The Offer

So, true to their word, the private school called for me to meet with their headmaster two weeks to the day after my interview. I was prepared to regard the whole proceeding with disdain. And now I must eat tasty crow and pick my teeth with the quills.

Word must have gotten around about an inappropriate comment offered by one of the teachers when I was on the campus before, because the headmaster was prepared with a full-on demonstration, complete with charts (!), about how his school is progressive. Before he even showed me the contract or discussed the job offer in any detail, he gave me the full-court press. It was a private meeting, tete-a-tete, so it felt odd when he walked over to the easel and elaborated on their massive project ($5 million) to make the campus environmentally responsible. It was like sitting alone in the audience while a play is performed just for you.

Then came the vow that his school gives no merit-based scholarships (which I have always translated as affirmative action for white people)--only need-based financial aid, "because we have a responsibility to reflect the diversity of our city and open doors for the economically disadvantaged." I think that's an exact quote. They spend over $1 million a year on need-based aid, he told me. Holy crap, I thought at that point, now I can't just sneer and go home.

Next, we talked about my neighborhood on the West Side. He knew T's school. He knew it because his wife works with Somali immigrant women (some of whose children T teaches): she helps them to learn English and so become more independent in Buffalo. My head grew light; now I was taking the place seriously. We talked about other things, which I don't need to elaborate, but it was all extremely positive. Damn, he's a good administrator.

Then he showed me the offer, and I tried not to drool. The salary and benefits are as good as, and in some cases better than, the contracts for assistant professorships I've seen on other searches for college jobs. I mean, it's still a teaching job and not stock-brokering, but the numbers were a bit, well, startling. Somehow I managed not to sign it right then and there.

He said the Board wanted to "respect my Ph.D. and university teaching experience." Hell, the university didn't respect my Ph.D. and university teaching experience.

When I left that meeting, clutching the contract (which the headmaster had signed), two of the other teachers were there. They expressed their embarrassment over their colleague's remark at the previous interview and wished me a warm welcome.

Now the contract sits here beside me on the coffee table. T has joked that I should sign it before they take it back.

Yet, a passage from John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist keeps going through my mind. Gardner talks about a number of different jobs a novelist might take while writing--night clerk, forest watchtower-sitter, etc.--and then specifically names teaching as "too demanding" a profession and thus harmful to writing fiction. Hm. But then I recall that a very successful writer, some of whose work I admire very much, taught at this particular school once. Mm-hm.

Who am I kidding? I know I'm going to sign this thing. Crow is pretty tasty, and less filling than you might guess.

Saccadic Changes (without much of anything really changing)

What a difference a week makes.

On Monday, an English teacher at one of the country's most prestigious college-prep schools called. He left a message on my answering machine informing me that the faculty there had considered me for a teaching post last year. That was news to me. I had never sent a vita or anything. All I remembered was meeting him once in graduate school a few years ago. I called him back.

Apparently an old friend, now teaching at another prep school in New England, bandied my name about so much at this school that a contingent formed with the mission of hiring me. It feels strange to have been talked about for the last few years without knowing about it. Anyway, I'm going to visit the school—right here in town—in April. The chair of the English department asked me to give a lecture, tour the school, etc. I think I would enjoy teaching literature again, getting paid for it (not much, to be sure, but a fortune when compared with the near-charity wage of a college lecturer), and finding myself in a stimulating environment for my writing. Still, the whole thing is so odd and unexpected that I'm not sure precisely what to think. I told the chair that I'd also like to coach the cross-country team if it were possible (it turns out that it is possible). Sort of a Garp impulse on my part, I suppose. I've talked with B and my Prestigious Poet Friend in Japan about the job. I'm no less confused, but I am reminded it's good to have friends. (B is easy to talk with, since he lives across the street; conversations with my PPF cost 39¢ per minute because he lives in Kobe, so his advice is more expensive.)

We'll see.

Also last week, I wrote about 5,000 words of a new novel I'm throwing away. Yet another false start. The writing was competent, I think, but if I'm not interested in the protagonist, who the hell will be? I am slowly beginning to realize that writing a draft novel every few months may not be possible for this scribbler. One manuscript per year sounds more reasonable. But maybe not--now I have to consider teaching again, since I fell ass-backward into it. Hm.

