The Friday Book《星期五的书》by John Barth
Doing the Numbers A FOOTNOTE TO THE FOREGOING "The statistics of eventual publication. . ." Ten years of presiding over the Johns Hopkins fictioneers prompt this 1983 footnote to the foregoing. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, our graduate-student apprentice writers were regular English Department Ph.D. candidates who happened to write fiction as well, but were admitted to the graduate program primarily on their academic qualifications. In consequence, the level of critical articulateness in the room was generally higher than the level of raw fictive talent. Most of those students are now professors. A few have published the odd short story; none has yet become an established professional writer. The same applies to the alumni of that excellent Aesthetics of Literature doctoral program aforementioned, presided over at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s by a poet, a philosopher, and a philologist: Elliott Coleman, George Boas, and Leo Spitzer, respectively. Its intellectual standards were so high, and literary scholarship was made so appealing by those three excellent gentlemen and their colleagues, that with but a few exceptions all the graduates of that program are now scholar-critics whose occasional fiction or verse is a graceful second string to their bow. Those of us who wound up being writers who also teach, more than teachers who also write, were either never admitted to that program or, like myself, dropped out of it because we felt ourselves distinctly in the wrong métier and out of our intellectual depth. For me it was a familiar feeling, the same I'd experienced years before at Juilliard. As I'd recognized then that my musical ability was real but small, I recognized later (with some disappointment, but not much) that my ability for abstract thinking and rigorous critical analysis was likewise not of pre-professional caliber. I shrugged my shoulders and got on with novelizing, writing the odd essay or lecture in the same spirit as I played jazz, for serious diversion. Among our graduate-student apprentices at Hopkins, as among those at Iowa, Stanford, and other writing programs both good and competitive, the statistics of eventual, substantial literary publication are by no means so discouraging as those aforecited, for the obvious reason that the writers are selected in the first place mainly for their apparent promise as writers. Their academic qualifications we take seriously, even unto their scores on the Graduate Record Examination: My opinion is that writers who elect to serve a part of their apprenticeship in a good university rather than elsewhere should be not seriously out of place in that university. But such bonuses as through-the-roof GRE scores, glowing testimonials from well-known professors, and impressive academic transcripts from good colleges serve mainly as tie-breakers and recommendations for teaching assistantships. The Ivy League has sent us a number of our best TAs, but most of our strongest writers have come to us from colleges not famous for their academic excellence. A powerful writing sample sweeps nearly everything else aside, and a few of our subsequently most successful fiction alumni (Frederick Barthelme and Mary Robison, for example) we accepted into the program more despite their academic backgrounds than on their account. Such applicants are obviously artists-in-the-making, who will be at least as good for the university as the university will be for them. But even with our ablest apprentices, I like early on to Do the Numbers. There exist currently in our republic, I tell them, worse than 300 degree-granting programs in creative writing, according to the bulletin of an organization called Associated Writing Programs. Let us suppose that, on the average, each of these turns out twenty certified, diplomatized Writers every year (the Hopkins program, a small one, turns out nearly twice that number if one counts both BAs and MAs, but since many of our MAs hold BAs in creative writing from elsewhere -- indeed, some hold MAs or MFAs from elsewhere, a circumstance we elect to ignore -- I adjust the average downwards to compensate). That comes conservatively to 5,000 officially anointed new U.S. writers per annum. Let us suppose that half of these are poets, playwrights, or screenwriters by chief election and half are fiction-writers -- my rough impression from having visited a good many such operations. We now have 2,500 newly ordained fictionists each spring. Next we shall estimate the productive lifetime of American professional writers of fiction -- those who join the Authors Guild or PEN, for example -- to average. . . three decades, would you say? From about age 30 to about age 60, balancing against each other the many curtailed and the not a few extended careers? Such a writer may then expect that during his professional lifetime his national culture will be the richer for 75,000 newly consecrated competitors in his medium -- and that only on the assumption that the popularity of writing programs in America unaccountably levels off this year from its enormous growth since 1945, though the fact is that the shrunken academic job market since So, my friends: 74,999 new certified American writers of fiction in your productive lifetime, plus yourself. It will not do to point out, correctly, that most of these diplomates will never publish a word of their art outside of their campus literary magazines, and therefore will never compete with you for the by no means infinite attention of readers of fiction. All that that circumstance tells us is that the 41,000-odd new titles published by the 13,000-odd book-publishers in America counted by the R. R. Bowker Company in 1982 (to take one year as representative), of which the largest single category is fiction, were written mainly by authors not authorized to do so by our degree-granting writing programs. The numbers still stand: The ten or fifteen novels or story-collections published by our average American professional fiction-writer in his/her 30-year productive lifetime must compete for shelf space, review space, and readerly mind-space with maybe a quarter-million other new titles offered by American publishers alone over that period. If, after all, the chief real product of all those writing programs is more readers rather than more writers, what a service they perform! Well, but what is an aspiring young writer to do with these formidable, not to say appalling, numbers? My advice to my students is twofold. First, be duly impressed. There is an enormous lot of competition for readerly attention out there, not only from those 74,999 (or however-many) other certified living American writers, but also from the thousands of non-American living writers and the tens and tens of thousands of your predecessors in the art of fiction. Why should anyone who owes you nothing (unlike your classmates in this room) read even a single page of yours, when there are so many other things to enjoy in the fiction way from the world's authors living and dead, so many other things yet to read besides fiction, and so many other agreeable things to do besides read at all? "The writer's first obligation," said Henry James, "is to be interesting." Very interesting. Second, having been duly impressed by the numbers, forget them. Talent tends to cut through odds. Many are called and few are chosen, but those few are chosen, usually. Inasmuch as the few can never mean the many, you had as well relax and trust your muse, for there's little you can do towards that final election except read everything and practice your ass off. Just a touch of cockiness might come in handy, too. I confess to you, worthy apprentices, that if at your age the muse had not only revealed to me the depressing numbers I have just reviewed with you, but warned me further that my particular American literary generation was fated to produce, say, only three writers of merit, I would have said to myself (I would not now), Who needs the other two? << PrevPage [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] ... NextPage >> |
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