John Barth - The Development

" What? "

That afore-noted small voltage resurged. "Her very words, George." Raising two fingers to make a quote mark, "'Like give the Gentle-Ass Reader some idea of how things feel, smell, sound, and look, for pity's sake, beyond Cassie's Bare White Et Cetera and Ms. Mandy's Jealous-Green Eyes, don't you think?' End of quote — and what the fuck story is she talking about, please? What's this collaboration? "

I was damned if I knew, and energetically swore so, adding that of course Ms. Klause and I had spoken in conference about the much coveted but problematical Shakespeare Prize, I being after all her faculty adviser, and that (partly as a result of that discussion) it had in fact occurred to me that there might be a George Newett short story in there somewhere: about an eccentrically gifted student "writer," say, whose "texts" are collages, rearrangements, pastiches of the words of others. But despite a few notebook notes and a false-start draft page or two, I had yet to work out what that story might be — and most certainly, to my knowledge, hadn't discussed it with "Cassandra Klause." When a potential story of mine is still that nebulous, she might remember, I don't speak of it even to my beloved fellow-writer spouse, much less to my students. And "Could we please change the subject now, hon? Enough voltage already!"

We duly did: spoke of our distant pair of adult children and of our grandchild, already high school age, up in Vermont; of our plans for the weekend; of some of our other, less troublesome Stratford students. But my mind remained at least half on "Cass Klause"'s editorial suggestion, with which I found myself so in accord that I itched to get back to my desk at home and experiment with a bit of sensory detail (never my strongest writerly suit) in that story-not-quite-yet-in-embryo: to "flesh out," for example, such lame lines as " The girl's amazing," my wife enthused with enhancements like My wife closed her [Matahannock-green-brown?] eyes, shook her [uh, very attractive? ruddy-cheeked? short-walnut-hair-framed?] head, and [um, enthused?] " The girl's amazing! "

Better yet, maybe go back and cut out all that river-name and gated-community stuff at the tale's front end and get right to the action: the day when a certain budding prankster/performance artiste proposed to her writing coach that instead of submitting to the class a manuscript of his own for them to criticize (as she'd heard I'd done once or twice in the past, half in jest, at semester's end), I should let her submit one of mine under her name — as if for a change she was making up her own sentences and paragraphs, characters and scenes, instead of rearranging and "performing" other people's, when in fact she wouldn't be! That way I'd get some really objective feedback, right? As could scarcely be expected otherwise, except from her outspoken self ("Too many parentheses and dashes, in this reader's opinion; not enough texture, " etc.). Plus maybe submit as mine a story of hers: She'd try to hack out something conventional, maybe about life in a tacky gated community like Heron Bay Estates, or about a professor whose maverick student puts an additional small strain on his prevailingly quite happy marriage by teasing him with her "corpus"… that sort of thing. Which is pretty much what Ms. "Cassandra Klause" did, Reader, at the time here told of — and here we go, almost.

Additional small strain, somebody just said, on a prevailingly happy marriage. Mandy's and mine has been that, for sure; keenly aware of each other's strengths and shortcomings, we feel much blessed in each other, on balance. But of course there've been trials, strains, bumps in our road: the undeniably disappointing atrophy of our separate literary talents, to which however we feel we have, on the whole, commendably accommodated; one serious temptation apiece, somewhere back there, to adultery — which however we each take credit for candidly acknowledging and, we swear, resisting; never mind the details. And our inevitably mixed feelings, as we've approached or reached the close of our academic careers, not to mention of our lives, about what each and the other have accomplished, professionally and personally: about what we've done and not done, who we've been and not been, separately and together, during our joint single ride on life's not-always-merry-go-round. Hence those occasional small voltage surges above-noted: nothing that our coupled domestic wiring can't handle, as I'm confident we'd agree if we spoke of it, which we seldom do. Why bother? It's an electrical field potentiated over the past year by "Cassandra Klause" at one pole and at the other by my Shakespeare House "replacement," Professor Franklin Lee — who would've been introduced earlier into this "story" if it's "author" didn't have a chip on his shoulder with respect to that smug sonofabitch. That tight-assed, self-important asshole. That…