Tuesday, I found a good university press that may be interested in the first novel, which is nice. It's a press everyone knows, so their interest strokes my ego just so. Ahh. They will take around six months to get back to me, but I am reasonably certain they'll read the whole MS, at least. And perhaps I can publish without an agent after all. Hope rears its ugly head anew.

And on Friday, I ticked off another year in my early thirties with a fine party. The people were dear, I sampled nine varieties of single malt scotch in a blind test and identified most of them correctly (excellent present B), and I enjoyed having attention and gifts lavished on me (the cake, once again, will live on in legend, M!).

Earlier on the very same day, I found out my nascent kid is perfectly healthy. He will be a boy, weighs the right amount, has properly developed internal organs, and all the rest of the developmental jazz. The temptation is there, of course, to say the news was the bestest pwesent I could ever wish for. Ok, it's true. But to temper the saccharine quality of the experience, I relate for the record: on an ultrasound he looks like Skeletor.

Step Right Up

James M. Cain is dead enough. I read Postman and now Double Indemnity. I’ve been thinking about how to make a good gutter-American novel with a fastbuck bastard protagonist, so I read Cain. His short stories are great, as I wrote in the last post, but I really wanted to read the two first-person pov novels to learn, I hope, something about how he did it. I also chose Cain, I suppose, because he’s dead.

He’s dead and people still read him. There are plenty of popular writers now living to choose from, of course. Nora Roberts had 5 simultaneous New York Times bestsellers, last I checked. I’m not so sure people will read her books long after her death, though.

Everybody wants to sell. I want to sell. More important for me, though, would be to write books one could read twice or more without becoming bored. I could read Double Indemnity again, no problem. The ending is so beautifully weird. So nasty and poetic.

The patron saint of American writers who toil in obscurity, St. Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote literature is “news that stays news.” I love that definition. My litmus for books, the ones I read and the ones I write, is always the same: if I can read it twice, and it’s just as interesting the second time, it’s good work. After revision, by my standard, I actually like about 1% of my own work. And I have my doubts about that 1%.

Cormac McCarthy has a bestseller at the moment—The Road. Once I’d finished reading it, all I wanted to do was read his previous novel, No Country for Old Men again. No Country seems a better novel to me than The Road. I want to read it again with greater urgency. Blood Meridian is better still. I read it in one day and night, then got up the next morning with the equivalent of a literary hangover and had the hair of the dog—I read it straight through a second time. I’ve read it twice more in the intervening years, and it’s still as interesting, or more so, each time. I know I’ll read it again in a couple of years. That, to me, is a very good novel.

So I want to write novels people will want to read over again. This much I know for certain. But of course, I have little positive idea what others will want to read once, let alone read again. Do people buying all those Nora Roberts vampire or romance novels read them over and over? Will people read them over and over in 20 years? I have my doubts.

Stephen King, when he complained about the little journals to an audience in San Francisco (see last post), said the writers of the fiction in those journals did not seem to care very much about catching a reader’s attention. He seemed to detect a sort of subtlety for subtlety’s sake that got in the way of writers grabbing a reader by the nostrils and yanking her forward. Ok, so there is a carnival-barker aspect to the kind of writing that sells. “Step right up, laidees and gentlemens, see a world of sex and violence you’ve never seeeen beeefore!” King sure knows about that. But some of his novels are clearly worthy of a second reading, I think. Some of them will last after King is in the ground. Of course, maybe after 50 novels, the odds are simply with him. How does one write novels that not only buy groceries, but turn into gold?

Ah, the alchemist’s stone. What is it? Being prolific, perhaps. Kinging out dozens of novels and getting some of them really, truly right. John Updike falls into that camp. I do not care for Updike’s work, myself, but I know he has written a hell of a lot of fiction and some of it will survive after he’s dead. But then, of course, there’s the J.D. Salinger scenario—only three novels and a book of short stories in fifty years, and everybody still knows his work, and they will continue to know it. William Gass, too. He doesn’t exactly roll them out every year.

The alchemist’s stone—what is it, what is it?