Praying for Everybody

       That same year, 1973, the Barths decided neither to remain in lively Boston nor to return to scrappy Buffalo, where by then I had lived and worked for seven years, but to move to Baltimore instead: Shelly to teach at the St.Timothy's School, me to join the Johns Hopkins University writing Seminars in which I'd served my own apprenticeship twenty years earlier.

       Though I had in that interim presided over many and many a writing workshop, this would be my first experience of teaching in an autonomous, degree-granting "creative writing" department, entirely distinct from the university's department of English. The happy prospect of returning to Johns Hopkins and the Chesapeake Bay country notwithstanding, my feelings about such programs were as mixed as were the university's. A small but historically rigorous school -- the first American university patterned after German rather than English or Scottish models -- Hopkins had never gone in for practicum courses in the arts: Those were the proper bailiwick of institutes and conservatories, not of universities. Yet it was recognized that writing was more akin to the general intellectual enterprise than were painting and singing, for example, and so -- in keeping with the university's traditions of pedagogical experiment and original research -- the Hopkins writing program was among the first to be established, after Harvard's and Iowa's.

       By 1973, however, its fortunes had fallen far from the days when the romance philologist Leo Spitzer and the aesthetician and historian of ideas George Boas had joined the poet and founder of the program, Elliott Coleman, in administering a first-rate interdepartmental doctorate in literary aesthetics, designed for writers with an academic string to their bow who wanted a serious Ph.D. Spitzer was now dead, Boas emeritus, Coleman ill and verging upon retirement, and the writing Seminars attenuated and amateurish, no longer a credit to the school. The appropriate deans and I agreed in interview that the university should either gently retire the program when its founder retired or else thoroughly and expensively renovate it. The options struck me as about equally sensible; if they chose the latter and hired me, I wanted authority to hire a new chairman -- preferably a literary critic or theorist who also wrote fiction or poetry -- with authority in turn to hire a whole new staff, from poets to secretaries.

       That is what came to pass, and I found myself thinking more attentively than I'd done before about the justification for such programs, which were proliferating like rabbits (there are now well above 200 degree-granting creative writing programs in our republic).* Early in the year, therefore, I went down from Boston to Washington, D.C., to join a symposium at the Library of Congress upon a subject not thitherto much to my taste -- The Teaching of Creative Writing -- as well as to check out the real-estate scene in Baltimore. My particular panel of symposiasts included Wallace Stegner, who compared the training of writers to the training of horses: The writing teacher, Stegner declared, can be an authoritarian who breaks his colts with a two-by-four; or he can be a rebel who by his unorthodoxy tries to stimulate originality in his charges (I've forgotten how this applies to horses); or he can abdicate responsibility and let go the reins entirely, admiring everything his students do and being correspondingly loved by them; or he can really teach, declaring his principles and stating his standards and obliging his students to demonstrate that any innovation they make is better than what they give up to make it.

* Now means 1973. By 1984 there were above 300.

       By some arrangement of the panelists' presentations which I cannot recall, mine was drafted in response to his.

       There is no disagreeing with Wallace Stegner's wise and plain account of the possibility of helping talented novices along in their literary apprenticeships. I concur as well, warmly, with his pedagogical-equestrian typology; having had the advantage, as a student at Johns Hopkins, of two writing teachers in his good fourth category, I've striven since in several universities to measure up to that ideal.

       There are a couple of things that Wallace didn't say because they go without saying. I shall now say them.

       First, we acknowledge that while a fair amount of current published fiction of the literary sort in the United States is written by people who've had some experience in college fiction-writing courses, the fact remains that the great majority of students in college fiction-writing courses -- even Creative Writing diplomates -- never achieve professional publication, for the reason that their work never gets to be good enough to be competitive. This majority is no doubt vaster in some writing operations than in others, but it is always very large. Elliott Coleman's list of his published former students over the past quarter-century is impressive; if he kept a list of his unpublished ones, it would be even more so. And a friend of mine who taught fiction-writing at Penn State for at least twenty years and kept in close touch with his former students confessed to me, upon his retirement, that except for Vance Packard and James Dugan, whose writings were nonfiction, not one of his alumni had ever published a word, to his knowledge. So it goes.

       But -- second -- there is nothing to be inferred from this state of affairs, beyond the gospel truth that many are called but few are chosen, and that, as Cardinal Newman remarked, in effect, no matter how you slice it, the few can never mean the many. Surely that circumstance doesn't make our enterprise futile, any more than the odds against grace invalidate the practice of religion. If anything, it validates us; we can say (again with Newman) that since we've no way of knowing which of our parishioners God has elected, we pray for all of them. In fact, at the end of each semester's work I like to pass on to my apprentice writers Samuel Beckett's favorite quotation from St. Augustine. Referring to the thieves who were crucified along with Jesus, Augustine writes, "Do not despair; one thief was saved. Do not presume; one thief was damned." The advice applies both to our students vis-à-vis their literary aspirations and to us vis-à-vis our students -- though in neither case are the odds anything like as good as fifty-fifty.

