John T. Irwin and Jean McGarry, editors
So the Story Goes
Johns Hopkins University Press
304 pages
May 13, 2005
by Robbie Whelan
It's a world that only Writing Sems majors know about, mostly. It's probably the coolest academic scene on campus, with the horn-rimmed professors in tweeds and colorful camisoles reading from their latest collections of short fiction or narrative poetry. Then afterwards, they all gather in the lobby of Mudd Hall and guzzle wine and cocktails and nibble fancy cheeses while they compliment each other and give out autographs. I bet some of them even do drugs-drugs I've never heard of, with mind-warping chemicals that produce lightning bolts of creativity from their ink-stained fingernails and vintage fountain pens.
It's the Hopkins literary scene, which began with the 1947 founding of the Writing Seminars department, and was revitalized in 1977 by the coming of scholar John T. Irwin, who now teaches classes about modernist poetry, fiction, and detective stories here at Hopkins. Irwin, along with Writing Sems chair Jean McGarry have co-edited So the Story Goes, a new collection of short stories to be published next month by the JHU Press.
The book is printed on the 25th anniversary of the Johns Hopkins Short Fiction Series, a joint venture by the Writing Seminars and the JHU Press to revive the short story genre by publishing as many worthy authors as possible. Many of the writers in this collection have backgrounds in academia, others are career artists, and almost all of them compelling storytellers. The collection as a whole, save a few weak choices of submissions, coheres as a strong exposition of reserved, often self-referential, academic-style fiction.
Steven Dixon, another Writing Seminars professor, contributed the most poignant piece in the book. "Time to Go," starts with the narrator describing his trip to the jewelry store to buy his fiance a jade necklace. The narrator's dead father is with him in line, at the counter and afterwards, advising him to bargain down the price, to buy a certain jewel and to gripe about manipulative sales tactics. In between the narrative, the father talks to himself (or to the reader, it's not clear): "My son-Nothing like me. Never learned anything I ever taught him and I tried as hard as I could."
The narrator's father follows his son through a mugging on the streets of New York, the purchase of a wedding band and a marriage license, and a meeting with a rabbi, appearing and disappearing at key moments and offering disapproving parental commentary all the while. The final scene is the wedding ceremony in the narrator's apartment. The narrator becomes emotional, starts to cry, starts kissing all the guests and, in the final moments, has a touching reconciliation with his father, who then disappears into thin air.
The two other Hopkins submissions, from McGarry and Tristan Davies, are much weaker. McGarry's "The Last Time" is a playful but unsubstantial fantasy of life with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Jazz Age Paris. In it, she is a faceless cohort of the two women, somewhat in love with Alice, who ends up couch-surfing with the Parisian literati, including Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. It is cute, but the point of the story is unclear. Is McGarry making any sort of comment on the historical figures she writes on or their work, or is this piece just a dalliance?
Davies' "Counterfactuals," from his collection Cake, is a very poor selection. Curtis, the disgruntled lover of Charlotte, crouches in front of the bathtub with a squeeze bottle full of ammonia and lemon, inhaling the fumes and making up his mind to leave her. He imagines the trajectory of his life-the various scenarios that could come about, the various women he might love down the line. The whole thing is like a certain crappy Gwyneth Paltrow movie I seem to remember from a few years back, ending with the line, "What if? he asks himself."
From Guy Davenport's 1979 collection Da Vinci's Bicycle?---the first collection to be published by the series-we get "A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg," a rambling, Wodehouse-style, dandy description of a balloon ride over Switzerland, told in shifting perspectives by a hapless butler. Davenport's story is a tough read, and more a cerebral exercise in literary experimentalism than a conventional narrative. "The balloon, O gorgeous memory, was as gaily painted as a Greek krater," writes Davenport.
The strongest story in the collection was Steve Barthleme's "Zorro," the story of a young man named Bobby who is forced to choose between caring for his widowed, alcoholic mother and having a life with his girlfriend Maria. Each weekend he makes the long drive between Austin and Houston to sit with his mother, listen to her disapproval of his life, and deal with her listening in on his phone calls with Maria.
