John Barth - The Development

And this is where Yours Truly comes in, eventually. Stratford's "Bard Award," as everybody on campus calls it, is a hefty prize indeed, endowed some decades ago by a wealthy alumnus who had aspired unsuccessfully to playwriting but later flourished as the CEO of Tidewater Communities, Inc., his family's real-estate development firm. His munificent Shakespeare Fund pays the honoraria and travel expenses of an impressive series of visiting lecturers, maintains Shakespeare House and it's associated quarterly lit mag, The Stratford Review, and annually showers one lucky apprentice writer with a cash award currently twice the size of — get this — the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and PEN's Faulkner Prize combined: the equivalent of at least two years' tuition at the College or the annual salary of one of it's midrange professors! Little wonder that competition is intense among the ten to fifteen seniors who submit portfolios (StratColl.edu is a small operation, remember), and the pressure considerable on the half-dozen of us faculty folk who review and, to the best of our ability, judge them.

That "us" and "our"… After thirty-some years of teaching at Stratford, I'm newly retired from academe these days, but I still enjoy hanging out at Shakespeare House with new students and old colleagues (my wife among them, who has a couple of years yet to go before joining me in geezerdom) and serving on the Prize Committee. Mandy and I are a pair of those "experienced author-professors" mentioned in the school's ads, who out of teacherly habit here remind you that Experienced doesn't necessarily mean Good, much less Successful. Not likely you'll have heard of the "fictionist" George Newett or his versifying spouse Amanda Todd, even if you're one of those ever scarcer Americans who still read literature for pleasure (as you must be if you're reading this, if it ever gets published, if it ever gets written). Oh, I scored the occasional short story once upon a time, and Mandy the occasional lyric poem, mainly in serious quarterlies not much more widely read than our Stratford Review: little magazines that we ourselves rarely glance at unless something of ours or our colleagues is in them, which was never often and, in my case anyhow, is now nearly never. The New Yorker? Harper's? Atlantic Monthly? Neither of us ever made it into those prestigious (and better-paying) glossies. I did manage to place a novel forty years ago — not with one of the New York trade houses, alas, but with my midwestern alma mater's university press. On the strength of that modest publication plus three or four lit-mag stories, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and two years of assistant-professoring at one of our state university's branch campuses, I was hired at Stratford, where then-young Mandy was already an instructor with an M.A. from Johns Hopkins and a comparably promising track record in poetry. A fine place to raise kids, she and I were soon happily agreeing in and out of bed — and so the town and it's surroundings proved to be. Over our wedded decades, however, our separate and never loquacious muses more or less clammed up here in Oyster and Blue Crab Land, as they doubtless would have in any other venue, and we learned to content ourselves with trying to help others do better than their coaches were doing. The circumstance that as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement does not prove our pedagogical labors fruitless, at least in our and most of our colleagues' opinion. Our program's graduates are better writers by baccalaureate time than they were at matriculation: more knowledgeable about language, literary forms and genres, and the achievements of three thousand years' worth of their predecessors. If they then become law clerks, businesspeople, schoolteachers, or whatever else, rather than capital-W Writers — well, so did their profs, and we don't consider our careers wasted.

Do we?

We don't, really, most of us more-or-less-Failed Old Farts, at least not most of the time. For one thing, showing all those apprentice scribblers what wasn't working in their works (that worked so well in the works of the great ones they were reading) showed us FOFs, on another level, the same thing vis-à-vis our own, if you follow me, and our consequent self-silencing spared posterity a lot of second- and third-rate writing, no? Though, come to think of it, most of our never-finished-if-ever-even-started stuff wouldn't have found a publisher anyhow, and most of what managed to find one would've mostly gone unread. So what the hell.

That being the case, why in the world am I writing this, and where, and to whom? The where, at least, I can answer: I'm in my office-cum-guest-room in our empty-nest coach home in Blue Crab Bight, a neighborhood of over-and-under duplexes in the sizable community of Heron Bay Estates, itself one of several extensive developments — residential and commercial, urban/ suburban/exurban — built by the virtual patron of Stratford's Shakespeare Prize Fund, the afore-mentioned Tidewater Communities, Inc. Indeed, inasmuch as our house purchase made it's tiny contribution to TCI's profitability and thus to the wealth of it's philanthropical CEO, we Newett-Todds feel triply linked to that problematical award: as coaches of it's candidates, as judges of their efforts, and as (minuscule, indirect) contributors to the winner's outsized jackpot.

It's a jackpot that Stratford's apprentice writing community regards, only half humorously, as jinxed: Shakespeare's Revenge, they call it, or, if they know their Hamlet, the Bard's Petard ("For 'tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petard," the Prince observes grimly in act 3) — as if, having hit the literal jackpot on some gargantuan slot machine, the unlucky winner then gets crushed under an avalanche of coins. Much as our Public Information Office welcomes the publicity attendant on every spring's graduation exercises, when the Shakespeare Prize routinely gets more press than the commencement speaker, it's ever more embarrassing side is that of the nearly two-score winners over the decades since the award's establishment, nearly none so far has managed to become "a writer" — i.e., a more or less established and regularly publishing poet, fictionist, essayist, screenwriter, journalist, or scholar — even to the limited extent that their coaches did. Worse yet, some who aspired simply to additional practice in one of our Republic's numerous master of fine arts programs have had their applications rejected by the more prestigious ones despite their not needing a teaching assistant-ship or other financial aid. And the few of our B.A.s who have gained admission to those top-drawer graduate programs happen not to have been among our Shakespeare laureates: a circumstance in itself no more surprising than that a number of the world's finest writers — Joyce, Proust, Nabokov, Borges, Calvino — never won the Nobel Prize, while not a few of it's winners remain scarcely known even to us lovers of literature. C'est la vie, n'est-ce pas? But awkward, all the same, for the Bard awardees and awarders alike.

In vain our efforts to reduce the pot to some more reasonable though still impressive size — four or five thousand dollars, say, or even ten — and divert the surplus to other of our program's amenities: more munificent honoraria to attract eminent visitors, better payment for contributors to The Stratford Review, upgrades of Shakespeare House's facilities, larger salaries for the writing faculty… Our benefactor's team of canny lawyers saw to it that the terms of the endowment are un-fiddle-withable. In vain too what I thought to be Mandy's and my inspired suggestion to a certain noted novelist on whom the College conferred an honorary Litt.D. ten years ago: that once the doctoral hood was hung on her, just before the awarding of the Prize, she announce, "By the authority invested in me by the Muse of Story and the Trustees of Stratford College, I declare that what I've been told is called Shakespeare's Curse is hereby lifted, both henceforward and retroactively. My warm congratulations to whoever may be this year's winner: May your efforts bear rich fruit! And my strong encouragement to all previous winners: May the Muse re ward with future success your persistence in the face of past disappointment! Amen."