A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Goof-off

As a junior at Auburn, I tried to take a creative writing class. We all turned our stories in, and Dr. Rose, one of the creative writing professors, (see post dated December 26, 2019) , chose mine right off the top of the pile to read. It was, of course, awful, and the quirky bearded flannelled English major guys ripped it. Whitley Southfield, who quite rightly turned into an Episcopalian minister, I think, said, “I couldn’t tell if this was a parable or not.” I thought, What’s a parable?

After the class, Dr. Rose said, “I can’t tell that you have any feel for the language.” I suspected uneasily that he might have a point. I dropped the course. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for it?

I kept writing though and kept winning the college literary magazine’s contest. I was probably the only entrant.

Eventually graduation loomed, and I had a future: I had been accepted, against all evidence against such an action, to the well-regarded MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I lacked any sense and was proud of this rather than soberly worried that I wasn’t up to it.

At UNC-G, they fed my arrogance: as the incoming student with the highest undergraduate GPA, I was named one of the editors of the renowned Greensboro Review. (Why that’s the criterion for selection is a mystery as the ability to write tests has nothing to do with literary judgment.) It had been published for years and, now 40 years later, still survives, a remarkable history for a literary review in a state whose legislature hates anything that smacks of brains.

One of my tasks was to help choose which stories and poems to publish; I’m afraid to look back now and see what I favored. My only real accomplishment, which the faculty advisor praised, was organizing the billing and subscriptions. Maybe I should have been there for an MBA instead, except I can’t do math.

I’m told that the process and attitude differ markedly at the various MFA programs. At one of the best, I’m told, there’s no criticism, just back-slapping. At another, it’s all vicious competition. UNC-G was gentle, at least at first. Fred Chappell, a real genius of a teacher and a writer, would read the story aloud and then call on people for comments; he knew who would say what and thereby he orchestrated the author’s education by her peers. The author was notionally anonymous. The night that my first story was read, everyone somehow knew that I was the author and was very kind to it, and I left in the cool fall air joyous, punching at the sky: “I’m going to be a WRITER!”

I let that misconception rule my thinking over the next two years. Though there was coursework, it wasn’t overly challenging except for Elizabethan Poetry. I took an American novel course, of which I remember only a woman named Gloria who had a cold all semester and thought pretty much all of American literature related to the Benji section of The Sound and the Fury.

The prose writers’ class met Monday nights from 6-9, after which I scurried back to my garage apartment to watch Monday Night Football. I watched a lot of sports; my second autumn was punctuated by the wonderful Red Sox-Reds World Series, the one in which Carlton Fisk hit the iconic home run during which he waves the ball fair.

I played a lot of touch football and basketball; the excellent gym was open to all. One Saturday night, I played one-on-one with a 6’8” fellow who was friends with the coed who lived downstairs. I dribbled under the basket and tried a reverse lay-up, thinking that the basket would shield me from his defense. But he put his hand on the ball, pushed, and I fell on my hip. Thus, I believe, began the inevitable road to my hip replacement decades later. I mention these events because I recall them more completely than writing class. I didn’t even attend class the second year.

But I wrote, golly I wrote, a whole novel my second year after short stories my first. I wrote the only poem I ever published. But I don’t know how much I learned. The only bit of technical knowledge I recall is this: when you’re writing a flashback, and your present action is written in past tense, you have to start the flashback in past perfect. You maintain that for fifty words, then mutate to past tense as it’s less cumbersome. Then when you return to present action, you transition with something like “Now Taylor found that….”

There were girls. There was alcohol. I wrote, pretty much blindly.

I graduated with an MFA, which made me think that I was a writer. That is a fallacy and the danger of all MFA programs anywhere. Skim the Book Review section of the New York Times, and you’ll see that the debut novels getting published are mainly by graduates of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

From the standpoint of my advanced age, I now realize that one’s 20’s should be dedicated to conscious open-minded screwing around: find out what you love and then do it. I lived that advice except that I wasn’t conscious and didn’t find out what I loved to do.

