Gunkholing: An Anecdotary

Anecdotes

We were sitting in his roomy office in Gilman Hall; the large railroad station clock on the wall behind him haloed his big bald head, a diadem of Helvetica numerals.

“What you have written here is not a story,” he told me.

“I know that, Jack,” I said.

John Barth was referring to a “story” I had turned in to the seminar called “Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List.” The comment that my “story” wasn’t a story wasn’t dismissive or negative but descriptive. My “story” wasn’t, technically, a “story” but more an anecdote, he said, a complicated anecdote. It did not adhere to the narrative map of Freytag’s triangle: ground situation, vehicle, rising action, climax, and denouement. My “story” was technically an anecdote made up of anecdotes. A collage of fragments. It was made up of numbered sections, fragments or vignettes that Robert Coover, Jack informed me, labeled “crots,” an informal French term taken from typography meaning “turd.” Type compositors would look at the shapes black print made on the white proof page. The crot, the pattern of shit on a road.

“But that’s okay,” Jack continued. “We’ll call this something else,” he said. A dramatic pause. “We’ll call it a ‘fiction.’”

________

Genes

Eric Nelson, a graduate student in public health who lived in my building on North Charles, asked me if I wanted to splice some genes. In 1979, Dr. Bernice H. Cohen established at Johns Hopkins the nation’s first graduate program in genetic epidemiology. At the same time I was at Hopkins in the Writing Seminars creating new fictions, the labs were creating new life. I answered Eric, “Let’s go.”

I had heard about gene splicing before when I was, a few years earlier, at Indiana University. The enzymatic scissors to cut and paste chromosomes had been around since the ’60s. But there was now a debate about the safety of the labs and preventing the escape of novel genetic material into the wild. Indiana had wanted to upgrade its facilities to a P3 level. At Hopkins in 1979, they too were using strains of E. coli, but the labs then seemed open to me. We walked in after hours. I remember the fluorescent lights humming and the fans running. Eric sat at a bench. He had put on a white lab coat. I was wearing a wool overcoat I had gotten in an Indianapolis thrift store. The best thrift store clothes always came from estates, not stuff donated when someone was alive. I was messing around in a genetics lab wearing a dead man’s coat.

Eric said that he was shooting frog genes into E. coli. He let me have a look at a colony of cells under the microscope. I had no idea of what I was looking at or for.

“That’s what I am calling E. coli nelsonenthis,” he said. It wasn’t viable for long, he told me, cleaning up. “But,” he said as he turned off the lights, “I am getting better at it each time I do it.”

Boston or baltimore

In 1978, there were only a handful of mfa graduate schools. Boston University and Johns Hopkins weren’t even mfa programs. They gave out MAs in creative writing. I applied to nine or 10 programs. I got into Hopkins, and George Starbuck called me from Boston with an offer. I was a bit overwhelmed. I’d never been out of Indiana, really, and I told him that. “You don’t want to go to Hopkins,” he said. “Baltimore is the world’s largest small town.”

I thought about that. And I thought a big small town sounded right for me.

“Tell Jack Barth to give you a ride on his yacht when you get there,” he told me. I told Jack what he had said about the yacht ride and that I was on my way to Baltimore.

“Hardly a yacht, a 31-foot cutter christened ‘Cobweb,’” he said. “Maybe one day I’ll take you out on the Bay.”

Sixteen years later, I was now a professor teaching, and I was moving south to teach at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. A week before I arrived, George Starbuck, who had retired in Tuscaloosa, died in that small, small town I was now moving to.

Once

I was always good at creating The Once Upon a Time, Jack always said— the ground situation, the setting of a story that constructs a cantilevered bridge of interesting details in anticipation of the incident, the “one day” that sets the whole “rising action” into motion. I was good at going on and on in the setting things up to happen and not very good at making that happen happen.

Here’s a ground situation from a parable: Once there was a man who had two sons. . . . That is all one needs. The potential for conflict is there— conflict between siblings, conflict between fathers and sons. One day (the one day is always a coincidence) the younger son comes to his father and says, “Father give all that is owed to me as I want to make my way in the world. . . .”

I could never pull that keystone block out of the Jenga tower. Instead, I would continue to add to the masonry, buttress the scaffolding, repoint, shore up. I never could get on to the getting on with it, the rising action. Jack describes the rising action as “the incremental perturbation.” The machinery stalled for me. Not plot but blot.

________

Down the ocean

The Eastern Shore looked like the Midwest to me. We drove on flat straight roads bordered by curtains of tasseled corn. It was humid the way Indiana was humid, but then there’s the ocean.

In 1978, I saw the ocean, for real, for the first time. I was 24. We had arrived “down the ocean,” driving from Baltimore after dark to camp on Assateague. I heard what I thought was a highway nearby but what turned out to be the Atlantic’s traffic of waves when I saw it for the first time in the dawn of the next day.

I never liked the notion of “experimental” writing. I think I think of myself more as a “formalist” and picked up from Jack this geography of narrative structures. If I am categorized at all as a student of John Barth, I am associated with those “experimental” conventions and strategies of the self-conscious, the metafictional, the postmodern, I guess. I am also a trader in the “tricks” that John Gardner warned you about instead of the transparent texts Gardner promoted.

All head. Little heart.

But I am here to say that my Barthian anxiety of influence has to do not with the Literatures of Exhaustion nor even Replenishment but with the Literature of the Here, the Near. That is to say (and no one ever says it) that what I took from Jack were methods to negotiate the notion of Place, of Region. I am, thanks to Jack, a surveyor of turf, a staker of spots. I am an arranger, a collector of the whole philatelic catalogue of where Where is, a chip off the old block.

