Author's Introduction

       The chief purpose of introductions (I like to say when introducing guest authors to their public audiences at Johns Hopkins, in whose writing Seminars I preside over advanced, unadvanced, and backward apprentice writers of fiction, coaching the first, instructing and encouraging the second, and gently hoping that the third will find another métier) is to test the public-address system. Introductions ought therefore to extend beyond a single breath, but not much beyond. They also permit latecomers to be seated and the guest author to size up his/her house and perhaps make appropriate program adjustments.

       There are a number of Rules for Public Introducing, of which the first is Do not upstage the introducee by introducing him/her with cleverer remarks than he/she is likely to make him/herself and the second is Never introduce either a speaker or a text with an attempted parody of him/her/it, for if your attempt is successful you have broken Rule One, and if it is not you have been at least faintly foolish.

       Introduction to a course of study is better done by a straightforward syllabus, to a body of assorted nonfiction by a straightforward table of contents, than by one more nattering text-before-the-text. Eschew introductions wherever possible. What cannot be eschewed, swallow hard and abbreviate. Above all, avoid any version, especially any clever version, of the introduction "This author [course, text, whatever] really needs no introduction."

       If you yourself are the author/teacher, and your presentation is after all largely self-explanatory -- an arrangement of your essays and occasional lectures, some previously published, most not, most on matters literary, some not, accumulated over thirty years or so of writing, teaching, and teaching writing, interstitched with little lessons on the manufacture of fiction, presentations to sundry symposia, remarks upon your work and your life as an American writer in the second half of the twentieth century, and other "continuity" material (not to be confused with "filler": Continuity, like discontinuity, has its place in writing which takes its readers seriously; "filler" does not), and here as they say collected for the first time -- you should dispense with introductions and get on with the job.

       Ms. Katha Pollitt, reviewing in the New York Times a 1983 volume of essays by Ms. Cynthia Ozick, writes, "This is not your typical collection of essays by an eminent middle-aged writer of fiction. You know what sort of book I mean -- a graceful miscellany of book reviews, introductions, and speeches, all wrapped up and offered to the public less as a book, really, than as a kind of laurel, a tribute to the author's literary importance." Okay: This book is that sort of book, except that it contains no book reviews -- my vows to the muse, made long ago and reasonably well kept, prohibit among other things the giving or soliciting of advertising testimonials and the reviewing of books -- and I offer it to the public after all less as a kind of laurel than as an honest-to-goodness book.

J.B.

Baltimore/Longford Creek, Md., 1983/84*

* James Joyce made these subscripts fashionable with his Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921 at the foot of Ulysses: a kind of navigational fix on literary high modernism. It is a practice of no artistic value whatever and therefore better eschewed, though in the case of American writers the dates of composition may be of interest to the Internal Revenue Service.

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