John Barth - The Development

One can readily imagine how less than edifying, instructive, or even entertaining Professor Franklin Lee found this sort of thing. In conference before the opening classes of her senior fall semester (my ex-student reported to me by e-mail), he pleasantly but firmly let her know that his Advanced Fiction Writing seminar, "unlike some," was no theater for avant-garde gimmickry, but a serious workshop in "the millennia-old art of rendering into language the human experience of life": more specifically, in the less ancient art of "inventing and constructing short dramatic prose narratives for print, involving Characters, Setting, Plot, and Theme, in the noble tradition of Poe and Maupassant through Hemingway and Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, to such contemporary masters of the form as Jorge Luis Borges and John Updike." If she found too constraining for her unconventional tastes a genre so splendidly various and accommodating (though rigorous), he advised, she should drop his course and sign up for something in the way of Experimental Theater, perhaps.

And when I pointed out to him that the Stratford catalogue doesn't offer any such courses [her e-message went on], he smirked that tweedy little smirk of his and said, "Maybe Professor Emeritus Newett will be willing to do some sort of Independent Study project with you in his retirement, unless his wife objects. If he isn't willing, or if she says no, it might just be that Stratford isn't really the right venue for you."In his class, however, while we were free to write in the comic or non-comic mode, the realistic or the fantastic, the traditional or the innovative, what we were going to make up and set down was STORIES, not "marginally interesting aesthetic points presented by non-narrative means. "

So HELP!!!!! (me, God) (And why wd yr wife object to a few extracurricular sessions, just you&me&my rambunctious muse, either somewhere on campus or maybe @ yr place, while Ms. Todd's meeting her classes?) (Just kidding, Ma'am;-)

Adieu 10/0 (= Much Ado Over Nothing),

Yrs (truly), "CK "

"I personally think Frank has a point," opined Mandy when I showed her this message (she and I have no secrets from each other, that I know of). "And damn straight I object! She's so obviously coming on to you, whether she means it seriously or not." If I chose to celebrate my academic retirement by humping a coed forty-five years my junior, she added, thereby dishonoring our longtime solemn vow to keep hands off our students, I should go right the hell ahead, and there'd be "much adieu" indeed: adieu to our marriage and to my academic reputation, for starters. My call.

This-all said no more than half seriously, she crediting me with no such intentions. And of course I abandoned the notion of any such tête-à-tête tutorials, if I'd ever really half entertained it. But I maintained Cassie's and my e-mail connection, offering to show my wife any and all such communications if she wished to monitor them — which she hoped I was kidding even to suggest. Because, truth to tell, my previous year's exposure to "Nom D. Plume"'s "rambunctious muse" showed signs of stirring my own muse from her extended hibernation. During Klause's second junior-year semester with me, and over the following summer, I had found myself reviewing two decades' worth of George Newett story-scripts (most of them rejected after serial submissions), including a half-dozen comparatively recent ones that I hadn't bothered to show Mandy. After my experience of "CK"'s freewheeling, no-holds-barred imagination, they all struck me as, well, earnest but clunky; "not untalented" but nowise excep tional; the sort of stuff that a Franklin Lee might produce, with none of the sparkle that marked Cassie's more imaginative perpetrations. Pallid rehashes, they were, of "the 3 Johns" (her dismissive label for Messrs. Cheever, O'Hara, and Updike): the muted epiphanies and petty nuances of upper-middle-class life in a not-all-that-upscale gated community on Maryland's endearingly funky Eastern Shore. Not impossibly, I had come to feel, some infusion of "CK" ish radicality might goose that muse of mine into rejuvenated action in my Golden Years, and George Newett would be remembered as a once-conventional and scarcely noticed writer who, in his Late Period, produced the refreshingly original works that belatedly made his name.

Meanwhile, however (not having lost my marbles altogether), I respected Frank Lee's ultimatum, sort of, or at least his right to declare it, as Amanda most certainly did as well. But I was determined to come to my former student's aid somehow or other. With some misgivings, therefore, I confided all the above to her by e-mail as her senior-year registration date approached, and we came up with a plan, mostly but by no means entirely hers, to kill several birds with one stone. So to speak? I would supply her with drafts of those unpublished and abandoned later stories of mine: the ones that not even Mandy had seen. She would then edit, revise, and/or rewrite them as much or as little as she chose and submit them to Professor Lee's workshop as her own, perhaps over such Klausean pen names as "John Uptight," "(Over A-)Cheever," "Scareless O'Hara" — surely Professor Lee wouldn't object to that! The payoff for me would be fresh input (including his) on those old efforts, for whatever that might be worth, which I could perhaps then re-revise and present to some book publisher as a story collection. For "Sandy," the reward would be her baccalaureate and a shot after all at the Shakespeare Prize (one of whose judges I still was, along with Mandy, Frank Lee, another literature professor, and the head of the English Department). In competition for which she would submit… what? Perhaps a "body of work" comprising specimens of her provocative junior-year stunts, her senior-year experiments with conven tional forms and straightforward realism, and some sort of capstone piece embodying both, to demonstrate her "Hegelian evolution" as a writer (her term for it), from Thesis versus Antithesis to a Synthesis triumphantly combining and transcending both.

Yes, well, reader of these strung-out pages: We did that, my star ex-coachee and I — unbeknownst to my wife, to Franklin Lee, and to my other Stratford ex-colleagues — and all parties were impressed. Ms. Klause had been, remember, the ablest critic in my workshop; now she showed herself to be by far the best editor/rewriter as well. Those ho-hum scribblings of mine took on a resonance, texture, and sparkle that they'd formerly manifested only here and there, if at all — on the strength of which example I dared hope to return to my long-abandoned second novel and CPR it back to new life. "Best damned writing student I ever had," Frank Lee marveled to Amanda and me over a colleaguely lunch one April day in the Stratford Club, "by a factor of several!" He would never have guessed, he went on, that those jim-dandy stories that she had come up with for his workshop were Crazy Cassie's, if not for their jokey pen names—"which of course we will get rid of before she sends them off to Harper's and The New Yorker. "

That winking, almost conspiratorial "we": So surprised and delighted was Fussy Frank by "our problem child's metamorphosis" that he generously included among it's causes my earlier patient encouragement of her, along with his own "less permissive" standards. "Like Thesis and Antithesis, right?" he actually remarked to Mandy. "And she's our Synthesis." Hence the lunch-in-progress (his suggestion), to which he'd also invited my wife on the strength of her having rescued me a year ago from that Body of Words, by now a campus legend.

"I'll drink to that," she allowed, and raised her glass of faculty-club merlot to mine and to our colleague's de-alcoholized char-donnay (he had a class to teach that afternoon, he explained — but then, so did Mandy). As we nibbled our smoked-turkey-and-bean-sprout wraps, he even hinted, shyly, that if our joint proté gée needed some extra cash this summer, he might actually hire her to review the typescript of his second novel and make editorial suggestions, so impressed was he by her acumen in that line. "Not that she'll likely be short on funds," he added with a chuckle — inasmuch as he would soon be presenting to the Prize Committee her assembled portfolio, which in his candid, considered, and confidential opinion need consist of nothing more than those half-dozen first-rate contributions to his senior seminar to make her a shoo-in for the Bard Award. "Who'd've thought, last September, that I'd hear myself saying that?"