Barthelme's voice is distinctly male, and through brilliant, crisp dialogue his character wins us over. At one point, during a fight with Maria, he stops-"I sit down. I think, Something's surely wrong because I've gotten myself into one of those arguments where the woman is right. This should never happen."
Perhaps I'm a sucker for the rebellious, but for my money the best pieces in So the Story Goes are the ones that don't smack of college classrooms and subtle literary tricks. It's fun to go through academic excursions for a few hundred pages, but the exceptions to the rule are the most welcome breaths of fresh air. What Irwin and McGarry have put together here is something of a good mix between literate writing that is not too stuffy, aired out every now and then by some fiction with a refreshing punch.
Richard Wilbur
Collected Poems 1943-2004
Harcourt
608 pages
December 6, 2004
by Katherine Brewer
Did Richard Wilbur cursed under his breath when little known Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel prize for literature this year? After four decades, two Pulitzer prizes, a National Book award, and a term as poet laureate, Wilbur is perhaps the most successful and well-known poet of the 20th century to never have won the Nobel.
Although Wilbur's Collected Poems show tremendous skill and unique talent, his pieces lack the uniformed vision of Nobel laureates such as Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, or W.B. Yeats-or even, for that matter, contemporary poets like Louise Gluck.
Wilbur is a master of poetic forms; no one disputes this. Often compared to Frost, Wilbur can be praised if only for how effortless he makes rhythm and rhyme seem. When it comes to content, Wilbur's best poems are slow-moving and usually set in spring or summer ("June Light," "Sunlight is Imagination"). Wilbur makes very little of the winter world and finds so much of his inspiration in sun-soaked days.
In his more recent work, such as "Green" and "Asides", Wilbur does confront autumn and winter more directly, but he cannot seem to get rid of the elements of sunlight and spring. Always more of an optimist than his counterparts, now and in the 1950s, Wilbur can't help but be inspired by the energy of the living months.
But some of Wilbur's poems are off. The simile in "A Simile for her Smile" doesn't work: "Your smiling, or the hope, the thought of it, / Makes in my mind such pause and abrupt ease / As when you highway bridgegates fall." A lover's smile reminds the narrator of waiting at a drawbridge? These types of metaphors are not just uninspiring, but actually irksome. And although at his best Wilbur writes poems like "Advice to a Prophet,"-with its perfect form and deceptive simplicity of language that combine into a subtle gem of poetry-some of the poems written over the course of his career seem offhanded. Like Billy Collins, another prominent figure in contemporary poetry and once-National Poet Laureate, Wilbur might have succumbed to the pressure to constantly produce, even when his creative well was dry.
His translations sometimes take a little too much freedom, in biasing rhythm over meaning, but that is up to the reader's preference. Some of these poems he calls "transformations" which are very loose interpretations of poems in other languages. This is interesting, but Robert Lowell did it decades ago and Wilbur adds little to the genre.
The book ends with Wilbur's "Poems for Children," which includes illustrations and poems entitled "The Disappearing Alphabet," ("If the alphabet began to disappear, / some words would look raggedy and queer."). Again, Wilbur seems to be taking a cue for another great poet, this time T.S. Eliot, and has written a book of poetry for children. But unlike Old Possum's book of Practical Cats, Wilbur fails to be intriguing to adults and children simultaneously.
Besides the children's verse, the only difference between this new collection and Wilbur's Pulitzer prize-winning New and Collected Poems, published in 1987, is the set of poems from Mayflies, New Poems and Translations, published in 2000, and a few newer poems. The best and most interesting of these are traditional Wilbur verses like the one in "For C." which Wilbur ends, "Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent, / Like a rose window or the firmament." He also explores Asian forms such as the Tanka more in his later work, but with limited success.
This new collection verifies what was already know, that Wilbur is a very talented formalist-arguably the best alive. But he shouldn't hold his breath waiting for that Nobel.
