Final Fridays

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

For Shelly

M
OST OF THE pieces here collected have been published separately, in slightly different form. The author gratefully acknowledges the following sources:
The New York Times Magazine
for “Keats's Fears, Etc.”;
The Wilson Quarterly
for “The State of the Art”; Dalkey Archive Press for the forewords to
LETTERS
and
Sabbatical
; Anchor Books for “‘In the Beginning'”; U. Michigan Press for “Further Questions?”; Story Press for “Incremental Perturbation”;
Context
for “‘The Parallels!'”; U. Mississippi Press for “My Faulkner”; U. de León for “¿Cien Años de Qué?”;
Journal of Experimental Fiction
for “The End of the Word as We've Known It?”; Hartford
Courant
for “The Place of ‘Place' in Fiction”; Albuquerque
Tribune
for “Liberal Education: The Tragic View”; Einaudi for “The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American”;
Poets & Writers Magazine
for “‘All Trees Are Oak Trees . . . : Introductions to Literature'”;
Writers Digest Press
for “The Inkstained Thumb”;
Tin City
for “Future Imperfect”; Sarabande Books for “I
.
” ; The
Believer
for “‘In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night'”; Signet Classics (Penguin Group USA) for “The Morning After”;
The Atlantic
for “Do I Repeat Myself?”;
Granta
for “The End?”; Random House for “Introduction to
Not-Knowing
”;
New York Times Book Review
for “The Passion Artist”; U. Delaware Press for “The Accidental Mentor”;
Review of Contemporary Fiction
for “‘As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy'”;
American Scholar
for “The Judge's Jokes.”

I
N 1984, HAVING reached age four-and-fifty and published eight volumes of fiction, I assembled a collection of essays, lectures, and other nonfiction pieces under the title
The Friday Book
.
¹
It was so called, its preface explained, because 1) at that time and for years thereafter, my wife and I, teachers both, routinely met our classes from Mondays through Thursdays and then shifted from Baltimore across Chesapeake Bay for long weekends and summer vacations at our Eastern Shore retreat near the old colonial customs port of Chestertown, Maryland; and 2) being prevailingly a novelist by temperament, with the habit of scratching away at some extended prose fiction on those weekday mornings before my afternoon sessions with undergraduate and graduate-student apprentices in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, I found it a refreshing change of pace as well as a logistical convenience not to haul the accumulating notes, drafts, and research materials for whatever novel was in the works back and forth across the Bay, and instead to dedicate those Friday work-mornings to the muse of nonfiction. The practice soon became so established that I found myself inclined to it more often than not on school-vacation Fridays as well, when Logistical Convenience was no longer a factor. A sort of
Shabbat
-respite, it was, from the
invention of characters, scenes, and plot-developments for novels, novellas, and short stories: one that, however—unlike the Jewish or Christian Sabbaths—could readily be shifted to a different day if the demands of some fiction-in-progress (or travel commitment, or whatever) took precedence. Contrariwise, I might declare some Tuesday or Saturday to be a “Friday” if some lecture- or essay-draft needed extra attention as its deadline approached.

Thus
The Friday Book
.

Three novels and 520 Fridays later, I had accumulated a second volumesworth of such pieces:
Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction
,
1984–1994
.
²
By then five-and-
sixty
, I retired from 40-plus labor-intensive but enormously rewarding years of teaching, as did my wife from her less lengthy but even more intensive pedagogical career. We continued, however—and, as of this writing, continue to continue—our weekday work-morning routines: me seeing what my primary and secondary muses will come up with next, she serving as my indispensable Primary Editor, General Manager of our household, and what in French resort hotels is called
Le Planning
: the arranger and scheduler-in-chief of our appointments and errands, chores and pleasures.

Et voilà:
After not another ten this time, but some fifteen yearsworth of further Fridays since
Further Fridays
, having delivered myself of six more volumes of fiction, I find as I approach age 80 that I've accumulated enough nonfiction-pieces for yet a third collection: not
1995–2005
, in tidy sequence with its predecessors, but
1995–
.

 

AND I PAUSE at that hyphen, which
gives
one pause, like those cemetery headstones bearing a deceased spouse's birth- and death-dates and the bereft survivor's birthdate followed by hyphen and
blank marble awaiting gravure. (Remember the awkward situation of some such pre-planners at the turn of the millennium, who had engraved their headstones
1910–19__
, say, and finding themselves still breathing air and taking nourishment in c.e. 2000, were obliged to have their grave-markers replaced or re-engraved? Given the ever-increasing longevity of dwellers in our planet's better-off precincts, best to end with the hyphen, even in a new century.) Just as my waiting grave's marker, if there were one, would read
1930–
, I'm dating these Friday-pieces
1995–
; and I call their assemblage
Final Fridays
on the same actuarial grounds that lead me to regard my eighties as my Final Decade.

“You should live so long!” some friend or family member might well tease. Given my thus-far-uncommonly-good health, and barring accident or general catastrophe, I just might, guys
³
—and even longer, though I've no desire to unless this book's dedicatee is with me and we're still enjoying life more than not. A fair-fortuned life it's been: If we know some more-blessed ones, we know ever so many less. Among its blessings, in my case, has been the pleasure of imagining, languaging, and publishing all those stories and essays—the latter mainly, though by no means exclusively, on the reading and writing of fiction. The ones in
The Friday Book
and
Further Fridays
were ordered chronologically by date of first publication; in the present volume they're ordered likewise, but within two groups: pieces about “Reading, Writing, and the State of the Art,” and then “Tributes and Memoria” to sundry literary comrades, colleagues, and other navigation stars.

 

I CONCLUDE THIS Foreword on the final Friday of the fifth month of the ninth year (or tenth, depending on one's counting-system) of
the 21st century of the Common Era, having published yet another story-book
⁴
and preparing to review and revise these accumulated nonfiction pieces over the next many “Fridays”—some of them Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, perhaps even the odd Saturday or Sunday—while awaiting re-inspiration
⁵
by my Muse-in-Chief. I do not know now in what year these
Final Fridays
will appear in print (“The world should last so long!” I hear again that Yiddish-inflected Voice Off, probably the Muse's, simultaneously hoping, half-doubting, teasing, and counter-
verhexing
). Nor do I promise that there'll be no further Friday-pieces thereafter from this pen: At my age and stage, one presumes neither way. But in the not-unimaginable event that the world, my muse, and I all manage to persist, I intend to leave open in this collection's subtitle that space beyond the hyphen.

 

—LANGFORD CREEK, MARYLAND: FRIDAY, MAY 29, 2009

An extended reflection on Getting Older, first published in
The New York Times Magazine
for a 1997 issue on “The Age Boom,” when its author was a mere and still-frisky 67-year old....

 

 

A
MBIVALENT 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 fiction
¹
—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....