Still Life with Caged Lion

At last, an institution of higher learning that looked the part. Brick buildings two hundred years old, requisite ivy ascending (not flowing down from above like Rapunzel’s tresses, as I’d believed when I was young), grassy quadrangles divided by walkways into skinny triangles. It seemed hardly to matter what went on inside.

In the mid 1970s, Johns Hopkins was one of a handful of writing programs in the country, though I turned to a writing program less for further instruction than as a refuge from the life for which my B.A. appeared to have prepared me: running a cash register at a supermarket, making sandwiches and ladling out macaroni salad in a deli, working as a “home health aide” for a social services agency.

If you were poor, and old, the class in which I had now found myself was teaching me, the odds were good you’d wind up your life in a grim, ill-furnished room all alone. Two decades in school had merely served to obscure this fact. “Forget about the laundry,” a bedridden client commanded, “have a seat.” “Stop fussing in the kitchen and come sit down, girlie!” said another. He wanted to talk about fishing. But bearing too much reality was not what I had been schooled in. I was eager to retreat back to the page.

Back to the world of the fathers, but admitted now to the laboratory where ideas were made and whence they were sent forth into the world. A faculty child masquerading as a graduate student. Had someone stopped me in the hallways and demanded to see my I.D. I would not have been surprised.

The heady moment of the week, when social and academic intensity came together, was in John Barth’s weekly writing seminar, in each of which two student stories were discussed. “I’d give that another turn of the dramaturgical screw,” Barth would say, in his courtly way—this cleverest of writers, whom I’d been startled to see in living color after his black-and-white book jackets, on which he appeared in heavy glasses and what looked like a lab coat. Not only was Barth colorized, he was tall and athletic, speaking in an elegant not quite Southern accent; he liked to sail; he lived in a big brick house in the soigné neighborhood north of campus with his attractive friendly wife. He was a genial host. He invigorated a stifled question-and-answer period by asking Italo Calvino if it was true that Erica Jong had lifted the concept of the “zipless fuck” from him.

After I’d been accepted by Hopkins I found The Floating Opera by this writer I’d never heard of and despite his looking like a no-nonsense high-school chemistry teacher I’d been impressed. I wouldn’t have expected that someone in this day and age could write so well. Once I arrived in Baltimore, my unwittingly self-imposed exile from the twentieth century became even more uncomfortably apparent. I had heard of Thomas Pynchon, upon whose whereabouts other seminar students were speculating. Now giant tomes surrounded us in every direction like the pillars of Stonehenge, waiting to be deciphered. There were Barth’s own lurking large books, Giles Goat Boy and The Sotweed Factor. There was Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Heller’s Something Happened. The Tunnel, which William Gass was known to be assembling. There were Joseph McElroy’s novels to reckon with. He was coming to teach in the spring semester: McElroy, the Writing Seminars’ director Charles Newman told us, was the “best unknown writer in America.” I was nostalgic for the cozy nineteenth century. I’d been happy there.

But here I was, in the midst of a conflagration of postmodernists, alive and well and writing up a bonfire, fueling it with suspect narrative drive. Barthelme, Gass, Hawkes, Elkin, Puig, Calvino, Ashbery—every member of the new canon except the elusive Pynchon, it seemed—came to read to and drink cocktails with us. I didn’t notice that none of them were women. The teacher of the single...