One day

One day, I was sitting in my little office in Gilman Hall when Bill Baer, passing by, asked if I was going to mla.

“What’s an mla?” I asked after him. I had no idea there were jobs to be had teaching creative writing and a venue where one interviewed with department hiring committees. The mla that year, it turned out, was in San Francisco. Jack would be there to do a reading. I couldn’t get into the reading as I wasn’t a member of the mla but saw him briefly in the lobby of the Hilton.

I told him about the one interview I had with the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I was lucky, I thought, to get such an interview. It was for a position in a graduate program. I didn’t think my MA was a terminal degree, and I had only published one fiction, “Alfred Kinsey, Alone after an Interview, Dreams of Indiana,” in The Iowa Review. After my interview, I went back to my room in the cheap hotel. There I made a sandwich (I could afford a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter) and dreamt of Indiana.

In the lobby of the Hilton, outside the ballroom where he would give his reading, Jack was interested in how things went. I told him that I thought it went.

“I mostly talked about you, Jack,” I answered, answering the questions about how Jack was as a teacher, what kind of person Jack was, what was Jack working on now, etc. We were both amused. Jack enjoyed the “meta” quality of the anecdote and of the moment. Interviewing the interviewee about the interview.

I said I didn’t think anything would come of it. And nothing did.

Numbers: 1

The only time I remember Jack expressing surprise about anything I said or wrote happened in a one-on-one conference after one of my pieces had been discussed in the seminar. It took place in his big almost-empty office. A framed letter from his daughter. The title page of The Sot-Weed Factor. A picture of Shelly. The big clock on the wall behind him.

I never saw him look at the clock. He seemed to conduct his conferences using the synchronicity of his own inner clock. At ten minutes till, he would finish up, having covered every possible thing that needed to be said, and ask for questions, having never glanced at the time. Hearing none from me, he would stand up and walk me to the door, reminding me of the next meeting and the prompts and tips previously discussed and ending with etc. etc., closing the door softly behind me outside.

This particular time, he asked how my thesis was coming along. The Writing Seminars thesis was challenging then as it had to be finished in one year, but the one year was really nine months of the school year, and, really, the thesis had to be written in seven months as the final archival copy had to be professionally typed and perfectly rendered months before graduation.

Then, Jack taught three semesters and was off one semester. My year, he was on leave in the spring. He was just checking up on me as he was checking out, etc. etc.

Numbers: 7

The surprise? I told him my thesis was titled Numbers and went on to outline the contents of the book, 10 fictions each having a connection with one cardinal number, etc. But he did not register receiving any of that information. Instead, he was stuck—I could see the gears turning—struck on the news of the title, Numbers.

It was very strange to see this eminently controlled man, for a second, syncopate. Soon, he recovered, regained balance, nodded assent and encouragement, walked me out the door, assuring me that Charlie Newman would take good care of me next term.

It was much later, after Jack’s seventh book, letters, came out that I understood what had happened. Within letters—an epistolary novel, a sequel to all six of his previous books, rife with twinning and the number seven—one of its characters is writing a novel titled numbers.

Jack never talked about what he was working on in class. At readings where he used parts of the work-in-progress as a script, he gave, in setting up, minimal hints about the book’s much larger structure.

With time running out, I sat there, ticking off my 10 fictions, the sun pouring in the big window of Gilman Hall, a surprising sliver in overlapping Venn diagrams, calibrating, always calibrating in that big brain.

Two anecdotes

My old friend, Mike Wilkerson, who died last year, was in Jack’s Writing Seminar, the year following mine, 1979–80. In February of ’80, he found out that Jack’s father, John “Whitey” Barth, had just died in Cambridge on the Eastern Shore.

Mike had a car in Baltimore, an amc Gremlin, and we drove to the viewing. Mike and I had been classmates at Indiana University. We had driven that same Gremlin out East, years before, scouting graduate schools.

Two volunteer firefighters in uniform and at attention flanked Whitey’s casket. The funeral home was packed. Whitey Barth had been a civic-minded judge, the owner of a popular candy store (Whitey’s since 1922), and founder of volunteer fire brigades. Jack saw us in the back of the room, made his way through the crowd to greet us. He noted how strange it was, this “viewing,” and with an anthropological distance talked a bit about the doctrines and traditions of Methodism and his hometown.

And then he related two humorous anecdotes about other funerals in which he had taken part. One had to do with a friend’s surreptitious burial at sea in the Chesapeake. The other about spreading another’s ashes only to discover that “ashes” is not le mot juste to describe cremains. After that, Jack thanked us again for coming out all this way to “view” his father, stowing the charm effortlessly, and returned funereally to the front of the room where he stood and greeted others next to the firefighters wearing white gloves.

As we crossed the Bay Bridge in the Gremlin, Mike and I talked about the setting, the transformations of tone, manner, delivery we had just witnessed. And we talked about it again, years later, the last time we talked, a few weeks before he died.

Gunkholing

After lunch, Jack, said we should go out gunkholing in the two-man kayak. Jack and Shelly lived then outside of Chestertown but spent most of the time cruising Chesapeake Bay. We had crab cakes and beaten biscuits for lunch. Once on the water, we went in and out of inlets and coves and mouths of creeks. I said that I heard there was more shoreline in the Bay than the entire coastline of the usa.

“Well, yes and no,” Jack said, “since the Bay’s shoreline would be part of the country’s coast, but I see what you mean.”

Being from Indiana, I had never been in a kayak made for one or two or gone gunkholing before. I was in the front and Jack was doing all the work.