A British accent, it seemed. A soft, yet I’m-busy-what-is-it? voice. I almost hung up. I’d been trying all week to reach him but had gotten only an empty burring ring from some outmoded phone system. Now this—John Gardner answering on the second ring. A British accent. A Famous Author disturbed at his work. I’d read in a New York Times article about his Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, house, its black marble mantlepieces and lofty ceilings. All this spooked me, but the pile of coins on the shelf fed some last-ditch desperation that kept me gripping the telephone in the lobby of the Binghamton, New York, Public Library. An elderly man in shabby clothing sat smoking a cigarette on the marble steps. Sunk in his own dream—or lack of one. I said my name, heard it boom around and around. Andrew Carnegie’s lobby might have been one of Forster’s Marabar caves. The old man paid no attention. I went on making a racket with my voice. Had he had a chance to read the story I’d sent him, “Natural Disasters?” Could I sit in on his class?—not for credit or anything like that. I had degrees, didn’t want more degrees. I just wanted to write. I must have said this three times. Since I’d sent him the story a month earlier, a small voice had been telling me that it was no good, in fact it was pretty bad. This voice had all but drowned out that other that had told me, OK! This is it. This is good, the summer before when I’d drafted the story—in Hawaii. I had been teaching there as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawaii, West Oahu College, but the urge to finally write had come on strong. While my #2 pencil skittered across the blue lines of the legal pad, chills skittered over me, hair stood up at the back of my neck. I sensed it was good—certainly on the way, at least. Now I was ready to hear Sorry.
He was talking. Fast. White water talk. No British accent—I’d been mistaken. I was trying to listen while at the same time being aware of people going in and out of the library. They don’t know, I was thinking, that I’m talking to John Gardner and he is saying yes, I could sit in on his class, yes he’d read the story and it was good fiction.
Coins tumbled down into the phone—had I thanked him?—and then I was outside in hot sunlight, the air clean with a cool edge to it. September—and in my head, the smell of new shoes, new pencils, notebooks. You never quite shake it, especially if you’ve spent just about the whole of your life in schools of one sort or another. But it was September, 1979, and I had given up a tenure-track position teaching college English at a time when graduate students were scrounging for jobs. I was thirty-four years old and starting out from scratch in a pursuit most people regarded (even if they politely didn’t say so) as downright crazy. No more academic semesters to shape the year. No more workplace community. No more bi-weekly paychecks and nice fringe benefits. Beginning again, in a totally new direction meant nothing was cumulative—neither the long haul for the PhD, nor the years given up to reading thousands of Freshman comp essays, nor the string of academic positions. Nothing, really, added up to a hill of beans, but at that moment, standing on the glaring steps of the Binghamton Public Library and seeing the courthouse across the street, the brilliant flow of traffic, the ornate old buildings on Court Street all held in that strong light, I thought everything made marvelous sense. All those hops and skips, all that wandering—the MA, marriage and England, the PhD work, and finally a teaching position in Hawaii—were precisely so that I could stand there, on those steps, on that day, after just such a phone call. I was supercharged as a kid on the first day of school. I was ready to begin.
Why, you may be thinking, did I feel that I had to give up academia in order to write? Many writers are also teachers. That’s absolutely true. I have a number of friends who stayed in academia and still wrote and published. In my case, I think circumstances played a large part. My husband had been able to transfer his work to Binghamton; we both had missed our old farmhouse in northeastern Pennsylvania, just over the state line; and I would have loved to teach at the State University of New York, my alma mater, but the university appeared to have a policy of not hiring its grads unless as adjuncts. An adjunct position, I thought, would fragment time, involve a lot of back and forth driving, and seemed exploitive: very little financial remuneration, no benefits, yet demanding excellent teaching, of course. As for the area’s community college, it hardly entered my mind. For one thing it was farther away by quite a bit, and also I didn’t have the heart to go back into Freshman comp and all those essays while trying to write fiction. My secret, and naïve, hope was that one day I’d publish something really good and then I might be able to teach at SUNY while continuing to write in our farmhouse. So it goes, hope. Once, while I was a PhD student, Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist and comparative religion scholar, visited our seminar on Melville and said something that had stuck: If one follows one’s bliss, things tend to work out. Words to that effect. I recall that he linked it to the hero quest idea; once you set out on a quest, there will be helpers and guides along the way. Words I didn’t dare tell my mom, who was appalled, saddened, and scared by my leaving academia. She had lived through the Depression, had had a good secretarial job at Burrough’s Adding Machine Company in Detroit, while unemployed men sold apples on street corners for nickels. She only perked up a bit years later when I’d been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She could hardly believe it. Twenty thousand dollars? For your writing? This news she happily shared with her card club friends. I was glad that she was glad—by then, my dad had passed away. My dad, who never said much, never criticized, my dad the trainman who’d read early Hemingway stories in his old Argosy and True magazines and did seem to have some appreciation of writing and what I was trying to do.
“Freedom is possibility,” Rollo May stated during a lecture on “The Paradoxes of Freedom” at the University of Hawaii the spring before I called John Gardner from the Binghamton library. Freedom is the chance for development, enhancement, change. It is endlessly creative. It gives birth to itself out of its own ashes. Its opposite is whatever is stultifying. Freedom, too, is a source of all other virtues—love, for example. Honesty. But freedom necessarily gives rise to anxiety, and anxiety, according to Kierkegaard, is the dizziness of freedom. It is far easier to grasp onto the certain—for security. One leaps, takes chances, moves into new contexts where the rules are entirely different. Picasso’s great breakthrough work, Rollo May said, Maidens of Avignon, gave birth to cubism. Heady stuff—and coming at a time when I was embroiled in qualms about leaving my position. Rollo May defined existential freedom as the pause in the face of a multiplicity of stimuli—the moment when God speaks—and linked this to Einstein as well as to Buddhism. These high-flown thoughts, music to my ears, didn’t help when it came to being back on campus and meeting old friends, old teachers who would say, in surprise, “You’re back? What are you doing back?” The odor of failure, doubt seemed heavy in those halls. Oh, I was dizzy with freedom, all right. A year later, when my husband and I had been invited to John and his wife Liz’s farmhouse, in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, one of the other guests, a woman about my age and possibly an associate professor by then asked, “So what are you doing now to justify your existence?” My muddled, apologetic stammering—“Ah . . . writing, that is, er . . . trying to”—made a bad moment worse. John, though, stepped in with swift praise and approval. In two people’s eyes at least—my husband’s and John’s, I wasn’t a freak after all—or a loon. That’s about all a person needs to keep going. In fact, more than enough.
(To be continued.)
Material excerpted from an essay titled “John,” in MSS Vol. IV, No. 1,2 ©1984 MSS State University of New York at Binghamton. Used with permission.