       Having acknowledged this state of affairs, I find myself believing that the right response to it -- on the part of those who preside over even our "advanced" studio courses, not to mention the less advanced ones -- is a particular concern to appraise the manuscripts in hand in terms of the existing corpus of literature; to analyze imperfect solutions of particular "executive problems," as Cleanth Brooks calls them, by comparison to perfect, or at least successful, solutions of similar problems. This is one of the obvious ways to turn a practicum course in fiction-writing into an adjunct to general literary study; it might be small consolation to students with more ambition than ability, but it's some justification for our ministering to them, if it's done right.

       Clearly it is not very helpful to say to a student "Kafka did this same sort of thing, but a lot more brilliantly." The student knows that already.* And comparison to the great can be a put-down even in its more generous forms: Wilfred Sheed reports Edmund Wilson's habit, in conversation, of prefacing a criticism with something like "Now see here, Sheed, this is where you and Tolstoy go wrong. . ." On the other hand, it can surely be illuminating, and may even be consoling, to be reminded that the problems of narrative strategy we wrestle with as apprentices have been famously wrestled with by our distinguished predecessors, and not always perfectly successfully.

* Leslie Fiedler told me once that whenever a student asks him "How can I become a much better writer?" he's tempted to answer, "Be born again." Setting aside the fact that now and then a person truly is reborn, such candid advisement is not very useful advice.

       I believe this kind of historical perspective is especially enlightening when brought to bear on very innovative work. It is not to put a young writer down that we show him that his edible or self-destructing or do-it-yourself narrative has venerable antecedents in the history of avant-gardism. It is to give him spiritual ancestors and comrades on the one hand, and on the other to conserve his imaginative energy; to spare him from forever reinventing the wheel.

       So much for what goes without saying. As for what doesn't, perhaps it could be left unsaid. But I'll lay on the table two unrelated observations that I'm regularly put in mind of in the classroom.

       One has to do with the meretriciousness of most radical formal innovation in fiction -- in all the arts, I'm sure. My observation is that most of the "traditionalist" fiction I read in typescript is fairly forgettable too, compared to real literary accomplishment. The most gifted seminar I've presided over to date at Buffalo, with neither encouragement nor discouragement from me, turned itself into a seminar in Alternatives to the Line and Page: action fiction, three-dimensional fiction, fiction for tape and live voice, wordless fiction. Most of what its members produced I have forgotten, but several of the experiments were extraordinarily successful. Though sometimes unmarketable for technical reasons, they were in fact genuine alternatives to the line and the page. The best ones managed even to be moving. A year later, virtually the same group was back to pages, lines, sentences, even characters and linear plots, with about the same percentage of hits and misses -- but, I observed, with a livelier sense of their medium than they had before their excursion to its perimeters. A roomful of determined young traditionalists, on the other hand, who neither know nor care about those perimeters, can be depressing to preside over. Youth should be more adventurous. I had rather apply snaffle and bit than spur and crop.

       The other observation -- picking up on Wallace Stegner's Third Truth, that teaching any art becomes progressively more difficult as one moves on from the rudiments -- has to do with the hierarchy of problems in fiction-writing workshops. My experience has been that the first gifts a gifted novice shows are usually a way with the language, as if it were his ally instead of his adversary, or at worst a friendly adversary; a flair for observing and rendering detail; and (less regularly) a sense of the fictive potential in people and situations. To put it another way, he has an inchoate authenticity of eye and voice; real steam in the boilers; real monkeys on the back; a Weltanschauung in utero, which those who've been there, students and teachers alike, usually recognize right off. On the other hand, the last thing we usually learn is the Aristotelian Business of what constitutes a whole dramatic action and the most strategic ordering of its parts. I find that the good apprentice writers in my own advanced seminars will themselves make most of the critical points I'll have noted to make about one another's diction, detail, management of narrative viewpoint, characterization, and the manipulation of images. What I find myself addressing, perhaps more and more as I move through my own apprenticeship, are such things as the motivation and foreshadowing and pacing of main actions; the dramatical-moral voltages of characters -- all that goes by the name of dramaturgy, a way with story as distinguished from a way with words, whether in relatively traditionalist fiction like John Updike's or William Styron's, or in less traditionalist fiction like Italo Calvino's or Gabriel García Márquez's. Because I myself am in love with stories at least as much as with language, it is in this area, dramaturgy, that I find myself most often in the role of adversary, coach, and instructor with my students past the novice level. And, other things equal, it is the writers who begin with or arrive at good dramaturgical sense whom I'm most optimistic about when their schooldays are done. Among them, I'd bet that the statistics of eventual publication are considerably less chastening.

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