John Barth - The Development

The audience chuckled and applauded; the media were duly amused; that year's prizewinner (a high-spirited and, we judges thought, quite promising young African-American poet from Baltimore) hip-hopped from the podium over to the seated dignitaries, check in hand, to bestow a loud kiss on his would-be savior — and returned triumphantly after the ceremony to his ghetto 'hood across the Bay, only to be killed later that summer in a "drug-related" drive-by shooting. Nor did his forerunners' and successors' fortunes appreciably improve, although several of my thus-far-luckless novel-writing protégés from commencements past have kept on scribbling vainly with their left hands, so to speak, while pursuing nonliterary careers with their right, their old coach having warned them that unlike violinists, mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and even lyric poets, for example — all of whom tend to blossom early or never — many novelists don't hit their stride until middle age.

Or later.

"So am I there yet?" one such perennially hopeful thirty-five-year-old asked me not long ago in a cover note to the typescript of her opus-still-in-progress, which she'd shipped to Blue Crab Bight for my perusal and comments despite my standing request to our graduates that they pass along all their future publications, to warm their old coach's heart and encourage his current coachees, but show me no more unpublished writings ever, please. A few pages plucked grudgingly from the thick pile's opening, middle, and closing chapters attested that their author wasn't, alas, "there yet." To spare her that blunt assessment, I e-mailed my praise for her persistence, reminded her of my No More Manuscripts policy ("We'd be shortchanging our present students if we kept on critiquing our alumnae"), and reminded her further always to enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope with any manuscript that she wanted returned to her. No reply, and so after a fair-enough interval I recycled her eternally gestating opus through my word processor, using it's pages' bare white backside for next-draft printouts of my own work-in-regress at the time.

Namely? Well, since you asked: a "story" provisionally titled "The Bard Award," not by Yours Truly, George Newett, but by "Yours Falsely, George Knewit" — a.k.a. a certain Ms. "Cassandra Klause" (quotes hers), beyond question the most troublesome, gifted, and all-round problematical coachee that "Yours Falsely" and his colleagues (my wife included) ever had the much-mixed privilege of coaching, and of being coached by.

Those quotation marks; that saucy sobriquet and nom de plume, as openly provocative as the "bare white backside" of a few lines back (all typical Klause touches)… Who knows how a youngster born to and raised by stolid Methodist parents on an Eastern Shore poultry farm and educated in marshy lower Delmarva's public school system came by age eighteen to be the unpredictably knowledgeable, aesthetically sophisticated, shyly brash and unintimidatable "literary performance artist" (her own designation) who, even as a Stratford freshman, was signing her term papers and exam bluebooks (always in quotes) "Sassy Cassie," "Sandy Claws," or "[in]Subordinate Klause," and contrived on her driver's license and other official documents to have her true name set between quotes? ("It's like that on my birth certificate," "C.K." once declared in class with her puckish smile. "My folks thought it looked more official that way.")

"And anyhow," she added this time last year in my old Shakespeare House office, "what's in a name? as Uncle Will has that poor twat Juliet ask her hot-pants boyfriend. Best way to find out is to try on different ones for size, right? Like pants or penises. Now then, Boss: my final exam. Ta-da! " Whereupon she turned her back to me, bent forward, and yanked down her low-cut jeans to display, on her unpantied bare white et cetera, the marker-penned title and opening lines of her latest composition: A Body of Words, by Nom D. Plume. I didn't seriously believe, by the way, did I (she nattered calmly on as I hurried to reopen the office door, which she herself had closed before displaying her lettered derrière, and call for my across-the-hall colleague, the FOF poet Amanda Todd, to please come verify that if anyone in the House was Behaving Inappropriately, it was our student, not her teacher), that that bumpkin of a glover's son from the Stratford boondocks actually wrote those plays himself? About as likely as a down-county chicken farmer's hatchling's winning next year's Bard Award!

Which in fact, however, she added as my wife came to my rescue, she was dead set on doing, this time next year. "C'mon, Doc, examine me!"

"Ms. Klause is up to her old tricks," said I with a sigh to Professor Todd, and gestured toward our saucy pupil's "final exam."

" New tricks, guys." She turned her (plumpish) "text" to the pair of us — and to the open door, which my wife quickly reclosed behind herself. "Just call me Randy Sandy, Mandy."

A calmer hand than her spouse in situations involving bare-assed coeds bent over one's office desk, my Mrs. granted briskly, "Very amusing, Cass. And we get your point, I think: all that feminist/deconstructionist blather about Writing the Body? Up with your pants now, please, or you get an Incomplete for the semester."

Undaunted, "Cass my ass, Teach," the girl came back, and maintained her position: "If y'all don't read Cassie's Ass, her semester's incomplete anyhow."

Said I, "Excuse me now, everybody?" and consulted my wife's eyes for her leave to leave: "Professor Todd will review and evaluate your final submission, Ms. Klause—"

To my desktop she retorted, " Semi final submission. You ain't seen nothing yet."

I'd seen more than enough, I declared. I would wait in Professor Todd's office while it's regular tenant examined and evaluated the rest of the text for me. "Your title and pen name pretty well establish the general idea."

To my departing back, as with a headshake I thanked Mandy and got out of there, "No fair, Chief. You read 'em out of cunt-text!"

Some while later, over lunch at a pizzeria just off campus, my wife and I shook heads over this latest, most outrageously provocative bit of Klauserie. What she had seen further of A Body of Words, she reported (feet, arms, belly, back, and neck had been enough for her), confirmed her opinion of it's being a not-unclever assemblage of quotes from all over the literary corpus, having to do literally or figuratively with the various anatomical items upon which they were inscribed: Virgil's "I sing of arms" on her forearms, the Song of Solomon's "Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies" encircling her navel, etc. "She said she'd intended to 'perform the whole text,' quote-unquote, in class, but then decided to hear your editorial suggestions first."

"Very considerate of her. What a handful that wacko kid is!"

"A figurative handful, we presume you mean?" Because though no beauty by fashion-mag standards, the ample-bodied Ms. Klause, we agreed, was a not unclever, not unattractive young woman, not unpopular with her classmates both male and female.

"Listen to us," I said to my spinach-mozzarella stromboli: "'Not unclever, not unattractive, not unpopular'… The girl's extraordinary! One tour de force after another, while everybody else in the room is still doing 'It was a dark and stormy night.' She deserves a fucking prize!"

"Better one of those than the Bard Award, we bet."

A certain small voltage had built across the table during this dialogue; it dispersed, if that's what voltages do, when I here declared, "The PITA Prize is what she deserves: Pain In The Ass." Back to being the dedicated, indeed impassioned teacher/colleague/wife I loved, "The girl's amazing," my wife enthused (a verb that she hates, but that her husband sometimes finds convenient). And "While we're talking about writing," she went on, although we hadn't been, exactly, "Ms. PITA Prize suggested to me that you should, and I quote, 'get some description done in that lame Bard Award story that he and I are supposedly collaborating on,' close quote. By which she meant you and her. Question mark?"