Oh, that not untalented, not unhandsome, undeniably dedicated, generally quite capable and personable forty-five-year-old who joined the Stratford faculty half a dozen years ago upon the publication, two years before that, of his first (and eight years later still his only) novel — as utterly conservative, conventional, and unremarkable an item as it's corduroy-jacketed author, but (to give the devil his due) not a bad job, really: issued by a bona fide New York trade house, not an academic press, and politely enough received by it's handful of reviewers. Long since out of print, of course, but who among us isn't? A second novel allegedly still "going the rounds" up in Manhattan, and it's author altogether mum about what, if anything, he and his strait-laced muse have been up to since.

In short and for better or worse, the guy's one of us, toward whom Mandy feels less animus and more colleagueship than does her spouse. "Frank Lee?" she'll tease when I get going like this on the subject. "Frank -ly, my dear, I don't give a damn, and neither should you." She's right, as usual, and I probably wouldn't, so much, except that it's been "Miz Klause's mizfortune," as that young woman herself puts it, to have Professor Lee as her official senior-year adviser, coach, and critic — and there, in her workshop mates' no doubt relieved opinion, go any hopes she might have entertained of so much as a long shot at this year's Shakespeare Prize.

But not in her own irrepressible estimation, nor in that of her FOF former coach. Shit, Reader (as Franklin Lee would never say): I'm no avant-gardist; would anytime rather read (or have written) the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, or Scott Fitzgerald, e.g., than those of Gertrude Stein or the later James Joyce. About contemporary "experimental" fiction — interactive electronic hypertext and the like? — I have only the most dutiful, professorial curiosity. Or used to, anyhow, back in my professoring days: used to urge my Stratford charges to keep an open mind and interested eye on the edges of their medium's envelope, reminding them that like the highest and lowest octaves on the classical eighty-eight-key piano — which, though rarely used, may be said to give a sort of resonant optionality to the middle octaves, making their use the composer's or performer's choice rather than a constraint — so likewise et cetera, you get the point. I therefore welcomed into my last year's workshop, after my initial startlement, the flagrantly unconventional "submissions" (misleading term!) of the apparently unscrupulous but actually strong-principled faux-naïve provocateuse "Cassandra Klause." The academic year that culminated last spring in A Body of Words, by Nom D. Plume had kicked off in the previous autumn with such unconventionalities as the opening pages of Don Quixote over the name "Pierre Menard" ("Borges's story, you know?" she had to explain to her baffled classmates. "About the guy who recomposes Cervantes's novel word for word?" They didn't get it); cribbed pages of a Joyce Carol Oates story signed "Toni Morrison," and vice versa (the "point" being that those two eminent Princeton colleagues must surely feel some rivalry, and might mischievously [etc.]); followed by other pointed or pointless but always transparent "plagiarisms" signed "The Grace of God," "The Way," "A Long Shot," "Extension," or "Bye Baby," leaving the reader to supply the missing "by." Never a sentence of her own composing, but invariably a presentation more original than anything else in the room, even when flagrantly cribbed, chopped, and reassembled from the previous week's workshopped efforts of her classmates and re-presented as [by] "D. Construction" or "Tryst-'em Sandy." And then that Body of Words, which she openly declared to be her trial run for the Bard Award ("Hey, it's for the quote 'most impressive body of work' unquote, right?") and "performed" for a handful of fellow workshoppers in her dorm room after it's preview by me and Mandy. And the "author" of these brazen stunts, mind, was an invariably unassuming, perky but shy-mannered young woman who also happened to be the most astute and candid yet diplomatic critic in the room (except perhaps for her coach) of her colleagues' literary efforts, so earnest but clunkily unimaginative by comparison.