Anyway it was back to Auburn as an instructor; I was to be paid $10,700 (worth about $48,700 today), and I would teach either four sections of freshman composition or three of comp and one literature survey. I loved it, and it was effortless for me. I think I was good at it. I hope so. I still remember some of my better students: the blank-faced Robin White, who was very white and wrote great papers; Lewis Someone and his friends, pre-vet students who sat in the back row and sniggered but who were excellent writers and students.

Otherwise, there isn’t much more to say than what I said about getting the MFA: beer, basketball, girls, tennis, whiskey, and softball. With an enormous cadre of graduate students and instructors like me to teach the mandatory freshman comp classes, we had built-in parties every weekend. This was pre-HIV, and everyone had sex with everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Some of the graduate students were downright entertaining, even their names: Wasco Deep, who got his B.A. at Austin Peay! Robin Carter didn’t grade a paper all quarter, then ran through them all the night before the final (either 250 or 500 papers, depending on whether he had one class or two), then quit and joined the Peace Corps. I recall mainly that he was very tall and on the basketball court didn’t know what a moving pick was; in disgust, my friend Mark Murphy literally took his ball and went home. One day, a bunch of dark-suited people strode up and down the hallways, asking questions about Andy Hey, who, I learned many years later, was being screened for a job in the DEA.

It was very likely the happiest time of my life. As an assistant professor pointed out to me one day when I was in an infrequent melancholic mood that became the mode when I was a lawyer, I was young and had ideas. What could be better?

But I wasn’t obsessive about the writing. I wrote, sure; over six years, I wrote countless stories and two novels. But I wasn’t devoted to it. I had a friend, another instructor, R.T. Smith, a poet, and he was. Every thought he had was about poetry

In hanging around him, I become more of a poet simply by osmosis. In the end, he’s had a wonderful career, with untold publications, respect, and, I suspect, the ability to look himself in the mirror. Good for him; he deserves it.

Writing turned out to be like everything else in my life: a half-assed, shoulder-shrugging, daydream-interrupted way to pass the evenings. Or in between baseball innings.

In the end, I didn’t publish much fiction. A few stories. I had a New York agency interested in me; they read my two novels and passed. Everyone has passed. Yet I tell myself and anyone who will listen (a steadily decreasing number of people) that all I wanted in my life was to publish a novel. Well, why didn’t I?

When I read a novel now, most of the time, I think, Nope, I couldn’t have done that—either the beautiful language, or the plotting, or, of course, the feelings. (I can do pacing and dialog as well as anyone, dammit.) Infrequently I think, how the hell did THAT piece of crap find a publisher? (Usually, as in the case of Susan Rieger, whose husband is in the publishing industry, a novel as bad as The Divorce Papers finds a hardback cover thanks to those contacts.) So a lot of the time, I can tell myself that I simply lacked the talent—to be specific, the emotional intelligence—to write quality literary fiction.

Then I have a darker, sadder suspicion. A writer creates great fiction by accessing and exploring the pain and knowledge of his or her life’s darkness. I’m afraid I simply didn’t have the courage to do that. Someone told me once that there was nothing at stake in one of my novels. After my childhood, that’s how I’ve wanted my life to be: nothing at stake.

There’s a wonderful scene in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoerthat has always stuck with me. The narrator’s mother, having suffered the death of her favorite son by drowning, now, in effect, wants everything easy and colloquial, even with God.

I wonder if that’s my deeper failure. Rather than explore how I’ve never felt that I belonged anywhere; that my mother was cold and reserved, refusing ever to validate my feelings; that I am simply not in the top echelon of intelligence, I was always more eager to play basketball or have a drink or talk to a girl than to do the hard work of writing emotionally true fiction.

Maybe I knew I couldn’t do that difficult emotional exploration so that I refused even to confront that issue—I don’t like to fail, I’m too competitive. The only consolation is that, even if I had been willing to do that hard work, maybe, as Charlie Rose wondered, I actually didn’t have an elegant enough feel for the language.

James Joyce, author of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"