining, at least to his all-white audience, as a burnt-corked Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” All the same, leafing through those time-browned, age-crisped cue sheets, like looking at his and Mother’s photographs on my bookshelves (younger then than their son is now) or his Orphans Court name plaque on the shelf above my word processor—John J. Barth, Chief Judge—inevitably makes me think, as the old Irish song laments, “Johnny, we hardly knew ye!”

Nor you me, Dad, really; nor most of us one another, finally, beyond what souvenirs we’ve been given to imagine from, and what imagination we can bring to them:

— nude sunbather on skylight over dining room

— birth control; shower / ice: 400 lbs

— Better try a different speaker next time: Even a rooster gets tired of chicken every night.

Judge John J. “Whitey” Barth, circa 1950.

Eulogy For Jill

A final farewell — this one for Joan Derr Barth Corkran (May 27, 1930–August 7, 2009): my twin sibling Jill. Her German middle name was the maiden surname of our paternal grandmother, Anna Derr; my own Scotch-Irish middle name (Simmons) was our maternal grandma’s married name (we kids never knew “Mommy Nora’s” husband, nor to this day do I know what her maiden name was). Our nicknames — see below — were laid on us before our official given names, John and Joan. Given the circumstance of being a twin born under the zodiacal sign of Gemini and named after a nursery rhyme, it’s to be expected that the motif of twins, doubles, alter egos, and the like may be found here and there in my fiction.

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.