Half a century ago, a professor at my college assigned “Giles Goat-Boy” as the culminating novel in his Modern Literature course. I’d never heard of the book or its author.
The length daunted me: 766 dense pages! But before I’d finished the multiple prefaces, John Barth had become my favorite writer. That a mere mortal could construct sentences so elegant, so complex and so funny with the same words I used every day — I didn’t see how it was possible. There was also a lot of sex.
A couple of years later, my professor invited Barth to our college. His most recent novel, “Chimera,” had won the National Book Award, and he read the opening pages to a full hall. In the photo I took that night, his bare cranium shines in the darkness; he looks like an oracle.
I stalked the author and his host after the reading. Following them to the dorm room where they settled in to chat and drink, I steeled myself and knocked. Nervous, starstruck, I told the story of trying to get Mickey Mantle’s and Whitey Ford’s autographs at a long-ago department store appearance, where I’d gotten crushed by a mob of boys and gone home empty-handed. Barth graciously autographed my copy of “Giles Goat-Boy,” signing it, Whitey Ford (John Barth).
Not long after that, I was accepted into the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. The prospect of studying with Barth thrilled and intimidated me. I had ambition, discipline and abundant ideas for stories, but how would he judge my work?
The department threw a welcome party. In a ballroom with tall Palladian windows — much grander than anything at my utilitarian, aluminum-and-glass state school — I watched my idol dance tipsily, happily, with his wife. It was an unexpected peek at the flesh-and-blood object of my awe.
Week after week, I sat at the opposite end of the conference table from him, saying to myself, I can’t believe I’m here. He was a patrician presence, a tall, effortlessly witty, Southern gentleman. Unlike anyone I had ever met, he spoke in complex sentences. Everyone called him Jack. I couldn’t do it. When he attended to mundane school business — the rules for running off copies of our stories, etc. — I thought, He shouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense.
The class included two writers who would soon place their stories in The New Yorker: Mary Robison and Frederick Barthelme. As for me, 22 years old, from blue-collar Queens, I was in over my head and paddling hard to stay afloat. The year was 1976, and Raymond Carver-style minimalism hadn’t yet overtaken the postmodern metafictions of Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover and William Gass. We were all trying to figure out what we could do that no one had done before. I went in a dozen different directions — groping for a style, imitating writers I admired, afraid to present anything that smelled of mere realism to the class.
In some writing workshops, merciless criticism is the norm. Not in Barth’s classroom: He imposed civility by modeling it, along with analytical rigor. He honored every story with sharp analysis and expected us to do the same.
My year in the Writing Seminars pushed me to invent at the absolute limit of my capacity. And I learned something about writing fiction that I might never have discovered without Barth’s guidance. When discussing our work, he often used the word dramaturgy. Along with some of my friends in the class, I struggled to understand what he meant by it. Here’s an example, from his comments on an early story of mine: “The conceit of Lou Belt is a dandy; so’s the mise-en-scène. Naturally, I have trouble with the dramaturgy … the mad climax on pp 10 + 11 seems insufficiently relevant (though attractive).”
The understanding I finally arrived at was that, whatever ideas and themes your fiction is exploring, the plot should work to express and reinforce them. This may seem obvious, but I was so focused on style and voice, it hadn’t occurred to me.
One of my stories, “Nobody Asks,” met with a lukewarm-to-negative reception from the class. Barth listened as the others probed its weaknesses. When he finally weighed in, he said, “My heart went out to the poor kid.”
Despite that small triumph, the comment I found on the last page said, “The ending’s too melodramatic & not in terms of the Nobody Asks theme … and the denouement ought to be in terms of the theme, don’t you think?”
I revised the ending and submitted the story to literary magazines, as I’d been doing since my sophomore year in college. After four years of rejections, I received a handwritten letter from the Transatlantic Review, complimenting the story and accepting it. Ecstatic, I screamed — and realized soon after that the editors wouldn’t have published the story if Barth hadn’t guided the revision.
Looking back at the careful critiques he gave my student pieces, I’m astonished. One of the country’s greatest living writers, he treated each of our apprentice efforts with respectful, insightful attention. He performed his work honorably and brilliantly.
My hero worship didn’t go unnoticed. His wife, Shelly, said to me once, “He’s just a person, you know.” Embarrassed — caught — I defended my attitude as best I could: “I know, but what he can do!”
The truth is, I was too young to fully process Barth’s advice — but I did make use of it later. Even now, when I revise a draft, the first thing I do is write dramaturgy on top of a blank page. Then I try to figure out what the piece is getting at, which parts are helping, and which parts are wandering off in the wrong direction.
Nearly 30 years after I earned my degree, Barth (who died earlier this month) provided a blurb for one of my novels — something he did for many of his former students. I understand that blurbs aren’t objective evaluations, but still, the praise meant everything to me.
Literary fashions change. If anyone writes books like John Barth’s now, I’m not aware of it. My tastes have shifted, too. The books I’ve loved in recent years don’t much resemble the cerebral comedy that enthralled me when I was 17. Nevertheless, when I pick up one of his novels and read a random passage, I shake my head in awe. There’s still no one like him.
Michael Laser (michaellaser.com) has published seven novels, many stories in literary magazines, and many essays and features in newspapers and magazines.