May Your Muse Still Be Singing

For Jack

I remember arriving at Hopkins suspecting every man with a smooth brow, ruddy cheeks, a tweed jacket, and a sailor’s hat to be John Barth. I had just arrived on the Homewood campus from the Philippines, and there were so many white men being John Barth that the most ordinary encounter with strangers was a potential thrill. I knew his face from dust jackets at the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center, the US embassy’s outpost on Buendia Avenue in Manila’s business district. It’s serendipitous—a very Barthian, Scheherazadian word, to be sure—to be writing about Jack now when I’m on a US book tour (virtually, of course) for Bibliolepsy, the novel-in-progress I sent him in 1986 during the height of a street rebellion, now called the edsa People Power Revolt, that kicked the Marcoses out of my country. The fan letter (with ms attached!) that I wrote to Mister John Barth was a shot in the dark as indeterminate as the outcome of our protests.

I had researched his office address from pamphlets at Thomas Jefferson after I had read an article he wrote in Harper’s called “Teacher.” Buendia Avenue was off of edsa, the 24-kilometer-long street of our discontent. I used to take a recess from revolution to read books and magazines. I was a 22-year-old kid from a far-flung, obscure island city, Tacloban, marching with the Maoists in Manila, but I’d also just graduated from an English department, with typewritten sheaves of a manuscript about books and reading in my backpack along with leaflets of rebellion. Among the American books I loved most in that library on Buendia were The Floating Opera and Chimera. For me, Barth made American literature relevant. Reading John Barth was like entering a world of ambitious invention that the world of the street echoed, in its different way: in the art of Barth’s books was also a way for me to be free. I was very surprised, reading the essay in Harper’s, that the magician of Chimera was human, with a possible office address, a second identity beyond art, and an earthly vocation: teaching. Looking back now, it’s even odder that I thought I could then just write to this magician-slash-teacher and send him my novel.

What is magical, in fact, is that John Barth wrote me back.

In recalling Jack, my memory is suffused simply by my remembrance of his generosity. That is all. That he wrote this clueless rebel back. That he took the time to enclose an application form. That he suggested, with the gentlest tone of bemusement at my audacity, also known as ignorance, in writing straight to him, that I should redirect my novel to the Writing Seminars. My letter from John Barth, the missive received in Manila from the Andromeda Galaxy, told me that I would be a writer. The first sight of him at the seminar table had that mystical quality that must have struck all 10 of us in class—my fellow writers, whom I still consider friends, were 20-something hotshots from Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Wesleyan, Hopkins, Goucher, Tulane, Cornell, and Brown (I was the only brown person, the only foreigner, and the only one not educated in a private college—though this singularity never occurred to me then: we were all just classmates). Whatever aggrandized figure we thought we were, Jack’s appearance at last at the table was the denouement of our collective, expectant awe. We talked about this often beforehand, at the welcome parties—what would he be like? He was not wearing his sailor’s hat, he was leaner than in his page-sized Chimera library-book dust jacket, and I remember one classmate was late—she told me afterward she had been circling the hallway, nervous. When she came in, Jack said, “And you must be Caragh O’Brien.” Her response was perfect: “And you must be John Barth.” And so he was.

To be in Jack’s presence was to summon up your swagger to...