Final Fridays (31 page)

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.

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.

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.

 

 

I
N 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 prophecy
³
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.

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.

 

 

N
EARLY 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....